SOURCE: Robinson, Daniel. “Getting It Right: The Short Fiction of Tim O'Brien.” Critique 40, no. 3 (spring 1999): 257-64.

[In the following essay, Robinson investigates O'Brien's approach to the truth in The Things They Carried.]

But it's true even if it didn't happen—

—Ken Kesey

In his introduction to Men at War, Ernest Hemingway states that a “writer's job is tell the truth. His standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his inventions […] should produce a truer account than anything factual can be” (xi). Tim O'Brien, for whose writing the Vietnam War is the informing principle, returns to this notion of truth in his short fiction.¹ His stories revolve around multiple centers of interest—at once stories in the truest sense, with a core of action and character, and also metafictional stories on the precise nature of writing war stories.

For O'Brien, like Hemingway in his introduction, the notion of absolute fidelity to facts almost becomes a non sequitur when considering truth. Facts might provide a chronology of events (and even then, we may disagree on the validity of the facts), but alone they cannot reveal the hidden truths found in a true war story. As Hemingway writes, facts “can be observed badly; but when a good writer is creating something, he has time and scope to make it of an absolute truth” (xi-xii). That is also true for O'Brien: He sometimes writes stories that contradict the facts of other stories; yet the essential, underlying truth of each story is intact and illuminating. Those truths lie as much in the fragmented, impressionistic stories he tells as in the narrative technique he chooses for the telling.

O'Brien does not deliver Vietnam in neatly packaged truisms. The same words that rang obscene for Frederic Henry in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, “abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow,” become empty in O'Brien's fiction. Those words imply a rational order to war that does not exist, and the absence of those words mirrors the horror of a world at its most irrational. As O'Brien writes in “How to Tell a True War Story,” [O]ften in a true war story there is not even a point” (88). What O'Brien prefers are the images that make “the stomach believe” (89), images of men at war who are too afraid not to kill.

The true reasons that bring O'Brien's characters to Vietnam are far from the abstract words that Frederic Henry dismisses and equally far from the Hollywood notion of heroism so prevalent in war movies prior to American involvement in Vietnam. The average age of the company of foot soldiers O'Brien writes about is nineteen or twenty, and most were probably drafted, as is the case of the fictional Tim O'Brien through whom author O'Brien often tells his stories. Thus, we see boys becoming men before they have had the opportunity to understand what manhood involves. And among the many things each soldier carried—the weapons, charms, diseases, and emotions—they “carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to” (“Things” [“The Things They Carried”] 20-21). Even the enemy soldiers, the Viet Cong, exhibit that moral dichotomy and fight out of fear as much as nationalism:

In the presence of his father and uncles, he pretended to look forward to doing his patriotic duty, which was also a privilege, but at night he prayed with his mother that the war might end soon. Beyond anything else, he was afraid of disgracing himself, and therefore his family and village.

(“Man” [“The Man I Killed”] 142)

However, quite different from most of O'Brien's characters driven by fear is Azar, the nineteen-year-old draftee who straps a puppy to a Claymore antipersonnel mine and blows the dog to pieces. Azar, still a teenager, loves Vietnam because it makes him “feel like a kid again.” “The Vietnam experience,” he says, “I mean, wow, I love this shit” (“Ghost” [“The Ghost Soldiers”] 237; O'Brien's emphasis). O'Brien's characters choose war for entirely negative reasons, not for unselfish love of country or of basic freedoms but from fear of embarrassment and cowardice or the love of war as if it were a child's game. Even the decision to go to Vietnam is determined not through an examination of positive motives but, again, for negative reasons: “I would go to the war […] because I was embarrassed not to. […] I was a coward. I went to war” (“River” [“On the Rainy River”] 63).

That inability in O'Brien's characters to establish a positive purpose in their reasons for going to war mirrors the historical ambiguities surrounding American involvement in Vietnam. Like the chaotic and morally ambiguous war they fight, O'Brien's characters are unsure of their purpose or even their actions. Azar explains blowing up the puppy as simple childish exuberance: “What's everybody so upset about? I mean, Christ, I'm just a boy” (“Spin” 40; O'Brien's emphasis). After one of his men dies, “Lieutenant Jimmy Cross led his men into the village of Than Ke. They burned everything. They shot chickens and dogs, they trashed the village well, they called in artillery and watched the wreckage, then they marched for several hours through the hot afternoon” to a place where they set up camp for the night (“Things” 16). Those men act not from forethought but from some measure of selective emotion: Azar, the sadist, experiences delight from torturing the puppy and, in “The Ghost Soldiers,” torture-prankstering a medic on guard duty who had nearly allowed another soldier to die through inaction; and the troop, following Lavender's sniper-death, razes the nearest village not for some strategic reason but out of an apparent need for revenge. The chauvinistic clichés that so often accompany patriotic fervor are missing. These characters have no center around which they can construct a reason for their involvement, and the only absolute is that resupply helicopters will arrive soon with more things for them to carry: For “all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry” (“Things” 16).

As Lorrie Smith writes in “Disarming the War Story,” “The ‘story’ of World War II […] has meaning for our culture as a heroic quest, and it forms a coherent narrative in which the soldier's sacrifices are redemptive” (90). All of that coherence of purpose is lost in O'Brien's stories of Vietnam, as his characters stumble through a landscape of disjointed experiences and realities. And though we may, as Smith asserts, “feel acutely the disjunction between ideals and realities” (90) when we attempt to consider Vietnam in terms of heroic quests, coherent actions, and redemptive sacrifices, O'Brien's characters seldom articulate any distinctions. For them, the realities are too overpowering to place against any abstract notions based upon cultural and societal ideals. Only Lt. Jimmy Cross, in “The Things They Carried,” and Tim, in “On the Rainy River,” consider that disjunction, and then only in personal terms, excluding any real notion of established codes.²

One often expects writers of war stories to present antithetical abstractions in a concrete form to establish some moral or ethical base. O'Brien, however, fuses abstracts such as realty and surreality and right and wrong in an effort to emphasize the lack of firm moral ground supporting his characters in a war lacking in definable purposes. To stop his own pain at seeing his best friend blown up, Rat Kiley systematically dismembers a baby water buffalo by shooting pieces from its body—its mouth, tail, ears, nose—until all that remains alive and moving are its eyes. The reaction by Rat's stunned comrades is restrained amazement: “A new wrinkle. I never seen it before. […] Well, that's Nam” (86). A group of Green Berets keep a pile of enemy bones stacked in a corner of their barracks underneath a sign that reads, “ASSEMBLE YOUR OWN GOOK!! FREE SAMPLE KIT!” (“Sweetheart” [“Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”] 119). That distillation of moral or ethical standards, an “aesthetic purity of moral indifference” (“True” [“How to Tell a True War Story”] 87), illustrates a general loss of humanity in any war, but possibly more so in a war that lacks any underlying absolutes, any real reasons for having gone to war. Thus the moral confusion Tim feels (in “On the Rainy River”) after finding out he has been drafted becomes a moral indifference once exposed to the brutalities and absurdities of war.

Those apparent indifferences extend even to how the soldiers deal with the death of their comrades. When a man dies, he is not killed, but “greased. […] offed, lit up, zapped.” (“Things” 19). Somehow, by verbally denying the reality of death through hyperbolic misnomers, they reject the death itself. At one point in “The Lives of the Dead,” Tim's unit enters a village it has calmly watched being bombed and burned by air strikes for thirty minutes. When the unit enters, the only person in the village is a dead old man who is missing an arm and whose face is covered by swarming flies and gnats. Each man, as he walks past the dead Vietnamese, offers a greeting and shakes the remaining hand: “How-dee-doo. … Gimme five. … A real honor. … Pleased as punch” (256). After Tim refuses to introduce himself or even offer a toast to the old man's health, he is ridiculed for not showing respect for his elders: Maybe it's too real for you?’” he is asked. “‘That's right,’” he replies. “‘Way too real’” (256). It is only his fourth day, and Tim soon realizes that he must develop the cynical sense of humor he will eventually need to cope with the realities of death. Paul Berlin, on his first day in Vietnam, in “Where Have You Gone, Charming Billy?” watches one of his comrades die of a heart attack brought on by the fear of dying. In his attempt to deal with witnessing his first death, he tries to transform the event into something that had not happened. Eventually, however, as the realities of the experience eat at him, he places the death in comic terms by imagining the official death notification:

SORRY TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON BILLY BOY WAS YESTERDAY SCARED TO DEATH IN ACTION IN THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM, VALIANTLY SUCCUMBING TO A HEART ATTACK SUFFERED WHILE UNDER ENORMOUS STRESS. […]

(130)

Berlin finally concludes that the death will make “a good joke” and “a funny war story” for his father (132). Not superficial male posturing, but overwhelming fear forces O'Brien's characters purposefully to detach themselves from death. They use any method possible, from keeping the dead alive through absurd ceremonial greetings to parodying government form letters to, as Albert Wilhelm writes, “keep the horrors of war at bay” (221).

Ironically, one of the deaths that breaks through the fabricated veneer of insulation is the death of an enemy in “The Man I Killed.” In explicit detail bordering on the religious, Tim vividly recalls the man he killed—maybe the first man or maybe just the first he had an opportunity to study afterwards. Azar dismisses the death in the common distancing dialogue discussed above, “Oh, man, you fuckin' trashed the fucker. […] You laid him out like Shredded fuckin' Wheat. […] Rice Krispies, you know? On the dead test, this particular individual gets A-plus” (140); And Kiowa tries moving Tim beyond his dumbstruck staring at the bloody corpse to talk about his emotions. Only here and in “Speaking of Courage,” where Norman Bowker, back home in Iowa on the Fourth of July, recounts the death of Kiowa in a swampy field, is the examination of death not covered under false layers of fear. O'Brien the writer must now dredge up those deaths that Tim the young soldier tried so hard to bury, which may explain why O'Brien returns to Vietnam in his fiction with such force and passion: he is reliving the horrors he suppressed decades earlier.

As in “The Man I Killed” and “Speaking of Courage,” O'Brien often uses a spiraling narrative technique to draw out the realism of death, even if this characters continue to refute that death. O'Brien revolves those stories around a specific death, as Joseph Heller revolves the first part of Catch-22 around Snowden's death, covering the same ground yet illuminating the moment's particular horror with each movement back to the death. The effect is at once numbing and oddly positive. We sense the overwhelming totality of death on the one hand, but we also imagine the narrator attempting to place a new order to his story, one that will somehow exclude the death. In “The Man I Killed,” the effect is an increasing horror at seeing the dead man; whereas in “Speaking Of Courage,” Norman realizes that he failed to save his friend's life. “The Things They Carried” revolves around the sniper death of Lavender, and in so doing shows Lt. Jimmy Cross's movement from the innocence of his insular world in which, to keep the war at a distance, he pretends that a girl back home in the United States is in love with him. However, with Lavender's death, he must face the reality that his lack of focus in leading his men may in part have caused that death. As many initiations do, Cross's initiation into the realities surrounding him result also in his need to destroy something of his past, which he does when he burns Martha's letters and photographs.

Kiowa's death becomes the center point for Norman Bowker in “Speaking of Courage” and is also the death around which the action revolves in “In the Field.” Ironically, here two other soldiers feel the responsibility for Kiowa's death, which adds an interesting layer of multiplicity of perception to O'Brien's stories. O'Brien further explores that notion of multiplicity of perception through Jimmy Cross's drafting a letter to Kiowa's parents. His first draft places blame on some ubiquitous “They” who sent him and his men to bivouac in a tactically indefensible position; in his second draft, he accepts the blame; and finally, he revises the letter to express “an officer's condolences. No apologies necessary” (197-98). All three drafts are accurate and true, underscoring the inability to write about war in absolute terms.

O'Brien's cyclical pattern that places death as the center point around which many of his stories revolve reinforces a permanence to war that a more linear narrative structure would necessarily exclude. O'Brien's characters cannot leave the deaths behind them and trudge on through a strictly chronological story. “The bad stuff,” O'Brien writes in “Spin,” “never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replying itself over and over” (36). And even when the war is over, it is not over; even though “the war occurred half a lifetime ago, […] the remembering makes it now” (40). So the cyclical pattern established in many of these stories continues to revolve long after the story stops, and the things they carried during the war become eclipsed by the things they carry following the war.

The deaths, of course, form the most visually unforgettable parts of O'Brien's stories. They are, first of all, not Hollywood war deaths: They are not scripted to show grace under pressure or to elevate the human reaction to the horrors of war. O'Brien's characters do not die filled with the notions of courage, honor, and camaraderie: they just die. Ted Lavender dies while zipping up his pants after urinating on a bus,”; Kiowa dies from drowning in the muddy human filth of a village's sewage field; Billy Boy Watkins dies of a heart attack brought on by the fear of dying after stepping on a land mine; Lemon dies from stepping on a land mine while playing an innocent game of catch and is literally blown into a nearby tree; and Jorgenson who dies after eluding enemy patrols and taking a mid-night swim, swallows bad water. None of the deaths are the deaths of heroes; and like the ritualized shooting of the water buffalo following Lemon's death, they serve to show a major theme connecting O'Brien's work—how isolated events of cruelty define war. Azar killing the puppy, Bowker shooting the water buffalo, a little girl dancing to an unheard rhythm outside her burned-out hut following a napalm raid, the first enemy killed, and the singular deaths of friends accrue as acts of cruelty to, as O'Brien says, “touch [the] reader's heart more than a grandiose description of the fire bombing of a village, or the napalming of a village, where you don't see corpses, you don't know the corpses, you don't witness the death in any detail. It is somehow made abstract, bloodless” (Kaplan 102). By focusing on the character—the individual coming in close contact with what death looks like—and allowing the surrounding scenes and events to take secondary importance, O'Brien increases the absurdity and horror. His plots are determined not by incident and event, but by the changing moral attitudes and development of his characters.

Likewise, “declarations about war, such as war is hell” (Kaplan 101) or war is immoral seem, in O'Brien's fiction, just as hollow as the declarations of war that place men in battle. These declarations, while possibly true, are little more than abstract generalities that fail to turn something deep within the reader. “A true war story,” as O'Brien wrote, “if truly told, makes the stomach believe” (84). A true war story, then, may not have a point, and it certainly does not exist in the narrative vacuum of beginning-middle-end, but it functions at a level of truth beyond that found in the story's words. Often, you doubt whether an O'Brien story can be true. Can a man actually transport his girlfriend to an isolated medical post in the Central Highlands and the lose her to the war as she slowly matriculates into the jungle? Some things, Pederson says in “Keeping Watch by Night,” “you just see and you got to believe in what you see” (66). A true war story has no moral, no instruction, no virtue, no suggestion of proper behavior; there is only a revelation of the possible evil in the nature of man: “You can tell a true war story,” O'Brien tells us, “by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” (“True” 76). True war stories, as O'Brien writes in his nonfiction narrative If I Die in a Combat Zone, offer “simple, unprofound scraps of truth” that lack any lessons to teach about war. The writer, then, according to O'Brien, must “simply tell stories” (32). However, within that apparent lack of pretense to message lies the phenomenological truths of O'Brien's fiction, which strike much deeper than, as Lorrie Smith writes, an exploitation of “war's larger political implications” (94). By suppressing the abstract in favor of the concrete, O'Brien allows his stories to exist as commentary through the “complex tangles and nuances of actual experience” (Calloway 222).

Beyond that, moreover, as O'Brien tells Steven Kaplan, “good stories somehow have to do with an awakening into a new world, something new and true, where someone is jolted out of […] complacency and forced to confront a new set of circumstances or a new self” (99). The archetypal pattern that O'Brien here alludes to of initiation into the complexities of the real world forms an underlying basis of much of O'Brien's fiction. Paul Berlin's witnessing Billy Boy's death signals his loss of innocence, his transition into manhood, and an unwelcome realization of the world's potential for cruelty. And Tim, who may realize that his only options are kill or be killed, cannot be comforted by that knowledge as his world of relative innocence is shattered by the realities of this new world he inhabits. Correspondingly, that separation between men and boys is also shown by the physical appearance of the soldiers as they trudge along under the weight of all they carry: “The most recent arrivals had pasty skin burnt at the shoulder blades and clavicle and neck; their boots were not yet red with clay, and they walked more carefully than the rest, and they looked more vulnerable” (“Spin” 36). As their appearance evolves and their movements change, so, too, their character changes in the “effort to establish a new order” to their life (Kaplan 99)—one in which the vulnerability of youth is replaced by the cynicism and hardness of manhood.

That also may be why O'Brien still returns to Vietnam in his fiction—because he is still trying to make sense of the new order established in his life over twenty years ago. In his stories, in the futile attempt to regain what he had before the war he can still dream alive the people who died; unfortunately, though, that also necessitates his reliving their deaths. That need may be what still hits O'Brien: “twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you get to the end you've forgotten the point again. And then for a long time you lie there watching the story happen in your head. You listen to your wife's breathing. The war's over. You close your eyes. You smile and think, Christ, what's the point” (“True” 88-89)? The point, however, is all in the telling, as is the healing. In his stories, O'Brien answers his characters desire to make sense out of their experiences: Kiowa imploring Tim to just talk after killing an enemy soldier instead of dumbly staring at the corpse, or Rat Kiley—not wanting to have to listen to the silence of the night—asking Kiowa to tell once again how Lavender fell like a sack of cement, or the platoon waiting once more for Rat to tell his story about the sweetheart of Song Tra Bong. O'Brien's characters, like O'Brien himself, carry their stories with them, sometimes damning the unimaginable weight of relived experience and sometimes extolling the outlet allowed through story-telling, which becomes at times a life-support system and a salvation from the moral complexities of the war.

Those moral complexities required of O'Brien “an innovative form rather than the conventional chronological narrative” (Slabey 206). In presenting stories from a war that lacked a traditional progression or a logical structure, O'Brien demands more from his writing than strict realism can provide. He blurs the distinctions in his stories to present truths coalesced in memory and imagination to, “get things right”—not in the absolute terms of packaged truisms and simplistic judgments but through the inner landscape of experiential truth telling.

Notes

1. In this essay, I consider only those stories of Tim O'Brien's that were previously published as separate short stories and are substantially different from any counterparts in later novels. Thus, I exclude stories that appeared in Going After Cacciato in much the same form as when they were published earlier as well as those stories in The Things They Carried that were not separately published.

2. Any use of “Tim” in this essay refers to the fictional character, and the use of “O'Brien” refers to Tim O'Brien the author. In an interview with Steven Kaplan, O'Brien discusses the similarities and differences between him and his fictional character:

   Everything I have written has come partly out of my own concerns […] but the story lines themselves, the events […] the characters […] the places […] are almost all invented. […] Ninety percent or more of the material […] is invented, and I invented ninety percent of a new Tim O'Brien, maybe even more than that.

   (95)

Works Cited

Beidler, Philip D. Re-Writing America: Vietnam Authors in Their Generation. Athens: U Georgia P, 1991.

Calloway, Catherine. “Pluralities of Vision: Going After Cacciato and Tim O'Brien's Short Fiction.” Gilman and Smith 213-22.

Gilman, Owen W., and Lorrie Smith. American Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War. New York: Garland, 1990.

Kaplan, Steven. “An Interview with Tim O'Brien.” Missouri Review 14.3 (1991): 95-108.

O'Brien, Tim. “The Ghost Soldiers.” O'Brien, Things 215-44.

———. “How to Tell a True War Story.” O'Brien, Things 73-92.

———. “In the Field.” O'Brien, Things 183-200.

———. “The Lives of the Dead.” O'Brien, Things 253-73.

———. “The Man I Killed.” O'Brien, Things 137-44.

———. “On the Rainy River.” O'Brien, Things 41-64.

———. “Speaking of Courage.” O'Brien, Things 155-74.

———. “Spin.” O'Brien, Things 33-40.

———. “Style.” O'Brien, Things 151-54.

———. “Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong.” O'Brien, Things 99-126.

———. “The Things They Carried.” O'Brien, Things 1-26.

———. The Things They Carried. New York: Penguin, 1991.

———. “Keeping Watch by Night.” Redbook 148 (Dec. 1976) 65-67.

———. “Where Have You Gone, Charming Billy?” Redbook 145 (May 1975) 81, 127-32.

Slabey, Robert M. “Going After Cacciato: Tim O'Brien's ‘Separate Peace.’” Gilman & Smith 205-11.

Smith, Lorrie. “Disarming the War Story.” Gilman and Smith 87-99.

Wilhelm, Albert. “Ballad Allusions in Tim O'Brien's ‘Where Have You Gone, Charming Billy?’” Studies in Short Fiction 28.2 (Spring 1991) 218-22.