SOURCE: Heberle, Mark A. “True War Stories.” In A Trauma Artist: Tim O'Brien and the Fiction of Vietnam, pp. 176-215. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Heberle provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of The Things They Carried and locates the book within O'Brien's oeuvre.]

RECIRCULATED TRAUMA, ENDLESS FICTION

After publishing his fable of nuclear age trauma in 1985, O'Brien's next novel was to have been The People We Marry, a work that eventually appeared as In the Lake of the Woods in 1994 (Kaplan 1995: 218). In the interim, however, he published several short stories, some set in Viet Nam and others in the United States but all related to the war. The shorter stories took on a life of their own and eventually a comprehensive form that became The Things They Carried, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1990, four years before the novel that was to have followed The Nuclear Age. Its award-winning title story, which appeared in 1986, was the first part of the larger work to be published. In 1989, just before its publication, O'Brien called Things [The Things They Carried] the best thing he had yet written (Naparsteck 8), and he has noted how much he enjoyed putting together the book as a whole. Indeed, reviewers greeted The Things They Carried as O'Brien's triumphant return to form after the relatively disappointing achievement of The Nuclear Age. The work has received admiring academic critical attention as well. Calling it a “remarkable text” (28), Philip Beidler used a citation from the title story as an epigraph to his 1991 study of Vietnam authors, and Don Ringnalda referred to Things as O'Brien's “ultimate Vietnam War fiction” (105). Even Lorrie Smith, a critic who finds much of the work “pernicious” in its masculinist discourse, concedes that Things “contributes significantly to the canon of Vietnam War fiction” and is “remarkable” in its treatment of writing and soldiering (38).

O'Brien has told one interviewer that the genesis of the book was the image of the war as something to be carried, a weight of things that derived from his own experiences: “remembering all this crap I had on me and inside me, the physical and spiritual burdens” (Lee 200). As a work derived from painful memories that must be borne again, The Things They Carried has also been admired by mental health professionals for its insightful representation of combat trauma. Things is the only work of Vietnam War fiction quoted in Jonathan Shay's comparative study of the Iliad and PTSD or in Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery. (And among the jacket blurbs for each book appear commendations by O'Brien.) Shay cites the narrator's insistence in “How to Tell a True War Story” that “a true war story is never moral” to argue more generally that trauma can never be easily resolved through writing (183), a point also emphasized by Kali Tal in discussing Lawrence Langer's study of Holocaust literature (Tal 1996: 49-50). Herman … cites passages from Things to exemplify Vietnam War trauma generally.

As O'Brien's satisfaction with the writing of the book suggests, however, Things is a work of recovery as well as trauma. Although “you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” (“How to Tell a True War Story” 76), yet “this too is true: stories can save us” (“The Lives of the Dead” 255). The Things They Carried negotiates between these two truths by making storytelling itself the most important subject of the book. Throughout the work, stories are produced through a wide variety of discursive gestures, including recollection, confession, and explanation, as well as explicit storytelling; and many tales are repeated, elaborated by further details, or supplemented by additional explanation or commentary. This ceaseless replication of the fictive process witnesses to the mutual dependence of trauma and narrative as O'Brien reinvents himself as a soldier and as a writer. In the end, the work exemplifies both the need to write one's way beyond trauma and the impossibility of ever doing so.

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED AS SELF-REVISION

Composed of twenty-two pieces, beginning with “The Things They Carried” and ending with “The Lives of the Dead,” O'Brien's fifth book has been characterized both as a collection of short stories and as a novel, but neither classification exhausts its generic range. Among the “things” carried in the volume are apparent fiction and apparent nonfiction, including straightforward realism, fantasy, memoir, author's notes, and literary commentary. In content and form, Things revises O'Brien's two previous war-sited works. Like If I Die in a Combat Zone, the book originated in a few independently published pieces that prompted a larger structure that would come to incorporate them; as with Going After Cacciato, those earliest elements were a series of prize-winning stories.¹ Although closely resembling Combat Zone in form and mode, Things is not a memoir; and although it includes many interconnected stories, it is not a continuous narrative work like Cacciato. O'Brien has called it simply a “fiction,” and it is more appropriate to identify its twenty-two “fictions” as “pieces” or “sections” rather than as chapters or stories. For example, “Spin,” the third section, merely narrates or recalls a number of short, unconnected sketches, some of them identified as memories, others as stories; the seventh piece, “How to Tell a True War Story,” and the last, “The Lives of the Dead,” are similarly miscellaneous. Whatever its genre, most of Things follows a group of about a dozen GIs who experience the mixed trauma and boredom of combat in Viet Nam and reappear in the various episodes that make up the book. These protagonists are a rewriting of Cacciato's Third Squad, and both groups are fictional versions of the men of Alpha Company with whom O'Brien served in Viet Nam during his year in-country; indeed, the soldiers in Things belong to an Alpha Company themselves. As in Combat Zone, Tim O'Brien is one of its members, and a great deal of first-person narrative and commentary in the book presents his own point of view.

Revisiting the war through the experiences and point of view of a representative group of GIs is a cliché in American representations of Vietnam (Leland 740), but Things is also a self-conscious refashioning of the structure of Cacciato. The novel had begun with a list of the dead, followed by a description of the living. The title fiction of Things is O'Brien's supreme use of a list, a masterpiece of literary realism and formal patterning that focuses on everything carried by each soldier in the book, from jungle boots, 2.1 pounds; to letters from home, 10 ounces; to grief, terror, love, shameful memories, and “the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to” (20-21). Thus, both works open with a catalog of characters, burdened by personal and collective trauma, who will reappear in the episodes to follow. Like Cacciato as well, Things goes on to recall the deaths of squad members until all have been recuperated by the end of the book, where they reappear in the oxymoronically titled final piece—it seems that “the lives of the dead” are not over in The Things They Carried.

Formally, then, O'Brien's fifth book combines the most obvious features of his two earlier Vietnam narratives: A series of structurally coherent scenarios portray the war through the experiences of a small group of GIs; and the writer represents himself as a protagonist, participant, or commentator in all but three (“The Things They Carried,” “Speaking of Courage,” and “In the Field”). The site of narration thus varies from piece to piece, moving from the first-person point of view of Combat Zone (and The Nuclear Age) to the third-person intimate perspective of Cacciato (and Northern Lights). The title narrative, nearly an epitome of the war as it was represented in both Combat Zone and Cacciato, sometimes takes on an omniscient perspective that reflects what O'Brien has represented in the earlier books about men in combat.

Throughout The Things They Carried, O'Brien refashions traumatic experiences that were first represented in Combat Zone and rewritten in the later books. Thus, breakdown in combat was briefly described in Chapter XIII (119-20) of the memoir, but its description in “The Things They Carried” (18-19) explicitly recalls not only Paul Berlin's experience on Cacciato's hill but also William Cowling's embarrassment in guerrilla training:

For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity. Now and then, however, there were times of panic, when they squealed or wanted to squeal but couldn't, when they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons blindly and cringed and sobbed and begged for the noise to stop and went wild and made stupid promises to themselves and to God and to their mothers and fathers, hoping not to die. In different ways, it happened to all of them. Afterward, when the firing ended, they would blink and peek up. They would touch their bodies, feeling shame, then quickly hiding it. … After a time someone would shake his head and say, No lie, I almost shit my pants, and someone else would laugh, which meant it was bad, yes, but the guy had obviously not shit his pants, it wasn't that bad, and in any case nobody would ever do such a thing and then go ahead and talk about it.

Whether or not O'Brien personally did “such a thing,” he wrote about it in both Cacciato and The Nuclear Age. The destruction of Tri Binh 4 recalled in the memoir (“Alpha Company”) and revised in the obliteration of Hoi An in Cacciato (“Fire in the Hole”) reappears in the wiping out of Than Khe in “The Things They Carried.” All three operations are ordered by junior officers during patrols near hostile villages, and the two purely fictional accounts are brutal responses to the death of an American GI, Jim Pederson in Cacciato and Ted Lavender in Things. Alpha Company's destructive takeover of a Buddhist monastery as a combat base in “July” (Combat Zone) is refashioned more positively in “Church,” where the monks' gracious courtesy is reciprocated by some of their guests. In the same chapter of the memoir, Captain Smith's incompetence leads to an American soldier's being buried in mud when a half-track runs over him, and his comrades have to find his corpse and pull it out of the mire. The episode is elaborately expanded and altered in several of the later sections of Things, which focus on the fate of Kiowa, an American Indian GI who is lethally buried under mud and human waste during a nighttime mortar attack. In “On the Rainy River,” O'Brien refashions his failure to flee from military service when he had a chance to do so, concluding his account with the same moral paradox that had haunted his recollection in Combat Zone (“Escape”): “I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war” (63). And as noted … O'Brien's description of the destruction of a water buffalo, recalled in Combat Zone (139) and rewritten in both Cacciato and The Nuclear Age, reappears in “How to Tell a True War Story.”

The Things They Carried rewrites O'Brien's earlier work, but it also revises itself as it proceeds, frequently providing multiple versions of a single episode and commenting on its own origins. The work's continual self-reflection upon its own status and purpose as imaginative writing has prompted Catherine Calloway (1995) to label it a metafiction. Perhaps the most comprehensive subject of Cacciato is its own making, as represented in the meditations of Paul Berlin. But Things is more explicitly metafictional, as the very titles of “How to Tell a True War Story,” “Notes,” and “Good Form” indicate. In the last sentence of the book, O'Brien reimagines himself as a ten-year-old boy, “skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story” (273). The image is a memory, a story, and a metaphor for the story making that has now come to an end—indeed, “Spin” is the third piece in The Things They Carried.

In this final passage, O'Brien is re-membering himself, an act that combines the roles of artist, character, and audience. Such self-representation is the most striking feature of The Things They Carried and its most significant means of making storytelling a crucial subject. Except in Northern Lights, the protagonists of his previous books were authorial surrogates, and even Paul Perry shares the quasi-authorial role of meditative observer or narrator that characterizes Berlin, Cowling, and O'Brien himself in Combat Zone. In Things, however, the author is directly refashioned as the figure whom O'Brien has referred to as “the Tim character” (Naparsteck 7) and “the character Tim O'Brien” (Kaplan 1991: 96-97).² We will refer to O'Brien's persona as “Tim O'Brien” or as “the narrator” to distinguish him from the author. By employing what we may call the trope of memory, suddenly recalling and then elaborating in more detail a past scene from the war, this latest version of O'Brien combines his identities as soldier and author, which had been distinct in the earlier books. For example, “Spin” consists of eighteen short sections, most of them brief scenes from the war introduced by the simple formula “I remember” or an equivalent. Four sections are prefaced by the reflection that “what sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end” (39). The final section identifies O'Brien's authorial role by making explicit the relationship between memory and fiction: “Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future” (40). In remembering, the author rewitnesses what the soldier had seen, so that the two selves also merge, like Tim the writer and Timmy the ten-year-old. Both are present even in brief sketches such as “Stockings,” which describes Henry Dobbins's unwavering faith in a personal talisman: “Even now, twenty years later, I can see him wrapping his girlfriend's pantyhose around his neck before heading out on ambush” (129). By the end of the piece, which describes Dobbins's decision to keep wearing the stockings for good luck even though his girlfriend has dumped him, the narrator has rejoined his platoon imaginatively: “It was a relief for all of us” (130). As in Combat Zone, the use of “we” and “us” incorporates the narrator Tim O'Brien into five other brief war pieces that are not directly presented as memories.

In “The Things They Carried,” “Speaking of Courage,” and “In the Field,” however, the narrator is neither remembering what once happened nor is present when it does. But each of these originally independently published stories is followed by a brief sketch in The Things They Carried—“Love,” “Notes,” and “Field Trip,” respectively—that identifies O'Brien's persona as the author of the preceding longer story. Indeed, in these three metafictional appendices and in nine of the other pieces in Things, Tim O'Brien is the narrator, remembering, describing, arguing, or explaining things to us in the first person.

Two of the other works, “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” and “Night Life,” are represented by O'Brien's persona as stories that were narrated by his comrades Rat Kiley and Mitchell Sanders. In “The Ghost Soldiers,” Norman Bowker tells how Morty Phillips suffered a lethal infection after taking a swim, and Kiley and Sanders tell additional stories in “Spin” and “How to Tell a True War Story.” Telling stories is thus omnipresent in Things, and Tim O'Brien represents himself and his comrades as an eager audience:

By midnight it was story time.

“Morty Phillips used up his luck,” Bowker said.

I smiled and waited. There was a tempo to how stories got told. Bowker peeled open a finger blister and sucked on it.

“Go on,” Azar said. “Tell him everything.”

(“The Ghost Soldiers”—221)

Tim O'Brien's presence in such scenes enacts a trope of storytelling to represent his fiction as simply the transmission of episodes overhead and repeated, just as the act of remembering defines his function as merely recovering and fleshing out actual incidents. In the latter case, he is a witness; in the former, an audience for twice-told tales. The notion of sharing the accounts of others is reinforced by the narrator's general references to the war as a source of stories; for example: “Vietnam was full of strange stories, some improbable, some well beyond that, but the stories that will last forever are those that swirl back and forth across the border between trivia and bedlam, the mad and the mundane. This one keeps returning to me. I heard it from Rat Kiley, who swore up and down to its truth, although in the end, I'll admit, that doesn't amount to much of a warranty” (101). This is the introduction to “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” Rat Kiley's account of Mary Anne Bell, a football cheerleader from Ohio who flies to the war zone to join her high school sweetheart but gradually becomes so enamored of counterguerrilla terrorism that she migrates into the jungle and is last seen prowling about in her pink culottes, wearing a necklace of human tongues. O'Brien has claimed that the story is based on an actual incident (Coffey 61, Baughman 205), so it perfectly exemplifies the convincing lunacy of a true war story that lasts forever.

Insofar as The Things They Carried presents itself as a miscellany of overheard and remembered episodes from the war, strikingly mundane and authentically bizarre, the book resembles the method and material of Michael Herr's Dispatches, a work and a writer O'Brien greatly admires. But its self-conscious use of remembering and storytelling also recalls Proust and Conrad. The work ends, like Remembrance of Things Past, by recalling the originating instance of the narrator's identity as a writer—in Tim O'Brien's case, the death of his childhood girlfriend Linda and his dreams of her continuing presence in his life. And “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” is O'Brien's Heart of Darkness, Americanized, Vietnamized, and surrealized (and possibly encouraged by Francis Ford Coppola's film version of Conrad, Apocalypse Now, for which Herr wrote the screenplay). Like Conrad's tale, “Sweetheart” [“Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”] is filtered through three sets of narrators, since Rat Kiley heard the end of the story from a comrade who talked to the Green Berets, and in their account the high school sweetheart is already turning into a ghostly legend: “[A] couple times they almost saw her sliding through the shadows. Not quite, but almost. She had crossed to the other side” (125). The Ohio cheerleader becomes the Kurtz figure who has “crossed to the other side,” while the Green Berets practice the barbarous rites that she first emulates and then goes beyond. And both in this story and in those that the other members of Alpha Company tell, O'Brien makes the circumstances of storytelling itself part of the tales, complete with interruptions by listeners and characterizations of his own narrative by GI storytellers, who thus become additional authorial surrogates.

Overall, Tim O'Brien appears in nineteen of the twenty-two pieces that make up Things as a participant, audience/observer, or commentator, and he is identified as the author of the other three. Whether as writer or soldier, he is the book's central figure, and his multiple roles as author and character make Things a peculiarly Proustian work, despite its subject. But just as Proust's narrator is not the author of Remembrance of Things Past but a young man who is about to write it, the Tim O'Brien who appears in The Things They Carried cannot be simply identified with the author who has created him. As noted above, O'Brien's book is identified as “a work of fiction” on the title page and in the brief foreword, which notes that “except for a few details regarding the author's own life, all the incidents, names, and characters are imaginary.” Although the autobiographical details virtually identify author and protagonist, O'Brien has given himself an imaginary daughter in “Ambush,” “Good Form,” and “Field Trip,” and the last of these pieces details a trip back to Viet Nam with her in 1990 that, needless to say, never happened. There are also less obvious differences between O'Brien and his persona, including some noted by the author: The vengeful behavior of Tim O'Brien in “The Ghost Soldiers” represents some of his creator's darker impulses, but the episode never occurred; and O'Brien does not share the narrator's mystification of war's violence (e.g., “For all its horror, you can't help but gape at the awful majesty of combat”—87) in “How to Tell a True War Story” (Naparsteck 9). Thus, the Tim O'Brien who appears in the book, a soldier who fought in Viet Nam in Quang Ngai Province and is now a writer and the author of a book called Going After Cacciato, is a character created by the Tim O'Brien who wrote The Things They Carried.

The narrator provides a confession and a justification for O'Brien's self-fabrication in “Good Form,” as if the apparent misrepresentation of the first seventeen sections of Things were an act of bad faith with the reader:

It's time to be blunt.

I'm forty-three years old, true, and I'm a writer now, and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier.

Almost everything else is invented.

But it's not a game. It's a form. Right here, now, as I invent myself, I'm thinking of all I want to tell you about why this book is written as it is.

(203)

The narrator then proceeds to revise “The Man I Killed,” an earlier piece that seems to recall his emotional breakdown after killing an enemy soldier, by revealing what actually happened, only to confess that the second account is also invented. And both versions are finally revealed to be fictive substitutes for what did not happen rather than what did:

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

Here is the 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.

(203-4)

What “really” happened was a failure to feel, an emotional constriction in response to trauma that the narrator associates with moral cowardice. “Responsibility” recalls the narrator's choice to participate in a bad war, represented in Things by the account of a traumatic breakdown in “On the Rainy River” when he is unable to flee to Canada; “grief” is felt for all the dead, even the enemy, and all the other wasted casualties. “Good Form” thus represents Tim O'Brien, the narrator of The Things They Carried, as a trauma writer and as a trauma survivor and provides a significant explanation for his rewriting of Vietnam. But although traumatization may be an important source of the writing, the source of the narrator's feelings remains both unspecific and endless, as “faceless” but also as all-embracing as all the things he carried out of the war. By refashioning himself so, O'Brien not only gives his personal traumatization a fictional form but also represents its ineffability.

The recycling in The Things They Carried of material from O'Brien's experiences and from his earlier books indicates the persistence of significant war memories in the writer's imagination. Some of them may be the unresolved traces of traumatic experiences, but they are also the inspiration for his writing. In Things the distinction between trauma and inspiration is frequently blurred in any case: Many of the pieces dramatize traumatization and various reactions to it, whereas others show how trauma is directly converted into a fiction. But the repetition of incidents and experiences in O'Brien's work also raises issues of authenticity and verisimilitude. War literature has commonly been validated on the basis of its truth to actual experience, but O'Brien's multiple rewritings radically question such assumptions. The problem of authenticity is addressed by Tim O'Brien in “How to Tell a True War Story,” which questions the categories of “truth” and “war story” through the communication of unspeakable grief.

“HOW TO TELL A TRUE WAR STORY”: MISREADING TIM O'BRIEN

“How to Tell a True War Story” is not only O'Brien's most complex meditation on war literature in general but also a brilliant representation of trauma writing. The work is narrated by the Tim O'Brien who is a fictional persona for the author and who self-reflectively interweaves stories and commentary on his own writing. The longest of its fourteen sections is an actual example of formal storytelling that raises issues that are developed throughout the piece, including, the validity of fiction and its relationship to trauma:

I remember how peaceful the twilight was. A deep pinkish red spilled out on the river, which moved without sound, and in the morning we would cross the river and march west into the mountains. The occasion was right for a good story.

“God's truth,” Mitchell Sanders said. “A six-man patrol goes up into the mountains on a basic listening-post operation. The idea's to spend a week up there, just lie low and listen for enemy movement. …”

Sanders glanced at me to make sure I had the scenario. He was playing with his yo-yo, dancing it with short, tight little strokes of the wrist.

His face was blank in the dusk.

(79)

The blank-faced narrator goes on to describe how the six soldiers become so hyperaroused by the sounds emanating from the mountains—Vietnamese music, a cocktail party, a “terrific mama-san soprano … gook opera and a glee club and the Haiphong Boys Choir” (81)—that they call in an all-night air strike against the mountains and flee back to base camp in the morning. Asked by a “fatass colonel” what happened, “[t]hey just look at him for a while, sort of funny like, sort of amazed, and the whole war is right there in that stare. It says everything you can't ever say. It says, man, you got wax in your ears. … Then they salute the fucker and walk away, because certain stories you don't ever tell” (82-83). Sanders then moves off into the dark, his story over. But in the next two sections of “War Story” [“How to Tell a True War Story”], he returns in the morning to give it a moral (“you got to listen to your enemy” [83]) and then later to revise that to “just listen,” while confessing to Tim O'Brien that most of the account was made up. “[B]ut listen,” Sanders insists, “it's still true” (84).

Mitchell Sanders's fable resembles some of the strange and true stories of the war reported by Michael Herr in Dispatches that stand by themselves as comments on its absurd and incomprehensible violence: for example, “Patrol went up the mountain. One man came back. He died before he could tell us what happened” (Herr 6). Like “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” O'Brien's episode mimics Conrad in its careful attention to the narrative situation, metacommentary by the storyteller, and symbolic details (Kaplan [1995] notes that the narrator Tim O'Brien recalls minutely the almost comic icon of the storyteller's magic: “Even now, at this instant, I remember that yo-yo” [183]). Within its fictional setting, this account of American soldiers who go into the mountains, undergo a traumatic experience, but ultimately return safely addresses the anxieties of its listeners, who anticipate their own dreaded mountain mission in the morning. Whether it happened or not, it is true to their fears and hopes. Finally, the survivors' inability to tell others what they have been through suggests that although storytelling is a necessary outlet for traumatization, the trauma event itself is incommunicable. Sanders's attempt to give the tale a moral and to separate “fact” from “fiction” are unnecessary, therefore, as the narrator Tim O'Brien knows and as much of “War Story” demonstrates.

Sanders's tale exemplifies that a story can be truer than what actually happened, that it can be more valuable than actual experience, and that it can make the survivor's trauma meaningful, but only to the right audience. O'Brien's representation of his authorial persona in “War Story” is concerned with these issues as well, particularly in the account of Rat Kiley's slaughter of a baby water buffalo, the ninth of the fifteen sections that make up “War Story.” Tim O'Brien introduces this third revision of the water buffalo incident from Combat Zone by noting that “I've told it before—many times—many versions—but here's what actually happened” (85). But at the end of “War Story,” the Rat Kiley episode—story? memory of actual occurrence?—has become another example of storytelling, a piece that he often reads in public and that is sometimes mistaken for a personal experience still bothering the storyteller, mistaken usually by “an older woman of kindly temperament and humane politics” (90): “She'll explain that as a rule she hates war stories; she can't understand why people want to wallow in all the blood and gore. But this one she liked. The poor baby buffalo, it made her sad. Sometimes, even, there are little tears. What I should do, she'll say, is put it all behind me. Find new stories to tell” (90). The narrator uses her reaction to denounce two sorts of misreadings of O'Brien's own fiction that derive from the relationship between traumatization and war stories.

On the one hand, a story may be interpreted as an actual experience rather than the fabulation of something that may or may not have happened: “Beginning to end, you tell her, it's all made up. Every goddamn detail—the mountains and the river and especially that poor dumb baby buffalo. None of it happened. None of it. And even if it did happen, it didn't happen in the mountains, it happened in this little village on the Batangan Peninsula, and it was raining like crazy, and one night a guy named Stink Harris woke up screaming with a leech on his tongue. You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it” (91). The narrator initially uses direct experience to validate the episode, only to deny that it happened; but if it did, he adds, it will be found in Going After Cacciato! Even the authenticity of the original account in Combat Zone must now be questioned, if what “actually happened” is to be found in “How to Tell a True War Story,” or in Chapter Six of O'Brien's second novel. Paradoxically, a “true” story is one that has multiple versions. Ultimately, the greater truth of the revisions depends not on what happened, but on the different ways in which killing a water buffalo is rewritten as a powerfully traumatic experience in Cacciato, The Nuclear Age, and Things.

Nevertheless, introducing the episode in “War Story” as an actual happening has established its credibility and thus met our need to believe that it is literally “true”—the narrator himself uses the mimetic fallacy before he disabuses his sympathetic listener of trusting in it as anything more than a narrative device. And of course the story's authenticity is validated by the listener's concern for the storyteller: She assumes that he has been traumatized because the terrible details are so real, so vivid. Indeed, her response suggests that the story has fulfilled an important criterion of a “true war story, if truly told”: It “makes the stomach believe” (84). Whatever her concern about the narrator's obsession with the war, she has enjoyed the story, after all, despite its “absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” (76), another of the narrator's criteria. In fact, her response is contradictory: Moved by what has been narrated, she exhorts the author to write about something else.

Forced to correct the mistaken assumption that true war stories represent actual experiences, the narrator is even more upset by the notion that their subject is war. If the mimetic fallacy mistakes fiction for fact in a true war story, a second sort of misreading misses the point of the fiction itself. In the first instance, the well-meaning reader or listener misattributes traumatization to the storyteller; in the second, she fails to locate the true fictional source of trauma and its victim. The water buffalo episode is the last of three sections in “How to Tell a True War Story” that deal with Rat Kiley, and although all of them take place during the war, their subject is something else.

“War Story” begins with a narrative episode followed by a commentary upon it, a pattern repeated throughout. In the first, Rat Kiley writes a letter to the sister of a good friend who has been killed, filling it with a few dubiously eulogistic stories to illustrate “how her brother made the war seem almost fun, always raising hell and lighting up villes and bringing smoke to bear every which way” (75). At the end of the letter, “Rat pours his heart out. He says he loved the guy. He says the guy was his best friend in the world. They were like soul mates, he says, like twins or something, they had a whole lot in common. He tells the guy's sister he'll look her up when the war's over” (76). But at the end of the section, his war stories are ignored: “Rat mails the letter. He waits two months. The dumb cooze never writes back” (76). In the commentary that follows, Rat's disappointment is used to illustrate that “a true war story is never moral”:

You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. 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.

Listen to Rat: “Jesus Christ, man, I write this beautiful fuckin' letter, I slave over it, and what happens? The dumb cooze never writes back.”

(77)

After two more sections with commentary, Rat's methodical massacre of the baby buffalo is gruesomely detailed, together with the platoon's reaction: “He shot it twice in the flanks. It wasn't to kill; it was to hurt. He put the rifle muzzle up against the mouth and shot the mouth away. Nobody said much. … Curt Lemon was dead, Rat Kiley had lost his best friend in the world. Later in the week he would write a long personal letter to the guy's sister, who would not write back, but for now it was a question of pain. He shot off the tail. He shot away chunks of meat below the ribs …” (85). By the end of the atrocity, “Rat Kiley was crying. He tried to say something, but then cradled his rifle and went off by himself” (86). The narrator and the platoon have become witnesses of “something essential, something brand-new and profound, a piece of the world so startling there was not yet a name for it. Somebody kicked the baby buffalo” and eventually Kiowa and Mitchell Sanders dump what remains of the animal in the village well. The episode ends with Sanders's commentary: “‘Well, that's Nam,’ he said. ‘Garden of Evil. Over here, man, every sin's real fresh and original’” (86).

The platoon reacts as if it were the audience for the kind of fiction that “makes the stomach believe,” according to the narrator: “[I]n the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe ‘Oh’” (84). By contrast, Tim O'Brien's own listener has tried to interpret the story as personal testimony and so missed its point:

I won't say it but I'll think it.

I'll picture Rat Kiley's face, his grief, and I'll think, You dumb cooze.

Because she wasn't listening.

It wasn't a war story. It was a love story.

(90)

Keeping his own brutality to himself, the narrator goes on to explain that a true war story is made-up, as we have noted above. But missing its subject is worse than mistaking its fictionality. The story does not represent Tim O'Brien's trauma, but Rat Kiley's. His love for his best friend is displaced through his behavior toward a Vietnamese water buffalo and Curt Lemon's sister; both the little atrocity and the profanity are reactions to combat death, brutal expressions of loyalty to a lost comrade. The atrocity takes crazed vengeance upon the only available trace of the enemy; the letter tries to make something good come out of the waste of his friend, perhaps even to perpetuate his love through someone intimately connected to Lemon. To Rat, the sister is dismissing his love for her brother, even invalidating the Curt Lemon that Rat admired. We can perfectly understand and support her silence, but to the doubly spurned lover her failure to answer is an act of betrayal that leaves his own wound unhealed.

The sister resembles the narrator's well-meaning but theme-deaf listener, who weeps for the baby water buffalo while ignoring the point of the episode: Rat Kiley's pain. But the story does not shrink from exposing the obscenity of the war, a point reinforced by Mitchell Sanders's commentary. Somebody's (i.e., anybody's) kicking the murdered baby buffalo and the poisoning of the village well by the GIs epitomize their everyday brutality toward Viet Nam and the Vietnamese, a destructiveness nakedly celebrated even in Rat's tribute to Lemon. But they, too, have lost a comrade, and Rat's love needs validation, his vengeance and breakdown need closure. Trauma cannot be healed by sympathetic atrocity, of course, which will only make it worse, but destruction seems the only means at hand for these violence-tempered young men. Violence and love depend on each other so closely in the Rat Kiley episodes that as in any “true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't tease it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning” (84). In his fourth version of buffalo hunting, O'Brien nonetheless does produce a love story from the elemental filth of the war, one that avoids sentimentality or a happy ending.

“How to Tell a True War Story” ends with an emphatic denial of the mimetic and thematic limitations of war literature as popularly understood (and written):

You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it.

And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.

(91)

By calling attention to its materials, O'Brien reminds us that “War Story” has fulfilled its own criteria. People who never listen include Curt Lemon's sister, Tim O'Brien's audience, and everyone denounced when Mitchell Sanders tries to define the moral of his story: “Nobody listens. Nobody hears nothin'. Like that fatass colonel. The politicians, all the civilian types. Your girlfriend. My girlfriend” (83). True war stories are not simply stories about war but fictions of traumatization that require willing listeners as well as skillful storytellers. Nor are they solely narratives of past events: Rat Kiley's breakdown is no more merely a record of some terrible events in the Vietnam War than Heart of Darkness is just an account of a trip down the Congo River in 1890. The war is a fictional creation that speaks of important human truths every time it brings together a storyteller and an audience, whether in Quang Ngai Province in 1969 or in a lecture hall in 1990, and that is the ultimate point of O'Brien's fictional essay with examples (or vice versa). The conclusion also reminds us that everything in the piece has been made up, including the narrator Tim O'Brien and the kindly listener whom silently he browbeats. His repetition of Rat Kiley's profanity links them as both storytellers and fictional characters; like Mitchell Sanders, the narrator has had an audience for his story, and he has taken his listener aside to comment on it; and the narrator himself has also been a listener—to Rat Kiley, to Sanders, and even to his audience.

Through fictionalizing himself here as elsewhere, O'Brien is able to represent trauma and its consequences without merely representing his personal experiences. Everything in the work speaks of psychic or moral breakdown, from the listening post soldiers who call in air strikes upon the jungle and abandon their post, to Rat Kiley, crying over a dead friend, a slaughtered water buffalo, and the wasting of himself and others that is the war. But although stories can both replicate and relieve trauma by displacing it formally, they cannot give it closure. By presenting a fable derived from their own nightmares, Mitchell Sanders's story temporarily calms men who will be facing combat the next day in the mountains, but his attempts to censor its falsehood and draw out a moral call attention to the limited magic of fictions.

And Rat Kiley is not the only figure who cannot forget the death of Curt Lemon. The narrator of “War Story” is obsessed with this traumatic incident. In the third section of the piece, he identifies Lemon as the friend for whom Rat Kiley wrote his love letter and then describes in detail how he was blown to pieces by a booby-trapped mortar round underneath a giant tree while tossing smoke grenades with Rat. Used to help explicate Kiley's letter writing, the description thus becomes a fragment that chronologically reverses antecedent and consequence, as if it were an afterthought to the letter instead of its cause. While Rat cannot let Lemon's death be the end of the story, the narrator Tim O'Brien cannot introduce it directly. Yet this traumatic incident is the origin of all the storytelling in “War Story.” Tim O'Brien refers to Lemon in seven of the fifteen sections that make up the work, and he describes his death in four of them. Its continual intrusion suggests an ineffaceable trauma, so that “War Story” epitomizes in miniature the recurrence of traumatization characteristic of Things as a whole. The first of the descriptions is the longest and most detailed; the second, which repeats phrases from the first, is the briefest: “We crossed that river and marched west into the mountains. On the third day, Curt Lemon stepped on a booby-trapped 105 round. He was playing catch with Rat Kiley, laughing, and then he was dead. The trees were thick; it took nearly an hour to cut an LZ for the dustoff” (85). This account is followed immediately by the baby water buffalo incident, which it motivates; but the battle in the mountains also recalls Mitchell Sanders's story, which is told the night before such a battle, and the cross-references suggest a complex of traumatization that has been fragmented throughout “War Story.”

The third description of Lemon's death follows the briefest of the fifteen sections in “War Story,” a typical combination of metafictional comment with example:

Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn't hit you until 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?

(88-89)

The paragraph itself is a “true war story,” of course, even though the episode occurs two decades after the war is over in the domestic security of a couple's bedroom. But here it is impossible to distinguish between story and traumatic intrusion: Whatever is being reimagined resists even the narrator's attempt at thematic closure, and it cannot be explained, even to his wife. It has no point at which it can be resolved, but it is also pointless to bother her with it—she probably wouldn't be able to listen. (As Jonathan Shay notes, “normal adults do not want to hear trauma narratives” [193].) The third death of Curt Lemon follows immediately in the next section. The narrator introduces it as another example of a “pointless” story, but does so in a way that suggests an unwelcome traumatic intrusion: “This one wakes me up” (89). In this account, Tim O'Brien is involved directly with Lemon's death, for he has to gather the pieces of body left in the trees after the booby trap has detonated, and he uses the trope of memory so chillingly, so tangibly, that story and continued traumatization are indistinguishable: “I remember pieces of skin and something wet and yellow that must've been the intestines. The gore was horrible, and stays with me. But what wakes me up twenty years later is Dave Jensen singing ‘Lemon Tree’ as we threw down the parts” (89). The last sentence concludes this particular war story but not the nightmare, which now circles back to the dream that wakes him up “twenty years later” in bed with his wife and thus epitomizes the endless recirculation and ineffability of trauma, as well as its asynchronous fragmentation.

“Twenty years later, I can still see the sunlight on Lemon's face” begins the narrator's last description of the death. The “sunlight” will be among the subjects used to illustrate his final assertion that “a true war story is never about war” (cited above). Here, it recalls the moment when the doomed soldier stepped beyond the shade of the trees where he and Rat Kiley were fooling around and onto the booby trap, so that “when his foot touched down, in that instant, he must've thought it was the sunlight that was killing him.” “[I]f I could ever get the story right,” the witness/survivor/narrator continues, “how the sun seemed to gather around him and pick him up and lift him high into a tree, … then you would believe the last thing Curt Lemon believed, which for him must've been the final truth” (90). Here the “right story” would be literally untrue, yet we would believe in it. It might also efface all visible traces of trauma by eliminating the presence of an observer who would watch Curt Lemon die, and then survive to tell about it, dream about it, write a letter about it, and commit atrocities in its name. But the desire to get the story “right” after four accounts of Lemon's death shows that trauma, however displaced, can never be buried: “You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it.” As Tobey Herzog notes (1997: 29-30), Lemon's obliteration is based on the death of the author's friend Chip Merricks, who stepped on a mine in Pinkville, a traumatic incident that was casually and ironically recorded in Chapter IX of Combat Zone. It is also briefly alluded to in “The Vietnam in Me” as the author revisits the site of the fatal ambush. Thus the actual event, nearly irrecoverable for O'Brien and rendered through the register of emotional constriction in both of the autobiographical memoirs, is here replaced and supplemented by a fiction, rendered from four different perspectives, that is more “true” than what actually happened yet remains without closure—and is thus available for additional posttraumatic refabrication. Whether as author or as narrator of “War Story,” Tim O'Brien can't get over whatever it was that happened to Chip Merricks or to Curt Lemon.

OTHER REFABRICATIONS OF TRAUMA

Ultimately, the imagined listener is right about the narrator's obsessiveness, wrong about urging him to put the war behind him. Although everything is made up—including Tim O'Brien and the listener herself—the author of The Things They Carried has created a true story that shows how trauma may be recycled but can never be closed. “How to Tell a True War Story” is O'Brien's most elaborate metafiction of traumatization, but other sections of the work handle the subject with comparable artistry. Besides Lemon's death, the narrator Tim O'Brien witnesses the deaths of Ted Lavender, Kiowa, and an enemy soldier, as well as several other Vietnamese. Lavender's death is represented in “The Things They Carried,” Kiowa's in “Speaking of Courage” and “In the Field,” and the Vietnamese soldier's in “Ambush.” Traumatic episodes all, their representations are fittingly marked by fragmentation, violation of chronology, instrusiveness, and repetition.

The award-winning title story is a brilliantly organized epitome of O'Brien's representation of the war in Combat Zone and Cacciato. Written in thirteen sections, it can be seen as a master catalog of combat trauma that combines and refabricates three lists from the earlier novel: the roll call of the dead and living that introduces Cacciato, the seriatim characterization of each of the squad members in Chapter 22 (“Who They Were, or Claimed to Be”), and the itemization of ignorance that made Viet Nam and the Vietnamese bewilderingly alien to the GIs who searched and destroyed them (Chapter 39, “The Things They Didn't Know”). The physical, psychological, and moral burdens and the objects of destruction, survival, pleasure, and hope carried by Alpha Company are categorized, section by section, until the war has been established as a site of obscene violence and almost unbearable trauma.

Within the larger catalog, O'Brien weaves two discrete narratives. The first appears only in the middle section, where Lee Strunk goes down an enemy tunnel for what seems to his waiting comrades an eternity and then emerges “right out of the grave,” according to Rat Kiley, “grinning, filthy but alive,” to hear his friends make “jokes about rising from the dead.” This story rewrites the tragic tunnel narratives of Cacciato as rough comedy, but we are told that at the moment when Strunk “made [a] high happy moaning sound,” Ted Lavender “was shot in the head on his way back from peeing. … There was a swollen black bruise under his left eye. The cheekbone was gone. Oh shit, Rat Kiley said, the guy's dead. The guy's dead, he kept saying, which seemed profound—the guy's dead. I mean really” (13).

Lavender's killing interrupts and completely displaces Strunk's survival, a discrete and coherent episode that is buried and isolated in the middle of the narrative. By contrast, the unexpected death reappears throughout the piece from beginning to end. Within the catalog of things carried by necessity, for example, we are told that “Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April” and that “until he was shot, [he] carried six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity” (4). And this catalog ends as a parody of an army field issue description with ironic practical application: “Because the nights were cold, and because the monsoons were wet, each [soldier] carried a green plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat or groundsheet or makeshift tent. With its quilted liner, the poncho weighed almost two pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that took him away” (5). These repeated fragments register the persistence of Lavender's death, while their mechanical assignment to the appropriate list suggests emotional constriction.

But Lavender's death also intrudes more dramatically into Things, which combines the omniscient narration of lists with the imaginative meditations of Alpha Company's commanding lieutenant, Jimmy Cross, an ironic Christ figure who survives Vietnam and whose men suffer while following him. Cross carries the burden of responsibility for his men, but he also carries ten ounces of letters, two photographs, and a good luck pebble from his virginal girlfriend Martha as well as memories, hopes, and fears about her love for him. Like Paul Berlin or O'Brien himself, Cross is a reluctant warrior, and he dreams of Martha while trying to carry out his duties. He blames his own negligence for Lavender's death, and his hopeless love for his negligence. Alone in his foxhole the night after Lavender is shot, Cross breaks down and cries: “In part, he was grieving for Ted Lavender, but mostly it was for Martha, and for himself, … because he realized she did not love him and never would” (17).

Like Cacciato, the piece ends with the sacrifice of dreams for duties, but the lieutenant's ironic immolation of his keepsakes will do nothing to efface his guilt:

On the morning after Ted Lavender died, First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross crouched at the bottom of his foxhole and burned Martha's letters. Then he burned the two photographs. …

He realized it was only a gesture. Stupid, he thought. Sentimental, too, but mostly just stupid.

Lavender was dead. You couldn't burn the blame.

(22)

Nor can he efface his love for Martha, since “the letters were in his head,” or the realization that “she wasn't involved. She signed the letters Love, but it wasn't love, and all the fine lines and technicalities did not matter” (23). Turning away from both his griefs, he resolves at the end of the story to dedicate the one and sacrifice the other to command responsibility: “He would dispense with love; it was not now a factor. And if anyone quarreled or complained, he would simply tighten his lips and arrange his shoulders in the correct command posture. He might give a curt little nod. Or he might not. He might just shrug and say, Carry on, then they would saddle up and form into a column and move out toward the villages west of Than Khe” (25). But the conclusiveness of this resolution is belied by the play-acting going on inside his imagination, which tries to cover up or replace the death of Lavender and the loss of Martha.

The final reference in Things carries us back to other vain attempts to close off the trauma of Lavender's death. Kiowa notes so repetitiously that the dead man went down “like cement” that his fixation irritates Norman Bowker, who makes a crude joke of the death (“A pisser, you know? Still zipping himself up. Zapped while zipping” [17]); waiting for the dustoff, his comrades smoke the rest of the dead man's dope. The most decisive reaction displaces traumatization with futilely murderous devastation: “When the dustoff arrived, they carried Lavender aboard. Afterward they burned Than Khe. They marched until dusk, then dug their holes, and that night Kiowa kept explaining how you had to be there, how fast it was, how the poor guy just dropped like so much concrete. Boom-down, he said. Like cement” (8). The constriction of the atrocity is followed so closely by the reintrusion of Lavender's death that traumatization seems to be feeding on itself. And a more detailed repetition of the sequence reintrudes later, suggesting the recurrence of what has been repressed in the narrative: “After the chopper took Lavender away, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross led his men into the village of Than Khe. 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, and then at dusk, while Kiowa explained how Lavender died, Lieutenant Cross found himself trembling” (16). Cross's trembling initiates the little breakdown noted above; and his tears for Lavender, Martha, and himself show the futility of violence as a remedy for traumatization.

In its original form, “The Things They Carried” appeared as a short story in Esquire in 1986, and O'Brien's masterpiece has been frequently reprinted in anthologies. By itself, the piece is not explicitly a posttraumatic narrative, and it lacks the presence of the character Tim O'Brien as participant, observer, storyteller, or audience. In Things, however, O'Brien adds a first-person postscript that establishes the relationship between traumatization and storytelling which characterizes the book as a whole. This second piece in the volume tells of Lieutenant Cross's postwar visit to the Massachusetts home of the writer Tim O'Brien. Not only does it introduce the figure who will be the chief character in the rest of Things, but it also introduces the subject of unresolved trauma and the trope of memory:

Spread out across the kitchen table were maybe a hundred old photographs. There were pictures of Rat Kiley and Kiowa and Mitchell Sanders, all of us, the faces incredibly soft and young. At one point, I remember [emphasis added], we paused over a snapshot of Ted Lavender, and after a while Jimmy rubbed his eyes and said he'd never forgiven himself for Lavender's death. It was something that would never go away, he said quietly, and I nodded and told him I felt the same about certain things.

(29)

They reminisce about happier memories, and Cross goes on to reveal that he met Martha in 1979, when he discovered that she was an unmarried Lutheran missionary, and impulsively revealed his undiminished love for her. Gently but decisively rejected, he explains that he now carries a copy of the photo of her that he had burned in Viet Nam, her farewell gift to him at the end of their final meeting. As his former lieutenant's visit ends, Tim O'Brien gets his approval to write a story about what they have discussed, and Cross jokes about getting Martha back—“Maybe she'll read it and come begging”—and being portrayed positively—“Make me out to be a good guy, okay? Brave and handsome, all that stuff. Best platoon leader ever” (31).

O'Brien's brief narrative, which is titled “Love,” thus functions as the inspiration for the longer narrative that precedes it, a truer story than the heroic melodrama requested by its protagonist. Viewed as a unit, the two works become a metafiction representing both the persistence of trauma—Cross is still bothered by Lavender's death and its connection to his unrequited love for Martha—and the reformulation of trauma into a fiction that transcends and transforms it: Jimmy Cross's double burden becomes the foundation and groundwork of a fiction masterpiece. “Love” is also O'Brien's first example in Things of a true war story that isn't about war, as its title indicates. Its title identifies as well the thematic significance of Jimmy Cross's traumatization in “The Things They Carried”: the conflict between loving his men and loving Martha and the way in which love, like war, can be unbearable.

Although Lavender's death is recuperated fictionally as Jimmy Cross's trauma, the deaths of Kiowa and the enemy soldier, which are narrated in “Speaking of Courage” and “The Man I Killed,” respectively, continue to haunt the narrator. The Native American, who perished during a horrendous night mortar attack, was his best friend in the war; the unnamed North Vietnamese was killed by Tim O'Brien himself. Like Ted Lavender's, both deaths appear as intrusive fragments that violate chronology. They persist through several different versions, just as Curt Lemon's death is narrated four times in “How to Tell a True War Story.” Moreover, like Jimmy Cross's obsession with Lavender and Martha, they are not simply past events but remain present in the narrator's imagination.

Like Lavender's death, both traumas are also reconfigured metafictionally in The Things They Carried. In contrast to the relatively simple sequence of war story followed by its putative origin “many years after the war” (“Love” 29), however, the traumatic origins of “Speaking of Courage” and “The Man I Killed” are revealed only indirectly and evasively. Their complex representation reflects their deeper level of shock: The narrator cannot get over Kiowa's death or his own killing of the young soldier, whereas Ted Lavender is Jimmy Cross's burden, and “The Things They Carried” a finely polished transformation of trauma into a coherent fiction by a former soldier who has become a writer.

The narrator identifies himself also as a trauma survivor in “Love,” where he tells Jimmy Cross of his own haunting by unnamed things that cannot be forgotten. Only in the penultimate list of memories in “Spin” does Tim O'Brien's traumatization begin to emerge, however, and only as a disconnected series of fragments that intrudes into and concludes a list of remembered images from the war:

A red clay trail outside the village of My Khe.

A hand grenade.

A slim, dead, dainty young man of about twenty.

Kiowa saying, “No choice, Tim. What else could you do?”

Kiowa saying, “Right?”

Kiowa saying, “Talk to me.”

(40)

The full story will finally come out ten pieces later, only to be further explained and justified in “Ambush” and “Good Form.” While the intrusive memory focuses on the man he killed, Tim O'Brien's fixation on Kiowa's presence as comforter significantly ties together this earlier trauma with his friend's horrible death, as if the latter itself were a terrible memory only beginning to emerge from repression.

Like the stories, therefore, the narrator's traumatization only gradually and fragmentarily defines itself. The reference in “Love” to experiences that will not go away is more fully realized in “The Man I Killed,” the twelfth of the twenty-two sections of Things. Occupying the center of the book, it begins suddenly as an image of the narrator's victim that goes on for nearly a full page, an anatomy that begins with the head—“His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole”—and ends at his feet—“His rubber sandals had been blown off. One lay beside him, the other a few meters up the trail” (139). Gradually the image becomes an obituary as the narrator imagines the background and circumstances that have led the “slim young man” to his death on a trail outside My Khe. And within another page the characterization has become a memory, a narrative, and a scene of trauma as the narrator squats next to the body while Azar exults (“you laid him out like Shredded fuckin' Wheat. … Rice Krispies, you know?” [140]) and then Kiowa tries to talk his friend out of his shock: “Nothing anybody could do. Come on, Tim, stop staring (141). … You feel terrible, I know that (142). … Talk to me” (144). These three final words end “The Man I Killed,” but not the trauma, which is presented not as an episode in the past but as an intrusive memory haunting the narrator. Talking only to himself, he never responds to Kiowa; therefore, although he is able to recover this traumatic experience (unlike his part in Kiowa's own death, as we shall see), it remains unexpressed to others. As studies of PTSD survivors have revealed (Shay 115-19), destroying the enemy can be as terrible an experience as the death of one's comrades, but ideological and social codes make the public expression of grief in such cases more difficult. O'Brien's narrator tries to resolve his feelings both by re-creating the young Vietnamese soldier in his own image, especially his sense of obligation to others, and by imagining that his victim's death will find some redemption: “He was not a Communist. He was a citizen and a soldier. … He was not a fighter. … He liked books. … Beyond anything else, he was afraid of disgracing himself, and therefore his family and village. … He knew he would fall dead and wake up in the stories of his village and people” (140-44 passim). But however much the narrator refigures his own distress, it can neither be laid to rest nor communicated to others.

The persistent cover-up of trauma is also dramatized in “Ambush,” right after “The Man I Killed” has dramatically re-created the incident alluded to in the fragments of “Spin.” When his daughter was nine years old, the narrator begins, she questioned his obsession with Vietnam: “You keep writing these war stories … so I guess you must've killed somebody” (147). “Of course not,” he answered her then but now relates for the third time the account of his killing a young enemy soldier with a grenade as the latter passed by his ambush position on a trail near My Khe. This is a matter-of-fact, third-person account that rewrites the fragments of “Spin” and the direct traumatization of “The Man I Killed” as a coherent, cause-and-effect narrative. At the end, however, Tim O'Brien's continued psychic wound is made apparent as he imagines what might have happened if he had simply let his victim pass:

Even now I haven't finished sorting it out. Sometimes I forgive myself, other times I don't. In the ordinary hours of life I try not to dwell on it, but now and then, when I'm reading a newspaper or just sitting alone in a room, I'll look up and see the young man coming out of the morning fog. I'll watch him walk toward me, his shoulders slightly stooped, his head cocked to the side, and he'll pass within a few yards of me and suddenly smile at some secret thought and then continue up the trail to where it bends back into the fog.

(149-50)

The almost journalistic account of his kill is thus undercut by the persistent trauma that concludes “Ambush,” and both seem to make the response to his daughter a lie intended to protect her innocence and his repression of the memory.

As we have noted, however, in “Good Form” Tim O'Brien insists that everything in Things has been invented and then presents a fourth version of the incident at My Khe, a confession that he was present but did not kill the young man. “But listen”—he warns us after finishing this account—“even that story is made up” (203). Finally, we seem to reach an explanation that would respond both to the kindly listener, who would like the narrator to stop writing war stories, and to his daughter, who wonders why he continues to do so: He writes stories not to recall past experiences but to make them up, to overcome the emotional constriction of the past. Stories, he asserts, can “make things present” so that “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” (204). In this account, writing transforms Vietnam into morally meaningful fiction through fictional traumatization; but it also functions as therapy for a still-unidentified guilt connected with things that the narrator couldn't carry at the time they occurred. We might associate his grief with O'Brien's own feelings that if he had been brave enough, he would never have even been in the war. But that would be to mistake Tim O'Brien for the author and to analyze a state of mind that the story deliberately leaves undefinable. Just as the various versions of “The Man I Killed” deny an authoritative account, the narrator's feelings resist the closure of a final resolution. In fiction, he concludes in “Good Form,” his daughter Kathleen can ask,

“Daddy, tell the truth … did you ever kill anybody?” And I can say, honestly, “Of course not.”

Or I can say, honestly, “Yes.”

(204)

Storytelling thus becomes a vehicle for the endless reproduction of trauma, revealing and covering it up, revising what has happened or inventing what has not. The author of “Good Form” has no daughter, of course; but that everything in the story and in Things as a whole is made up means that O'Brien is representing how guilt and grief are endlessly recycled rather than simply recalling his own.

Such recirculation is also fashioned with authentic complexity in the case of Kiowa's death. The narrator's friend is buried alive within a communal privy where the platoon has camped at night when it is heavily mortared during a rainstorm. Kiowa's death is variously described and revised in four of the pieces in Things: “Speaking of Courage,” a former comrade's reminiscence of the horror as he drives aimlessly about his hometown's lake on the Fourth of July years after his service in Viet Nam; the appended “Notes,” in which Tim O'Brien explains how he came to write the story; the following account, “In the Field,” which narrates the platoon's recovery of the body from the mud and filth in which it was submerged; and “Field Trip,” a description of the narrator's return to the site of Kiowa's death in Viet Nam twenty years after it occurred. Alternately moving, horrifying, and sardonic, O'Brien's sequence of episodes powerfully examines the persistence of trauma and the attempt to put it to rest.

“Speaking of Courage” is a revision of an earlier, prize-winning story of the same title that O'Brien published in 1976. That first version is an appendage to Cacciato, for the soldier who drives aimlessly around his hometown's lake, regretting his failure to be a hero by rescuing Frenchie Tucker from a VC tunnel, is Paul Berlin. Details of the setting are taken directly from O'Brien's hometown, Worthington, Minnesota; moreover, Berlin's circuit replicates the description in Combat Zone of O'Brien's own desultory drives around town during the summer before his induction into the army (25). Although its counterpart won an O. Henry Prize, its later refabrication in Things is an even stronger work, another of O'Brien's masterpieces. Here, the unhappy veteran is Norman Bowker, traumatized by his failure to rescue Kiowa from his terrible fate, alienated from the town and his previous civilian life, unable to talk with his father about almost winning the Silver Star by saving his friend's life. The first sentence sums up Norman's condition with eloquent understatement that could be applied to countless other traumatized veterans: “The war was over and there was no place in particular to go” (157). The narrative bleakly mirrors the trauma survivor's isolation and anomie as he circles the lake twelve times, recalling his failure to pull Kiowa out of the mud and excrement along the Song Tra Bong while distantly observing the minutiae of small-town life. The persistence of the traumatic memory is captured by the meaningless circularity of his drive, briefly interrupted at an A&W Root Beer stand, before he immerses himself in the lake and watches the town's Independence Day fireworks display. Unable either to let go of Kiowa or to feel at home, Bowker narrates his war story as an experience that he would like to tell his father if the latter were not at home watching a baseball game on TV and if his son did not feel so guilty and ashamed: “[H]e would have talked about the medal he did not win and why he did not win it. … ‘So tell me,’ his father would have said” (161). His untold tale becomes for him an epitome of the true story of Vietnam, a revelation that he feels would fall on deaf ears: “The town could not talk, and would not listen. ‘How'd you like to hear about the war?’ he might have asked, but the place could only blink and shrug. It had no memory, therefore no guilt. … It was a brisk, polite town. It did not know shit about shit, and did not care to know” (163). The only willing listener is the voice he hears on the A&W squawk box, his only message an order for a Mama Burger and fries. Just before he stops at Sunset Park and stands in the lake, he finally arrives at a dark enlightenment:

There was nothing to say.

He could not talk about it and never would. The evening was smooth and warm.

If it had been possible, which it wasn't, he would have explained how his friend Kiowa slipped away that night beneath the dark swampy field. He was folded in with the war; he was part of the waste.

(172)

The final personal pronoun is ambiguous, of course, so that the attempt to finally bury Kiowa is not only unredemptive but suggests that Bowker has died in some sense as well.

The “Notes” that follow this haunting portrayal of persistent trauma are the closest O'Brien comes to identifying himself directly with the narrator of The Things They Carried, who extends Bowker's guilt to his own. Identifying himself as the author of Going After Cacciato, Tim O'Brien tells us that the original version of “Speaking of Courage” was written in 1975 “at the suggestion of Norman Bowker, who three years later hanged himself in the locker room of a YMCA in his hometown in central Iowa” (177). Like “Love,” it purports to present the materials from which the preceding story was constructed. Thus, Norman Bowker's long letter to the narrator begins with the confession that “there's no place to go. Not just in this lousy little town. In general. My life, I mean. It's almost like I got killed over in Nam … Hard to describe. That night when Kiowa got wasted, I sort of sank down into the sewage with him … Feels like I'm still in deep shit” (177-78) [ellipses in the original]. Written originally to give a voice to his former comrade's traumatization, the story disappointed its author as an unfunctional part of the novel—“Going After Cacciato was a war story; ‘Speaking of Courage’ was a postwar story” (181)—and was published as a short story, we are told. But beyond its formal flaws, the substitution of Paul Berlin for Bowker and the elimination of the terrible night in Viet Nam left it morally flawed as well: “[S]omething about the story had frightened me—I was afraid to speak directly, afraid to remember—and in the end the piece had been ruined by a failure to tell the full and exact truth about our night in the shit field,” the narrator confesses to us. Upon its publication, Bowker's reaction, too, was a reproach: “‘It's not terrible,’ he wrote me, ‘but you left out Vietnam. Where's Kiowa? Where's the shit?’”—and “eight months later he hanged himself” (181).

Unlike “Love,” this account of how a preceding story was written involves the narrator directly in the consequences of traumatization: Unable or unwilling to represent his own experience, he effaces his former comrade's story. “Speaking of Courage” (1976) becomes a “false war story,” and Tim O'Brien's failure to refigure the trauma fictionally so that it may be relieved is at least partly responsible for Norman Bowker's final despair. As a result, the narrator is so implicated in Bowker's agony that he identifies the rewritten story as an act of memorialization and deferred obligation: “Now, a decade after his death, I'm hoping that ‘Speaking of Courage’ makes good on Norman Bowker's silence. And I hope it's a better story” (181).

Noting how strongly he had been moved by Bowker's original letter, Tim O'Brien states that “I did not look on my work as therapy, and still don't” (179). In revising the earlier story, however, the author of Things has represented it as a trebly therapeutic fiction. In finally giving voice to Bowker's repressed trauma, the narrator addresses his feelings of guilt for not doing it originally. But in addition, the end of “Notes” reveals that the new story allowed him to give voice to his own traumatization: “It was hard stuff to write. Kiowa, after all, had been a close friend, and for years I've avoided thinking about his death and my own complicity in it. Even here it's not easy. In the interests of truth, however, I want to make it clear that Norman Bowker was in no way responsible for what happened to Kiowa. Norman did not experience a failure of nerve that night. He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of the story is my own” (182). As Kaplan notes (1995: 192), the final sentence is ambiguous because of the narrator's peculiar fictional role as both writer and participant in his own scenarios: Has he simply made Bowker feel guilty for Kiowa's death, or does he feel guilty for Kiowa's death himself? If the former, Bowker would have revealed in the letter his failure to save his friend; if the latter, the narrator failed to pull Kiowa out of the slime. Of course, both Bowker and the narrator Tim O'Brien may feel guilty about Kiowa's death whether or not they could have saved him because soldiers frequently feel guilt and grief if their own survival of a comrade's death seems unfair or incomprehensible (Shay 69). In any case, Tim O'Brien's personal trauma—his “complicity” in Kiowa's fate—has either been refigured through Norman Bowker or remains something that cannot be told.

“In the Field,” the piece that follows “Notes,” raises the issue of responsibility and guilt again only to leave it unresolved. The story follows the platoon of eighteen soldiers on the morning after the mortar attack as they comb their excrement- and mud-infested night position for Kiowa's body. Formally, this narrative resembles “The Things They Carried” and “Speaking of Courage” in that the Tim O'Brien character is absent and the narration is relatively impersonal. But while those works were followed by metafictional accounts of their traumatic origins, “In the Field” simply extends the trauma of “Speaking of Courage” and “Notes.” As with the title story, omniscient narration alternates with an intimate third-person perspective as the point of view alternates from the activities of the platoon as a whole to the private meditations of Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and an unnamed younger soldier who are searching the flooded field by themselves. Both feel responsible for Kiowa's death: Although Cross carried out orders in pitching camp atop the communal waste field, he ignored the villagers' warnings and blames himself for the GI's death. The unnamed soldier feels guilty for switching on his flashlight to show Kiowa his girlfriend's picture just before the lethal mortar rounds hit the platoon. But even the normally sadistic Azar feels chastened. Once Kiowa's body has been pulled out of the slime, Azar sees his own jokes about the death (“[e]ating shit” [187], “one more redskin bites the dirt” [188]) as murderous: “[W]hen I saw the guy, it made me feel … sort of guilty almost, like if I'd kept my mouth shut none of it would've ever happened. Like it was my fault” (197).

Norman Bowker's response as he looks “out across the wet field” is closest to the truth, however: “Nobody's fault,” he said. “Everybody's” (197). As a result, trauma is at least temporarily relieved, not least because Kiowa's corpse undergoes a strange resurrection. His body, though hideously disfigured, is recovered by his comrades, a communal ritual that leaves them peculiarly satisfied: “For all of them it was a relief to have it finished. … They felt bad for Kiowa. But they also felt a kind of giddiness, a secret joy, because they were alive, and because even the rain was preferable to being sucked under a shit field, and because it was all a matter of luck and happenstance” (197).

And for the lieutenant and Kiowa's unnamed friend, too, the story ends with ironic absolution. The young soldier is searching for his girlfriend's picture, not his friend's body; after all, “Kiowa's dead” he tells the lieutenant (194), who then watches him continue his search, “as if something might finally be salvaged from all the waste,” and “silently wishe[s] the boy luck” (195). And when the young GI finally tries to confess his own culpability, the lieutenant “wasn't listening,” floating in the muck and meditating on everything that could be blamed “when a man died,” from “the war” to “an old man in Omaha who forgot to vote” (198-99). At the end of the piece, the letter of self-incrimination to Kiowa's father that Jimmy Cross has been revising throughout is replaced by a daydream of going golfing “back home in New Jersey”: “When the war was over, he thought, maybe then he would write a letter to Kiowa's father. Or maybe not. Maybe he would just take a couple of practice swings and knock the ball down the middle and pick up his clubs and walk off into the afternoon” (199). Perhaps it is the shit field itself, a symbolic paradigm of the ghastly enterprise of Vietnam, that is the final cause of Kiowa's death. O'Brien's ironic title, “In the Field,” modulates from a metonym for a battleground to a sense that everyone in the story is “In the Shit,” a morass so all-consuming that staying alive is all that matters.

Yet even after this ironic closure to Kiowa's death, O'Brien's fourth handling of the subject suggests that the narrator's own trauma remains unhealed by his writing. “Field Trip” begins, in fact, by alluding to the earlier episode: “A few months after completing ‘In the Field,’ I returned with my daughter to Vietnam, where we visited the site of Kiowa's death, and where I looked for signs of forgiveness or personal grace or whatever else the land might offer” (207). Although “Notes” hinted at Tim O'Brien's feeling some responsibility for Kiowa's death, his own role has been left unclear: Did he freeze when his friend was pulled beneath the slime, like Norman Bowker in “Speaking of Courage”? Is the young, unnamed soldier in “In the Field” a version of his guilt, as suggested by Mark Taylor (227-28), distorted beyond being recognized by the reader? In any case, the persistence of trauma is explicit in his meditations as he looks at the field of death:

This little field, I thought, had swallowed so much. My best friend. My pride. My belief in myself as a man of some small dignity and courage. Still, it was hard to find any real emotion. It simply wasn't there. After that long night in the rain, I'd seemed to grow cold inside, all the illusions gone, all the old ambitions and hopes for myself sucked away into the mud. Over the years that coldness had never entirely disappeared … somehow I blamed this place for what I had become, and I blamed it for taking away the person I had once been. For twenty years this field had embodied all the waste that was Vietnam, all the vulgarity and horror.

(210)

While a government interpreter waits with his ten-year-old daughter, bemused like Cowling's Melinda by the symptoms of her father's traumatization—“Sometimes you're pretty weird, aren't you?” she has observed earlier (209)—Tim O'Brien wades into the muck of the paddy, squats and then sits down in the slime at the place where “Mitchell Sanders had found Kiowa's rucksack.” There, he offers his friend's old hunting hatchet to the land beneath him.³ As “tiny bubbles broke along the surface” (an image associated with the disappearance of Kiowa's head in “Speaking of Courage” [168] and “In the Field” [193]), his attempt to “think of something decent to say” inevitably settles on the all-purpose GI mantra for the trauma of Vietnam: “‘Well,’ I finally managed, ‘There it is’” (212). This moving scene of expiation and memorialization culminates with the narrator's sense of personal catharsis: “The sun made me squint. Twenty years. A lot like yesterday, a lot like never. In a way, maybe, I'd gone under with Kiowa, and now after two decades I'd finally worked my way out. A hot afternoon, a bright August sun, and the war was over” (212). It also recapitulates but transcends Kiowa's immersion in the field and Norman Bowker's frustrated attempt to cleanse himself—or drown himself—in his hometown lake on the Fourth of July.

This apparent closure of trauma is qualified and decisively undercut by O'Brien, however. The narrator's exact role in Kiowa's death is uncertain, as if that were a story that he can never recount, despite his resolution in “Notes” to tell “the full and exact truth.” Within Things, “Field Trip” is followed by “The Ghost Soldiers” and “Night Life,” two grimly comic accounts of the narrator's wounding and Rat Kiley's self-mutilation in the war, respectively, which is not over for his imagination. And “Field Trip” itself includes an unresolved source of guilt and remorse. Tim O'Brien's personal ritual is witnessed not only by his daughter and his official guide but also by a farmer whose land was once taken over by the Americans but has now been restored to its communal purposes. Although Kiowa's hatchet has been buried, the narrator cannot so easily translate his personal peace into a wider redemption: “The man's face was dark and solemn. As we stared at each other, neither of us moving, I felt something go shut in my heart while something else swung open. Briefly, I wondered if the old man might walk over to exchange a few war stories, but instead he picked up a shovel and raised it over his head and held it there for a time, grimly, like a flag, then he brought the shovel down and said something to his friend and began digging into the hard, dry ground” (212). The narrator, an intruder in peace as in war, reacts immediately: “I stood up and waded out of the water” (212). His ten-year-old daughter responds instinctively to what she has seen, and the story ends with questions about its apparent resolution:

When we reached the jeep, Kathleen turned and glanced out at the field.

“That old man,” she said, “is he mad at you or something?”

“I hope not.”

“He looks mad.”

“No,” I said. “All that's finished.”

(213)

This reassurance must depend on the farmer's attitude, of course, which the narrator cannot interpret but would prefer not to think about. Like the barely registered destruction of Than Khe after the death of Ted Lavender or Rat Kiley's enthusiasm about how Curt Lemon “liked testing himself, just man against gook” (75), the trauma of Vietnam involves more than the death of American comrades for the narrator—those are simply the stories he can tell best.

As noted above, “Field Trip” is immediately preceded by “Good Form,” which reveals that “almost everything” (203) in the book has been invented. This reminder also calls into question the apparent personal recovery dramatized in the subsequent piece. Its soul-baring is so convincing that “Field Trip” seems an authentic personal experience rather than the self-confessed fiction of everything that appears before it; yet we can only believe in its authenticity if we believe in the “happening-truth” of the preceding fictions concerning Kiowa. We are left, therefore, with a series of episodes that represents an attempt to write about an experience that never happened as it is described. Yet by inventing a narrator who makes up traumatic experiences and recoveries, O'Brien paradoxically represents the ineffability of such experiences, what Kali Tal (1996) has called “the impossibility of recreating the event for the reader” (121). Whatever the protagonist of The Things They Carried has experienced can never be fully represented through writing—and that is why he can never stop writing about it.

“THE LIVES OF THE DEAD”: BRINGING THEM BACK ALIVE

The Things They Carried ends with “The Lives of the Dead,” an account of how the narrator became a professional writer. Although published as an independent story in the January 1989 issue of Esquire, the piece is a deliberate conclusion to the book, incorporating and dramatizing once more what Things has exemplified about true war stories and their relationship to traumatic experiences. Beginning with the simple assertion that “stories can save us,” this final fiction resurrects Ted Lavender, Kiowa, Curt Lemon, “an old man sprawled beside a pigpen, and several others whose bodies I once lifted and dumped into a truck. They're all dead. But in a story,” the narrator's introduction continues, “the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world” (255). Combining the tropes of memory and storytelling, “Lives” [“The Lives of the Dead”] brings back the war dead in brief episodes that alternate with the narrator's account of his love for his grade-school classmate Linda, their first and only date, her death from brain cancer at the age of nine, and his dreaming her alive thereafter. By combining Vietnam and a love story, soldiers and nine-year-olds, “The Lives of the Dead” transcends the war and exemplifies the narrator's earlier insistence that “a true war story is never about war” (91).

The paradox of the title identifies its real subject, a central concern of O'Brien's fifth book as a whole: the ways survivors carry the dead with them through the rest of their lives. “The Lives of the Dead” is filled with descriptions of corpses: an old Vietnamese farmer killed by an American air strike on an unfriendly village; Ted Lavender; The Man Who Never Was, a dead body dropped along the French coast to deceive the Nazis about the D-Day landings in a movie that Timmy and Linda saw on their one date; Linda's body in her funeral home casket, “bloated,” the skin “at her cheeks … stretched out tight like the rubber skin on a balloon just before it pops open” (270); twenty-seven “enemy KIAs” [enemy soldiers killed in action] dumped into a truck by Tim O'Brien and Mitchell Sanders after their battle in the mountains—all “badly bloated … clothing … stretched tight like sausage skins … heavy … feet … bluish green and cold” (271). For Timmy, however, “It didn't seem real. A mistake, I thought. The girl lying in the white casket wasn't Linda. … I knew this was Linda, but even so I couldn't find much to recognize. … She looked dead. She looked heavy and totally dead” (270). And for Mitchell Sanders, gathering the remains of a great victory that he and the narrator have survived brings a comparably banal enlightenment:

At one point [he] looked at me and said, “Hey, man, I just realized something.”

“What?”

He wiped his eyes and spoke very quietly, as if awed by his own wisdom. “Death sucks,” he said.

(271)

The human imagination is unsatisfied with this trite truth, as Timmy's bewilderment and Sanders's tears for the enemy suggest, and O'Brien dramatizes various attempts to supplement or transmute the dead body throughout the story. “The Lives of the Dead” begins with a traumatic experience for the narrator, who cannot look at the decaying corpse of the old man who is “the only confirmed kill” (255) of Jimmy Cross's punitive air strike. A newcomer to the war, he is further appalled as his comrades shake the corpse's hand and then prop it up as the guest of honor at a macabre get-acquainted party that gradually turns “that awesome act of greeting the dead” into a ceremony: “They proposed toasts. They lifted their canteens and drank to the old man's family and ancestors, his many grandchildren, his newfound life after death. It was more than mockery. There was a formality to it, like a funeral without the sadness” (256-57). Kiowa comforts him later in the day, praising the courage of the narrator's refusal to participate, wishing that he had done the same but also reassuring him that “you're new here. You'll get used to it,” since he assumes that “this was your first look at a real body” (257). The necrology of the scene is not simply repulsive, however, as the narrator realizes. Underneath the GIs' ghoulish humor and postmortem sadism lies an unconscious awareness of the mortality that they share with the Vietnamese farmer and an attempt to imagine beyond it. In “Night Life,” the previous piece in Things, Rat Kiley has a nervous breakdown when he begins to see himself and his comrades as potential corpses, imagining them as a collection of organic body parts rather than as human beings. By contrast, here the narrator's comrades transform a corpse into a life to be celebrated beyond the “real body.” Their grotesquerie contrasts strikingly with the sterile funeral home where Timmy is left bewildered and unsatisfied by the reality of Linda's preserved body.

The resurrection of the dead pervades O'Brien's final work. Kiowa comes back here, after all, as the comforter at the end of this first episode. Things began with Ted Lavender's death, and it ends with his corpse waiting for a medevac but miraculously reanimated as Mitchell Sanders and the rest of the platoon conduct a dialogue with their comrade before sending him home: “‘There it is, my man, this chopper gonna take you up high and cool. Gonna relax you. Gonna alter your whole perspective on this sorry, sorry shit.’ … ‘Roger that,’ somebody said. ‘I'm ready to fly’” (261). The last we hear and see of Rat Kiley's dearest friend is not the obliteration of his body but the full account of his trick-or-treating in the Vietnamese countryside on Halloween, “almost stark naked, the story went, just boots and balls and an M-16. … To listen to the story, especially as Rat Kiley told it, you'd never know that Curt Lemon was dead. He was still out there in the dark, naked and painted up, trick-or-treating, sliding from hootch to hootch in that crazy white ghost mask” (268).

It is the resurrection of Linda, however, that has made all the others possible. Although Kiowa assumes that the Vietnamese farmer provides Tim O'Brien's first look at a corpse, he is wrong. “It sounds funny,” O'Brien's persona tells him, “but that poor old man, he reminds me of … [ellipsis in the original] I mean, there's this girl I used to know. I took her to the movies once. My first date” (257). “[T]hat's a bad date,” Kiowa understandably responds, ending the first section of “The Lives of the Dead.” Most of the rest is taken up with the narrator's memories of his love for Linda, their going off to see The Man Who Never Was with his parents as chaperones, the exposure of her fatal illness, her death, and his visit to the funeral home. As he recounts it, his life as a storyteller began when he imagined his love alive the day after Linda died, in “a pink dress and shiny black shoes,” all traces of her illness gone, “laughing and running up the empty street, kicking a big aluminum water bucket” (266). Timmy breaks down, knowing that she's dead, but Linda insists that “it doesn't matter” (267) and forces him to stop crying. Thereafter, Linda's death and his grief are replaced by dreaming her back to life and his subsequent career as an author: “She was dead. I understood that. After all, I'd seen her body, and yet even as a nine-year-old I had begun to practice the magic of stories. Some I just dreamed up. Others I wrote down—the scenes and dialogue. And at nighttime I'd slide into sleep knowing that Linda would be there waiting for me. Once, I remember, we went ice skating late at night, tracing loops and circles under yellow floodlights” (272). By asking what it's like to be dead, Timmy initially questions the truth of his own imagination, but Linda sets him straight: “‘Well, right now,’ she said, ‘I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like … [ellipsis in original] I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading’” (273).

According to this account, therefore, writing grows directly out of trauma but refashions it beyond the unreality of death. Like the rest of the dead, Linda comes back to life through the narrator's stories, but so does he as he examines a photograph of himself as a nine-year-old:

[T]here is no doubt that the Timmy smiling at the camera is the Tim I am now. … The human life is all one thing, like a blade tracing loops on ice: a little kid, a twenty-three-year-old infantry sergeant, a middle-aged writer knowing guilt and sorrow.

And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body—her life.

(265)

In saving her, therefore, he saves himself. Near the end of “The Lives of the Dead,” however, we are reminded that while stories can save lives, what is saved is itself a fiction: “I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, still dreaming Linda alive in exactly the same way. She's not the embodied Linda; she's mostly made up, with a new identity and a new name. … Her real name doesn't matter. She was nine years old. I loved her and then she died” (273). The facts are less important than the truth that the story has compelled us to believe. Employing the tropes of memory and storytelling for the last time as the book comes to an end, O'Brien uses them together not to represent the fact of death—even the dead are fictions in a true war story—but to save the lives of Linda and his other characters forever: “And yet right here, in the spell of memory and imagination, I can still see her as if through ice, as if I'm gazing into some other world, a place where there are no brain tumors and no funeral homes, where there are no bodies at all. I can see Kiowa, too, and Ted Lavender and Curt Lemon, and sometimes I can even see Timmy skating with Linda under the yellow flood-lights. I'm young and happy. I'll never die” (273). Ultimately, of course, by making us believe in the man who never was, fiction can create people who will never die.

O'Brien's great book has certainly done both, but it is O'Brien's persona, a fictional creation, not necessarily O'Brien himself, who seems to have saved his life through writing by the end of “The Lives of the Dead.” A survivor of trauma who has translated what he could not carry into true war stories, Tim O'Brien resembles the author's other protagonists in passing through fear, guilt, and grief to achieve his own separate peace. The narrator's ability to memorialize a terrible war so masterfully makes The Things They Carried O'Brien's most accomplished fiction, and his persona's ostensible resolution of his personal trauma also makes it the most redemptive. Yet Tim O'Brien's sense of well-being in The Things They Carried is also a function of his narrow characterization. Except for the relationships with his daughter and Linda, he has no life outside of writing; in fact, everything he does, says, or remembers in the book becomes part of its storytelling. Trauma is endlessly recirculated through the tropes of memory and storytelling or explicitly fabricated in multiple versions, never experienced directly by the fictional protagonist as it is in the three previous novels. Like Things, O'Brien's next book will be formidably metafictional, but its hero's inescapable, comprehensive, and endless traumatization will cost him his life, not enable him to save it.

Notes

1. “The Ghost Soldiers” appeared in Esquire in 1981 (March) and was reprinted in the 1982 O. Henry Award Prize Stories volume. “The Things They Carried” first appeared in the August 1986 Esquire and won the 1987 National Magazine Award in Fiction. “How to Tell a True War Story” (October 1987), “The Lives of the Dead” (January 1989), and “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” (July 1989) also appeared in Esquire, while four other sections of Things appeared first as short stories: “Speaking of Courage” (Granta, Winter 1989), “In the Field” (Gentleman's Quarterly, December 1989), “On the Rainy River” (Playboy, January 1990), and “Field Trip” (McCall's, August 1990). Six other shorter pieces in Harper's (March 1990) and Mānoa (Spring 1990) were to be slightly altered when they appeared shortly afterward in The Things They Carried. (For bibliographical details, see Calloway 1991 and 1993.)

2. In turn, O'Brien noted to Martin Naparsteck, “the Tim character” is “transformed again” into the character Norman Bowker (7). Here as elsewhere, O'Brien's self-revisions are at the center of his fiction making. The transformations of O'Brien into Norman Bowker (and Paul Berlin) in “Speaking of Courage” are discussed below.

3. As Calloway (1995) notes, the hunting hatchet in the original 1990 edition of the story is replaced by moccasins in the 1991 paperback editions (Penguin and Flamingo [U.K.]). Perhaps “burying the hatchet” was too flagrant a symbol for the narrator's attempted therapeutic gesture.