Land of the Brave: Bravery in Powers The Yellow Birds and Tim O'Brien's If I Die

In the past week or so I've been reading Kevin Power's The Yellow Birds, a novel offering a private's experience of the Iraq War and Tim O'Brien's memoir of his time serving in the infantry in Vietnam.
The two perspectives differ greatly on the whole idea of bravery.

Inspired by a brave platoon leader, O'Brien is very interested in the idea and spends a good portion of a chapter trying to define the concept. He even draws in Plato to suggest that bravery is not simply courage in the face of danger. It requires that one show courage in the face of danger for the purposes of trying to accomplish something good or just. Moreover, it can't be courage born of ignorance; the brave person must be fully aware of the dangers and risks he's facing down. Anything short of this is a questionable bravery.

O'Brien finds that bravery in Vietnam was rare simply because so many soldiers practiced various types of blinkering or ignorance. He's not faulting them for it, but according to O'Brien, "When we walked through the sultry villes and sluggish sullen land...the mass of men...talked little about dying...Death was taboo...Fear was taboo. It could be mentioned, of course, but it had to be accompanied with a shrug and a grin and obvious resignation. All this took the meaning out of courage."

Later, he revises this assessment and suggest that the average man sometimes acts bravely and at other times acts cowardly depending on the circumstances. He concludes, "the men who do well on average, perhaps with one moment of glory, those men are brave." Still, he singles out his brave platoon leader, Johansen, as demonstrating an exalted form of courage and this demonstration of courage redeemed the war and gave him something to fight for, to strive for.

Power's Private Bartle is much less interested in bravery, as either an idea or a redeeming goal. He too is intrigued by a brave commander, Lieutenant Sterling, who is a combat-hardened soldier's soldier that Bartle admires and fears. Bartle says, "I wasn't sure he wasn't crazy, but I trusted that he was brave. And I now know the extent of Sterling's bravery. It was narrowly focused, but it was pure and unadulterated. It was a kind of elemental self-sacrifice, free of ideology, free of logic"(43). O'Brien would dismiss this as a sham bravery, but Bartle is fascinated by it. Ultimately, Sterling proves to be crazy and brutal and this leads Bartle and the reader to question the idea of bravery offered in so many war narratives.