Lesson Two - On the Rainy River

Conclusion

"What I was crying about, you see, was - was not self-pity. I was crying with the knowledge that I'd be going to Vietnam, that I was essentially a coward, that I couldn't do the right thing, I couldn't go to Canada. Given what I believed, anyway, the right thing would have been to follow your conscience, and I couldn't do it. Why, to this day, I'm not sure, I can speculate it. Some of it had to do with raw embarrassment, a fear of blushing, a fear of some old farmer in my town saying to another farmer, 'Did you hear what the O'Brien kid did? The sissy went to Canada.' And imagining my mom and dad sitting in the next booth over, overhearing this, you know, and imagining their eyes colliding and bouncing away, and-uh, I was afraid of embarrassment. Men died in Vietnam, by the way, out of the same fear - you know, not out of nobility or patriotism; they were just af - they charged bunkers and machine gun nests, just because they would be embarrassed not to, later on, in front of their buddies. Not a noble motive for human behavior, but I tell you one thing, one you'd better think about in your lives, that sometimes doing the hard thing is also doing the embarrassing thing, and when that moment strikes, it hits you hard." Tim O'Brien