The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

There are, in my experience, two types of novels about war. There are the Tom Clancy fictional masturbations on guns and tanks and snipers; these were fodder for my adolescent romanticism about battle. Then there are the attempts to deal with the actual trials of warfare, the death and pain and memory and coping. Because war is at once so meaningful and yet so pointless, so primal and yet so unnatural, some of our best literature has stemmed from the ordeal of combat.

Obvious examples might include Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, and Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, four stalwarts of the American high school curriculum. From my own reading, I would add James Jones' The Thin Red Line, Howard Bahr's recent Civil War trilogy starting with The Black Flower, and now Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.

O'Brien's masterpiece is in many ways a "post-war story" rather than a "war story," to use his own lexicon. It is clear, even in the early chapters, that the book is being written by someone conveying troubled memories of Vietnam, rather than by an omniscient narrator. Though the first chapter begins with a recitation of the physical "things they carried," it quickly moves to less corporeal burdens:

They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing -- these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture.

As the book progresses, it becomes clear that the narrator is still carrying a heavy weight, a burden of memories, and that the telling of these stories is in part an attempt to deal with that millstone. Like all memories, the details shift with each retelling. Over the course of the interconnected vignettes that make up the book, O'Brien drop hints about certain events, only to contradict these when exploring the event in detail in a subsequent chapter. Just when you think the narrator has finally come clean, it becomes clear that there is no underlying commitment to what might be called objective truth, what O'Brien calls "happening-truth."

This is made explicit when O'Brien channels Calvino and seems to break the fourth wall and speak directly to the reader. In "Notes," in what appears to be his own voice, O'Brien admits the previous chapter was largely invented. There is, of course, no way to discern that this is O'Brien's real voice any more than the rest, which is the point. The previous chapter may be true, the "Notes" chapter may be true, they may both be true. First you have to define truth, and O'Brien is demonstrating the importance of fiction as a method of doing so, of exploring memory and of suitably conveying the combat experience:

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

Here is happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.

Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him.

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.

I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.

This is one of the truest explanations for the value and necessity of literature I have read yet. O'Brien is tapping into the value of writing for the writer, a theme he returns to again and again, as when his daughter asks why, at forty-three, he is "still writing war stories." It is a way for him to confront and consider his own past, and an attempt to bring the reader with him. This insight applies not just to stories about war, but to any effort to use fiction to convey a meaningful experience in life to someone who has not shared that experience. The simple recitation of facts is usually not the only way, or even the best way, to share the heart of the matter with the reader, the listener, the viewer.

Thus we don't know if O'Brien really fled to within twenty yards of the Canadian border, like the narrator in "On the Rainy River," or whether this is simply a story that conveys the psychological conflict for many who suddenly found their names atop a draft notice. It doesn't matter. What matters is how personally the reader feels the anguished resignation when, floating out along the empty banks of the river, he chooses not to cross:

I gripped the edge of the boat and leaned forward and thought, Now.

I did try. It just wasn't possible.

All those eyes on me -- the town, the whole universe -- and I couldn't risk the embarrassment. It was as if there were an audience to my life, that swirl of faces along the river, and in my head I could hear people screaming at me. Traitor! they yelled. Turncoat! Pussy! I felt myself blush. I couldn't tolerate it. I couldn't endure the mockery, or the disgrace, or the patriotic ridicule. Even in my imagination, the shore just twenty yards away, I couldn't make myself be brave. It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that's all it was.

The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.

Interestingly, the last chapter is largely centered on a death that occurs long before Vietnam; the book has no overarching story arc. But neither do most soldiers' experiences in battle; it is exactly this lack of a comprehensible arc that makes coping so difficult in the aftermath. Instead, the stories are threaded together into a continuous meditation on the functions of memory, the purposes and principles of storytelling, and the psychological impact of combat. I am confident O'Brien's work will stand next to that of Remarque and Heller in the annals of great twentieth-century war literature.