The Accident (ii) and Free Fire Zone (vii)
From Vietnam Veteran Against the War James R. Dorris and Operation Cedar Falls
Do you find it unlikely that the title of The Accident refers to the clinamen, the swerve in Lucretius’ physics, so to recommend the Stoic detachment of the Epicurean school and of Aurelius in order to avoid accidie, apathy, and acedia, slothful rage? That the name of the protagonist Temple suggests both intellect and ritual purity and that of his antagonist Adams recalls the man made of clay, who first sinned?
I made all those assertions because I think they are likely. The author James R. Dorris was an Information Specialist 4 at Long Binh where we administered our war.
My friend David A. Willson who did the same work at the same place and time was the quickest and most well-informed man I ever have known, leaving the MacArthur fellows and self-made billionaires of my acquaintance far behind. David told me that he in turn had trained with men that much more bright than he.
The Army is the original statistical population. Their outliers fill in the crossword puzzle faster than I read it. All that stuff I said about The Accident, Temple, and Adams are things you learn working puzzles.
So yeah, I don’t think I am making anything up about this story, its philosophy, and theodicy. My opinion. That these associations are germane in any case is the way things are.
What happens between the first and the last pages of The Accident which I show here? It’s an accident, what we commonly mean by accident, a road accident. I have been in many and likely so have you. Starred in one and by grace did not kill anyone.
Adams did not mean to kill the old man. No more than anyone meant to kill as many Americans every year on our new National Interstate and Defense Highways as in the sum of those years of our occupation of our ally the Republic of Viet Nam.
Major Adams did instantly command Temple to help him conceal the body. Then he fled the scene at top speed as he had approached it around a corner on a small road shared with old men and children herding livestock. He brought death into the world and passed sin along to the young man.
Temple, intellectual, pure, who has refused to go whoring with the career sergeants, leaders of men, tells the major that he will report the accident. The colonel refuses to accept the report. James R. Dorris doesn’t give that officer a name because he individually doesn’t matter.
Temple walked out of the office and left the headquarters building. He stopped in front of the company bulleting board to see if he was scheduled to pull Sergeant of the Guard. He wasn’t on the list for the next three days so he went to the NCO tent. He crossed to his bunk and lay down.
Temple’s story begins at dawn and ends by going to bed, observing the classical unity of time in a tragedy, a tale of blindness and insight. Still think I am making up the ancient wisdom in this tale? Fine. Let’s talk about Operation Cedar Falls.
James R. Dorris’ 79th Engineering Group may have taken part. Temple and his major certainly did. We learn over the pages not shown that they watched two lifer sergeants from their company pump a tunnel network full of acetylene gas and ignite it.
We really did that at Ben Suc in the Army operation named for the down-home Iowa town: Cedar Falls in Black Hawk County, named for the man whose band of Sauk we had defeated and removed the century before.
Over January 1967 we buried everyone who hid from us at Ben Suc, removed everyone who cooperated, then destroyed every structure, poisoned the land, and thereafter shot dead anyone who moved. What can you say about arson, kidnap, and murder on that scale?
Temple and Adams rather remark on the two sappers, Bohannon and Cameron, the only other characters of the story with names. The sergeant and the major wonder idly as they speed by that spot, back and forth, how it was that someone later blew specifically those two so thoroughly to bits.
That’s a penny James R. Dorris drops. An old man, a staff sergeant and his sidekick with comic Irish names, I propose, may strike you harder than another more detailed and expansive account of what we now recognize as ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Those were an accident. This is a work of art.
This is the second Viet Nam letter of 2 addressing The Accident by James R. Dorris. The first posted on December 3, 2022.
The Rabbi, by Barney Currer, was on March 21, 2022 the topic of the first of 8 Viet Nam letters on those which Wayne Karlin, Basil T. Paquet, and Larry Rottmann present in Free Fire Zone.
Next came a letter each on a story from Loyd Little on April 20, 2022, about Wayne’s own sketch on May 23, 2022, then 2 about Free Fire Zone in general on July 4 and on September 17, 2022,
then after the 2 on this story from James R. Dorris, a letter on May 25, 2023 about a story from James Aitken.
Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.
The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.