Tim O’Brien was born three and half years before me on October 1, 1946 in Austin, Minnesota, 60 miles east of where I grew up in southern Minnesota. He grew up in Worthington, MN, 75 miles west of where I grew up, a place claiming to be the “turkey capital of the world”. Worthington is more than double the size of the town in which I grew up, Austin, quadruple. Both have meat-packing plants that keep regular hours, whereas my initiation into the workforce was twelve-hour shifts (at $1.25 an hour) in a Green Giant canning plant (that ran when peas or corn were harvested).

I feel that I have a pretty good idea where O’Brien came from, and there but for fortune — or, more exactly, birth dates — might have gone I. O’Brien was drafted after graduating (summa cum laude) from Macalaster College in 1968, the year I graduated from high school. The first  draft lottery was December 1, 1969. It was a lottery I won. I relaxed when the 200th date was picked out of the bowl and my number did not come up until about halfway from there to 366, so I did not have to face the fight or flight question he did — more in imagining going to Canada than in the more overt approach and turning back a few yards short of the young college graduate in “On the Rainy River.”

Despite his opposition to the US military ventures in Southeast Asia, he went. And served from 1969 to 1970 in the 3rd Platoon of  A Company, 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry Division, in Quang Nai province. He survived to tell about it, first doing so in the 1973 memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. In it he wrote: ""Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken and analyze them and live our lives and advise others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories."

Switching to fiction, O’Brien wrote the hallucinatory (magical realist) Going After Cacciato, which won the National Book Award for fiction in 1978. Some of the stories in The Things They Carried predate the novel, others postdate it. Five of the stories first appeared in Esquire, another in Playboy, another in GQ. The book came out in 1990. The newest edition states that there are more than two million copies in print. It has been widely assigned in high-school and college classes. The story I find the most difficult to believe, "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" was made into a movie in 1998 as A Soldier's Sweetheart.”

Both within the book and in interviews, O’Brien has proclaimed the story’s are fictions that are true not in the sense of reporting what happened but as stories (“story truth is sometimes truer than happening truth,” O’Brien avers in “Good Form”, the pendant to “In te Field”). "In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen...The angles of vision are skewed," he wrote in the combination essay and story "How to Tell a True War Story," continuing, “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest proper models of human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever/”

In that essay/story and in others in the book, O’Brien tells many stories, sometimes commenting on them or reshaping their contents in later ones, most notables in “Notes,” which immediately follows "Speaking of Courage."

O’Brien faulted himself for lacking the courage to go into exile and be excoriated back home, though, like the town in which I grew up, Worthington was "a town that congratulates itself, day after day, on its own ignorance of the world: a town that got us into Vietnam. Uh, the people in that town sent me to that war, you know, couldn't spell the word 'Hanoi' if you spotted them three vowels." He detested their pride in their ignorance, “sending me off to fight a war they didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand.” He was/is bitter about being sent off to risk dying and see his buddies die in an unjust war against an invisible enemy (mortar fire and its results were visible, but not “the enemy” soldiers) in an uncomfortable (sodden) environment. “I was bitter, sure. But it was so much more than that. The emotions went from outrage to terror to bewilderment to guilt to sorrow and then back again to outrage.”

As the studies on World War II (The American Soldier by Samuel Stouffer et al.) showed, it was concern for those sharing the dangers, the platoon, not officially stated goals (“defending freedom,” etc. in a country that the US had prevented from holding the elections called for in the 1954 Geneva Accords after the US-financed French colonial army lost) that motivated the infantrymen in the field.

In the opening, title story, after inventorying what various soldiers and the lieutenant who commanded them carried, O’Brien opined:

"They died so as not to die of embarrassment. They crawled into tunnels and walked point and advanced under fire. Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move. They endured. They kept humping. They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards."

I don’t recall any mention of John Wayne (who avoided military service during WWII and acted heroism in many movies) in The Things They Carried, but Wayne war movies are the paradigm of falsity in Going After Cacciato and other writings by American veterans of combat in Vietnam. There is heroism in O’Brien’s fiction, in characters like Bob "Rat" Kiley, the medic who patches up O’Brien the first time he is shot (in marked contrast to the green new medic Bobby Jorgenson who fails to come to him the second time he is shot, nearly resulting in lethal shock) and Kiowa. And there is Norman Bowker, who is haunted by not having risen to exceptional courage, the kind that would have won him a Silver Star, and the main carrier of survivor guilt in the book.

Even between the covers, the facticity of what is reported shifts and gets questioned (including Bowker’s dissatisfaction with the first version of a story O’Brien published). The Things They Carried is a work of fiction, not a memoir, but it is a work of fiction that has the authority of coming from someone who was there with direct access to verisimilitude.

I think that it is a collection of stories, with some very short (2-3 page) ones that don’t do much more than proliferate might-have-beens. The strongest stories, however, are riveting, including the three set mostly in Iowa and Minnesota — “On the Rainy River,” “Speaking of Courage.” “The Lives of the Dead — plus “The Things They Carried, “Spin,” “How to Tell a True War Story,” “Church, “Ambush.”

With a continuity of characters, the book might be considered an elliptical novel heavy on metafiction (discussing fictionalizing and different perspectives on what happened). There’s very little sex, but a lot of “street language” (why is it “curse like a sailor” rather than “curse like a solider”?). In “How to Tell a True War Story" O’Brien wrote: ''You can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil….. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.''

Like most fiction and nonfiction written by American veterans of combat in Vietnam, there are hardly any Vietnamese in The Things They Carried. There are none on either side with names, though “Ghost Soldiers” and "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" are  set in a fortress camps with ARVN troops as well as US ones (including half a dozen Green Berets). The GIs terrify some women, mock a corpse of an old man, and one hideously punishes a water buffalo (the slaughter of a water buffalo, the means of production for peasant rice farmers, also occurs in Going After Cacciato). The guilt-stricken narrator (the character Tim O’Brien, whose experiences are not necessarily those of the author Tim O’Brien) imagines a backstory for a man he killed in “Ambush” (a story offering an alternative to “The Man I Killed,” which if further undercut later on).


© 2010, Stephen O. Murray

In addition to reflecting on telling psychologically true stories within The Things They Carried, O’Brien has talking about writing Vietnam in many interviews. One from which I quoted his bitter characterization of Worthington is at
www.stg.brown.edu/projects/WritingVietnam/obrien.html

My epinions about other classic books on the war in Vietnam (and its aftershocks,):

Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War
Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War
Michael Herr, Dispatches
Duong Thu Huong, Novel Without a Name
Gustav Hasford The Short-Timers  (and the softened movie version Full-Metal Jacket)
Larry Heinemann, Close Quarters, Paco's Story, Black Virgin Mountain
Neil L. Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam
Andrew Lam, Perfume Dreams
Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato,
In the Lake of the Woods
Andrew X. Pham, Catfish and Mandala, The Eaves of Heaven
Robert Stone, Prime Green

Library of America, Reporting Vietnam II

Recommended: Yes