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The Things They Carried

by Tim O’Brien

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Vietnam, Carried On

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SOURCE: Bunting, Josiah. “Vietnam, Carried On.” Book World—Washington Post (23 April 1990): B13.

[In the following review, Bunting considers the defining and unifying characteristics of the stories in The Things They Carried.]

A war writer's compulsion to write about why, and how, he writes about war and about what constitutes good war writing is not often resisted successfully. It rises like second growth forest, from soil in which his memory has already quickened and that has nourished his imagination and sometimes its trunks and shoots bristle in the midst of taller usually stronger trees. Too often the consequence is literary criticism, or reflections on the unreliability of memory, or simple assertions about writing about combat, that should have stood alone. It is rare that writers of unusual imaginative powers have critical gifts to match. When the fruits of both are mixed, the result is to diminish each. Perhaps The Things They Carried deserves a partial exemption from such criticism: It is after all a collection of long stories and memoirs (it is impossible to tell which is which) published over the last 11 years of Tim O'Brien's writing life. What efforts have been made to stitch them together, after the fact, cannot be judged.

Most of these narratives tell stories about the lives and deaths of 19-year-old American boys in the Central Highlands of Vietnam in 1968. The stories are linked in one way or another, through flashbacks, casual anticipations, the reappearance of different characters, all members of an infantry platoon. Episodes in their lives as infantrymen are rendered in an authorial tone, with an evocative, quiet precision not equaled in the imaginative literature of the American war in Vietnam. It is as though a Thucydides had descended from grand politique and strategy to the calm dissection of the quotidian effects of war on several individuals—given, particularly, the things they carried with them into combat: their own exhaustion, their few pathetic bibelots, their memories, their weapons. They carried no political sensibility or outrage. “They marched for the sake of the march. They plodded along slowly, dumbly, leaning forward against the heat, unthinking, all blood and bone, simple grunts, soldiering with their legs, toiling up the hills and down … but [without] volition, without will, because it was automatic … a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility.” O'Brien has it just right; and he observes a few pages later that “a true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it.”

Precisely so. Such stories as wars produce must aim only at telling what seems significant in what the participant remembers of what he saw, as his imagination has transmuted such things. What figures most vividly in his mind must not consciously be “moral.” The things he carried into the war are very different from what he carried away from it—in O'Brien's case, for example, a conviction that it was a lack of true courage that prevented him from leaping from a rowboat close to the Canadian side of the Rainy River in 1968, a leap that would have made a conviction about the injustice of the war a commitment not to fight in it.

There is a sense in these narratives of elemental fatalism: not unlike that of soldiers of World War I, as they appear in Siegfried Sassoon, Henri Barbusse, Wilfred Owen, Erich Maria Remarque. An American boy in the infantry, from the Minnesota prairie, simply serves to survive; exhausted, private, helplessly clinging to his small baggages against the coming of the distant date of his expected “rotation” home to America. There is no political or moral irruption here; only personal remorse and the lived knowledge that no sense is to be made of the war by those called upon—always the youngest and least knowing—to fight it.

It is now more than 17 years since the departure of the last American soldiers from Vietnam. It is 25 since the commitment of U.S. Army and Marine units to combat. The former lapse of time is greater than that between Hiroshima and the inauguration of John Kennedy. In 1961, not many people were writing about ground combat in World War II; but our absorption in Vietnam remains intense, self-consciously intense, haunting. Novels, memoirs, collections—all pour forth in a thick stream that does not diminish: acts of exorcism, atonement, reconstruction, epiphany. It will never all be said; but it is difficult to imagine that it will ever be set down more accurately, more usefully, than in these narratives. If in form they resist classification, if their facts and their fictions are commingled beyond separate identification, if critical reflection occasionally intrudes unduly, these are small cavils to set alongside a growing body of work about our worst and longest war, by its best and more steadfast chronicler.

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