truepenny | UBC: Wambaugh, The Onion Field (Reply)

The Onion Field by Joseph Wambaugh

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book does, in fact, deserve to be a classic. Like In Cold Blood, it's something between true crime and a novel; like In Cold Blood, it's an account of a vicious and senseless murder; unlike In Cold Blood, one of the victims survived. That, in fact, is what sets The Onion Field apart from almost all the true crime I've read: just as much as Wambaugh is telling the story of the murder and the story of the ghastly theatre de l'absurde that was the endless trial-and-appeal, trial-and-appeal, of the aftermath, he's telling the story of the survivor, Karl Hettinger.

In so doing, Wambaugh presents a vivid portrait of PTSD (seven years before it was added to DSM-III, so without the terminology, but from 2017 I recognize 100% what Wambaugh describes) and a vivid portrait of the absolute fucking mess the LAPD made of its reaction to Hettinger's survival. Wambaugh is very careful, and he lays out with considerable sympathy and understanding the reasons the LAPD failed Hettinger so abysmally (making the survivor go to department roll-calls and describe what happened--being abducted by a pair of two-bit hoods, driven from Hollywood to Bakersfield, watching one of them shoot his partner, and then being chased across the onion fields in the dark--and let his brother police officers Monday-morning quarterback everything he did or didn't do is basically what you're going to find next to "contra-indicated" in the dictionary), and I thought Wambaugh's observations about the police definition of masculinity and the very brutal limitations of that definition (a police officer, being a "real" man, would never surrender his gun to anyone, no matter what the circumstances were; a police officer, being a "real" man and therefore a man of action--what Wambaugh calls a "dynamic" man--would always be able to find some positive action to take. Surrender is no guarantee of safety, as a memorandum written after Officer Campbell's murder said, a memorandum that stopped just barely short of explicitly condemning Hettinger for his actions and inactions--stopped just barely short of explicitly blaming Hettinger for Campbell's death--and the worldview encapsulated in that statement (the implicit corollary that because surrender does not guarantee safety, it is the wrong (unmanly) response), a worldview that Wambaugh understands at the same time he rejects it, is about half of what caused Hettinger's slow nervous breakdown, to use an old-fashioned term. Untreated PTSD, plus believing (half paranoia and half accurate observation) that he was being blamed for Campbell's death, plus Hettinger's own staggering lack of self-awareness making him so extremely vulnerable to the erosion of his self-worth . . . it really is no wonder that he ended up compulsively shoplifting until he was finally caught and forced/allowed to resign from the LAPD. These assumptions (unexamined by Hettinger, very carefully examined by Wambaugh) about "real" manhood and "real" men (and "real" policemen) are a beautiful demonstration of the proper use of the term "toxic masculinity." Because this is a definition of masculinity, a set of rules about how masculinity ought to be performed, that is manifestly toxic. It came within about an inch of being lethal to Karl Hettinger, that inch being the movement of his trigger finger that would have put a suicidal bullet in his brain.

On that count alone, The Onion Field is a remarkable accomplishment, but Wambaugh also pays the same careful, compassionate attention to Gregory Ulas Powell and Jimmy Lee Smith, the two-bit hoods who murdered Ian Campbell. Powell (who died in prison in 2012, the last survivor of the men who walked into the onion field in 1963) and Smith were both sociopathic (to varying degrees: Powell was the complete remorseless shark-in-human-form, Smith, at least as presented by Wambaugh, was more complicated, but since he said that he thought "conscience" was something made up by white people to oppress black people and didn't really exist . . . yeah, survey still says sociopath), but Wambaugh teases out bits and pieces of how they got that way, how what they did was both completely their fault, made up of a series of choices they made with complete free will, but also how it grew organically from who they were, what their world had shaped them into.

Wambaugh does a brilliant job in the first part of the book with a foreshadowing device that was effective even though I knew exactly what he was doing. He started on the night of the abduction, and then--a perfectly standard narrative technique--cut back along each man's timeline to explain how he got there. But with Smith in particular, as he jumped back along Smith's relationship with Powell, you could see the pieces of the disaster being assembled: the acquisition of the clothes they're wearing, the acquisition of the guns, the acquisition of the car. I first encountered this device in Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books--an irony, because I find it completely ineffective there, but Wambaugh shows how it's supposed to work, the intense feeling of Greek tragedy, of a catastrophe that cannot be averted because it's already happened (particularly effective because Jimmy keeps trying to find the right moment to leave Powell, and you end up mentally shouting at him to just cut his fucking losses and run . . . and he doesn't).

The only aspect of the book I found less than brilliant was Wambaugh's attempt to reconstruct Ian Campbell's subject position. There seems to have been something essentially unknowable about Campbell, something that he kept back from everyone who knew him, so while I understand why Wambaugh had to try, it's just not really successful, pretentious instead of portentous. But, otherwise, yeah. This is an amazing book.

View all my reviews