[In the following essay, Kaplan perceives The Things They Carried to be O'Brien's imaginative attempt to reveal and understand the uncertainties about the Vietnam War.]

Before the United States became militarily involved in defending the sovereignty of South Vietnam, it had to, as one historian recently put it, “invent” (Baritz 142-43) the country and the political issues at stake there. The Vietnam War was in many ways a wild and terrible work of fiction written by some dangerous and frightening storytellers. First the United States decided what constituted good and evil, right and wrong, civilized and uncivilized, freedom and oppression for Vietnam, according to American standards; then it traveled the long physical distance to Vietnam and attempted to make its own notions about these things clear to the Vietnamese people—ultimately by brute, technological force. For the U.S. military and government, the Vietnam that they had in effect invented became fact. For the soldiers that the government then sent there, however, the facts that their government had created about who was the enemy, what were the issues, and how the war was to be won were quickly overshadowed by a world of uncertainty. Ultimately, trying to stay alive long enough to return home in one piece was the only thing that made any sense to them. As David Halberstam puts it in his novel, One Very Hot Day, the only fact of which an American soldier in Vietnam could be certain was that “yes was no longer yes, no was no longer no, maybe was more certainly maybe” (127). Almost all of the literature on the war, both fictional and nonfictional, makes clear that the only certain thing during the Vietnam War was that nothing was certain. Philip Beidler has pointed out in an impressive study of the literature of that war that “most of the time in Vietnam, there were some things that seemed just too terrible and strange to be true and others that were just too terrible and true to be strange” (4).

The main question that Beidler's study raises is how, in light of the overwhelming ambiguity that characterized the Vietnam experience, could any sense or meaning be derived from what happened and, above all, how could this meaning, if it were found, be conveyed to those who had not experienced the war? The answer Beidler's book offers, as Beidler himself recently said at a conference on writing about the war, is that “words are all we have. In the hands of true artists … they may yet preserve us against the darkness” (Lomperis 87). Similarly, for the novelist Tim O'Brien, the language of fiction is the most accurate means for conveying, as Beidler so incisively puts it, “what happened (in Vietnam) … what might have happened, what could have happened, what should have happened, and maybe also what can be kept from happening or what can be made to happen” (87). If the experience of Vietnam and its accompanying sense of chaos and confusion can be shown at all, then for Tim O'Brien it will not be in the fictions created by politicians but in the stories told by writers of fiction.

One of Tim O'Brien's most important statements about the inherent problems of understanding and writing about the Vietnam experience appears in a chapter of his novel, Going After Cacciato, appropriately titled “The Things They Didn't Know.” The novel's protagonist, Paul Berlin, briefly interrupts his fantasy about chasing the deserter Cacciato, who is en route from Vietnam to Paris, to come to terms with the fact that although he is physically in Vietnam and fighting a war, his understanding of where he is and what he is doing there is light-years away. At the center of the chapter is a long catalogue of the things that Berlin and his comrades did not know about Vietnam, and the chapter closes with the statement that what “they” knew above all else were the “uncertainties never articulated in war stories” (319). In that chapter Tim O'Brien shows that recognizing and exploring the uncertainties about the war is perhaps the closest one can come to finding anything certain at all. Paul Berlin, in his fantasy about escaping the war and chasing Cacciato to Paris, is in fact attempting to confront and, as far as possible, understand the uncertainties of the Vietnam War through the prism of his imagination. Once inside his make-believe world, Berlin has the opportunity to explore all of the things that he did not know about the war: The elusive enemy suddenly becomes his partner in a long debate about the meaning of the war; he explores the mysterious tunnels of the Vietcong; one of the victims of the war becomes Berlin's tour guide as he and his fellow soldiers go after Cacciato; and, most important of all, Berlin is given a chance to test and ultimately reject his own thoughts of desertion by imagining how he would react to the desertion of another soldier.

In his most recent work of fiction,¹The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien takes the act of trying to reveal and understand the uncertainties about the war one step further, by looking at it through the imagination. He completely destroys the fine line dividing fact from fiction and tries to show, even more so than in Cacciato, that fiction (or the imagined world) can often be truer, especially in the case of Vietnam, than fact. In the first chapter, an almost documentary account of the items referred to in the book's title, O'Brien introduces the reader to some of the things, both imaginary and concrete, emotional and physical, that the average foot soldier had to carry through the jungles of Vietnam. All of the “things” are depicted in a style that is almost scientific in its precision. We are told how much each subject weighs, either psychologically or physically, and, in the case of artillery, we are even told how many ounces each round weighed:

As PFCs or Spec 4s, most of them were common grunts and carried the standard M-16 gas operated assault rifle. The weapon weighed 7.5 pounds, 8.2 pounds with its full 20-round magazine. Depending on numerous factors, such as topography and psychology, the rifleman carried anywhere from 12 to 20 magazines, usually in cloth bandoliers, adding on another 8.4 pounds at minimum, 14 pounds at maximum.

(Carried 7 [The Things They Carried])

Even the most insignificant details seem worth mentioning. One main character is not just from Oklahoma City but from “Oklahoma City, Oklahoma” (5), as if mentioning the state somehow makes the location more factual, more certain. More striking than this obsession with even the minutest detail, however, is the academic tone that at times makes the narrative sound like a government report. We find such transitional phrases as “for instance” (5) and “in addition” (7), and whole paragraphs are dominated by sentences that begin with “because” (5). These strengthen our impression that the narrator is striving, above all else, to convince us of the reality, of the concrete certainty, of the things they carried.

In the midst of this factuality and certainty, however, are signals that all the information in this opening chapter will not amount to much: that the certainties are merely there to conceal uncertainties and that the words following the frequent “becauses” do not provide an explanation of anything. We are told in the opening page that the most important thing that First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried were some letters from a girl he loved. The narrator, one of Cross's friends in the war and now a forty-three-year-old writer named Tim O'Brien, tells us that the girl did not love Cross, but that he constantly indulged in “hoping” and “pretending” (3) in an effort to turn her love into fact. We are also told “she was a virgin,” but this is immediately qualified by the statement that “he was almost sure” of this (3). On the next page, Cross becomes increasingly uncertain as he sits at “night and wonder(s) if Martha was a virgin” (4). Shortly after this, Cross wonders who had taken the pictures he now holds in his hands “because he knew she had boyfriends” (5), but we are never told how he “knew” this. At the end of the chapter, after one of Cross's men has died because Cross was too busy thinking of Martha, Cross sits at the bottom of his foxhole crying, not so much for the member of his platoon who has been killed “but mostly it was for Martha, and for himself, because she belonged to another world, and because she was … a poet and a virgin and uninvolved” (17).

This pattern of stating facts and then quickly calling them into question that is typical of Jimmy Cross's thoughts in these opening pages characterizes how the narrator portrays events throughout this book: the facts about an event are given; they then are quickly qualified or called into question; from this uncertainty emerges a new set of facts about the same subject that are again called into question—on and on, without end. O'Brien catalogues the weapons that the soldiers carried, down to their weight, thus making them seem important and their protective power real. However, several of these passages are introduced by the statement that some of these same weapons were also carried by the character Ted Lavendar; each of the four sections of the first chapter that tells us what he carried is introduced by a qualifying phrase that reveals something about which Lavendar himself was not at all certain when he was carrying his weapons: “Until he was shot …” (4, 7, 10).

Conveying the average soldier's sense of uncertainty about what actually happened in Vietnam by presenting the what-ifs and maybes as if they were facts, and then calling these facts back into question again, can be seen as a variation of the haunting phrase used so often by American soldiers to convey their own uncertainty about what happened in Vietnam: “there it is.” They used it to make the unspeakable and indescribable and the uncertain real and present for a fleeting moment. Similarly, O'Brien presents facts and stories that are only temporarily certain and real; the strange “balance” in Vietnam between “crazy and almost crazy” (20) always creeps back in and forces the mind that is remembering and retelling a story to remember and retell it one more time in a different form, adding different nuances, and then to tell it again one more time.

Storytelling in this book is something in which “the whole world is rearranged” (39) in an effort to get at the “full truth” (49) about events that themselves deny the possibility of arriving at something called the “full”, meaning certain and fixed, “truth.” By giving the reader facts and then calling those facts into question, by telling stories and then saying that those stories happened (147), and then that they did not happen (203), and then that they might have happened (204), O'Brien puts more emphasis in The Things They Carried on the question that he first posed in Going After Cacciato: how can a work of fiction become paradoxically more real than the events upon which it is based, and how can the confusing experiences of the average soldier in Vietnam be conveyed in such a way that they will acquire at least a momentary sense of certainty. In The Things They Carried, this question is raised even before the novel begins. The book opens with a reminder: “This is a work of fiction. Except for a few details regarding the author's own life, all the incidents, names, and characters are imaginary.” Two pages later we are told that “this book is lovingly dedicated to the men of Alpha Company, and in particular to Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa.” We discover only a few pages after this dedication that those six men are the novel's main characters.

These prefatory comments force us simultaneously to consider the unreal (the fictions that follow) as real because the book is dedicated to the characters who appear in it, and the “incidents, names, and characters” are unreal or “imaginary.” O'Brien informs us at one point that in telling these war stories he intends to get at the “full truth” (49) about them; yet from the outset he has shown us that the full truth as he sees it is in itself something ambiguous. Are these stories and the characters in them real or imaginary, or does the “truth” hover somewhere between the two? A closer look at the book's narrative structure reveals that O'Brien is incapable of answering the questions that he initially raises, because the very act of writing fiction about the war, of telling war stories, as he practices it in The Things They Carried, is determined by the nature of the Vietnam War and ultimately by life in general where “the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity” (88).

The emphasis on ambiguity behind O'Brien's narrative technique in The Things They Carried is thus similar to the pattern used by Joseph Conrad's narrator, Marlow, in Heart of Darkness, so incisively characterized by J. Hillis Miller as a lifting of veils to reveal a truth that is quickly obscured again by the dropping of a new veil (158). Over and over again, O'Brien tells us that we are reading “the full and exact truth” (181), and yet, as we make our way through this book and gradually find the same stories being retold with new facts and from a new perspective, we come to realize that there is no such thing as the full and exact truth. Instead, the only thing that can be determined at the end of the story is its own indeterminacy.

O'Brien calls telling stories in this manner “Good Form” in the title of one of the chapters of The Things They Carried: This is good form because “telling stories” like this “can make things present” (204). The stories in this book are not truer than the actual things that happened in Vietnam because they contain some higher, metaphysical truth: “True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstractions or analysis” (84). Rather, these stories are true because the characters and events within them are being given a new life each time they are told and retold. This approach to storytelling echoes Wolfgang Iser's theory of representation in his essay “Representation: A Performative Act”:

Whatever shape or form these various (philosophical or fictional) conceptualizations (of life) may have, their common denominator is the attempt to explain origins. In this respect they close off those very potentialities that literature holds open. Of course literature also springs from the same anthropological need, since it stages what is inaccessible, thus compensating for the impossibility of knowing what it is to be. But literature is not an explanation of origins; it is a staging of the constant deferment of explanation, which makes the origin explode into its multifariousness.

It is at this point that aesthetic semblance makes its full impact. Representation arises out of and thus entails the removal of difference, whose irremovability transforms representation into a performative act of staging something. This staging is almost infinitely variable, for in contrast to explanations, no single staging could ever remove difference and so explain origin. On the contrary, its very multiplicity facilitates an unending mirroring of what man is, because no mirrored manifestation can ever coincide with our actual being.

(245)

When we conceptualize life, we attempt to step outside ourselves and look at who we are. We constantly make new attempts to conceptualize our lives and uncover our true identities because looking at who we might be is as close as we can come to discovering who we actually are. Similarly, representing events in fiction is an attempt to understand them by detaching them from the “real world” and placing them in a world that is being staged. In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien desperately struggles to make his readers believe that what they are reading is true because he wants them to step outside their everyday reality and participate in the events that he is portraying: he wants us to believe in his stories to the point where we are virtually in the stories so that we might gain a more thorough understanding of, or feeling for, what is being portrayed in them. Representation as O'Brien practices it in this book is not a mimetic act but a “game,” as Iser also calls it in a more recent essay, “The Play of the Text,” a process of acting things out:

Now since the latter (the text) is fictional, it automatically invokes a convention-governed contract between author and reader indicating that the textual world is to be viewed not as reality but as if it were reality. And so whatever is repeated in the text is not meant to denote the world, but merely a world enacted. This may well repeat an identifiable reality, but it contains one all-important difference: what happens within it is relieved of the consequences inherent in the real world referred to. Hence in disclosing itself, fictionality signalizes that everything is only to be taken as if it were what it seems to be, to be taken—in other words—as play.

(251)

In The Things They Carried, representation includes staging what might have happened in Vietnam while simultaneously questioning the accuracy and credibility of the narrative act itself. The reader is thus made fully aware of being made a participant in a game, in a “performative act,” and thereby also is asked to become immediately involved in the incredibly frustrating act of trying to make sense of events that resist understanding. The reader is permitted to experience at first hand the uncertainty that characterized being in Vietnam. We are being forced to “believe” (79) that the only “certainty” was the “overwhelming ambiguity.”

This process is nowhere clearer than in a chapter appropriately called “How to Tell A True War Story.” O'Brien opens this chapter by telling us “THIS IS TRUE.” Then he takes us through a series of variations of the story about how Kurt Lemon stepped on a mine and was blown up into a tree. The only thing true or certain about the story, however, is that it is being constructed and then deconstructed and then reconstructed right in front of us. The reader is given six different versions of the death of Kurt Lemon, and each version is so discomforting that it is difficult to come up with a more accurate statement to describe his senseless death than “there it is.” Or as O'Brien puts it—“in the end, really there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe ‘Oh’” (84).

Before we learn in this chapter how Kurt Lemon was killed, we are told the “true” story that Rat Kiley apparently told to the character-narrator O'Brien about how Kiley wrote to Lemon's sister and “says he loved the guy. He says the guy was his best friend in the world” (76). Two months after writing the letter, Kiley has not heard from Lemon's sister, and so he writes her off as a “dumb cooze” (76). This is what happened according to Kiley, and O'Brien assures us that the story is “incredibly sad and true” (77). However, when Rat Kiley tells a story in another chapter we are warned that he

swore up and down to its truth, although in the end, I'll admit, that doesn't amount to much of a warranty. Among the men in Alpha Company, Rat had a reputation for exaggeration and overstatement, a compulsion to rev up the facts, and for most of us it was normal procedure to discount sixty or seventy percent of anything he had to say.

(101)

Rat Kiley is an unreliable narrator, and his facts are always distorted, but this does not affect storytelling truth as far as O'Brien is concerned. The passage above on Rat Kiley's credibility as a storyteller concludes: “It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite: he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt” (101). This summarizes O'Brien's often confusing narrative strategy in The Things They Carried: the facts about what actually happened, or whether anything happened at all, are not important. They cannot be important because they themselves are too uncertain, too lost in a world in which certainty had vanished somewhere between the “crazy and almost crazy.” The important thing is that any story about the war, any “true war story,” must “burn so hot” when it is told that it becomes alive for the listener-reader in the act of its telling.

In Rat Kiley's story about how he wrote to Kurt Lemon's sister, the details we are initially given are exaggerated to the point where, in keeping with O'Brien's fire metaphor, they begin to heat up. Kurt Lemon, we are told, “would always volunteer for stuff nobody else would volunteer for in a million years” (75). And once Lemon went fishing with a crate of hand grenades, “the funniest thing in world history … about twenty zillion dead gook fish” (76). But the story does not get so hot that it burns, it does not become so “incredibly sad and true,” as O'Brien puts it, until we find out at the story's close that, in Rat's own words, “I write this beautiful fuckin' letter, I slave over it, and what happens? The dumb cooze never writes back” (77). It is these words and not the facts that come before them that make the story true for O'Brien.

At the beginning of this chapter, O'Brien asks us several times to “Listen to Rat,” to listen how he says things more than to what he says. And of all of the words that stand out in his story, it is the word “cooze,” (which is repeated four times in two pages), that makes his story come alive for O'Brien. “You can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” (76). This is just one way that O'Brien gives for determining what constitutes a true war story. The unending list of possibilities includes reacting to a story with the ambiguous words “Oh” and “There it is.” Rat Kiley's use of “cooze” is another in the sequence of attempts to utter some truth about the Vietnam experience and, by extension, about war in general. There is no moral to be derived from this word such as war is obscene or corrupt: “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct” (76). There is simply the real and true fact that the closest thing to certainty and truth in a war story is a vague utterance, a punch at the darkness, an attempt to rip momentarily through the veil that repeatedly re-covers the reality and truth of what actually happened.

It is thus probably no coincidence that in the middle of this chapter on writing a true war story, O'Brien tells us that “Even now, at this instant,” Mitchell Sanders's “yo-yo” is the main thing he can remember from the short time encompassing Lemon's death (83). This object, associated with games and play, becomes a metaphor for the playful act of narration that O'Brien practices in this book, a game that he plays by necessity. The only way to tell a true war story, according to O'Brien, is to keep telling it “one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth” (91), which ultimately is impossible because the real truth, the full truth, as the events themselves, are lost forever in “a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent” (88). You only “tell a true war story” “if you just keep on telling it” (91) because “absolute occurrence is irrelevant” (89). The truth, then, is clearly not something that can be distinguished or separated from the story itself, and the reality or non-reality of the story's events is not something that can be determined from a perspective outside of the story. As the critic Geoffrey Hartman says about poetry: “To keep a poem in mind is to keep it there, not to resolve it into available meanings” (274). Similarly, for O'Brien it is not the fact that a story happened that makes it true and worth remembering, anymore than the story itself can be said to contain a final truth. The important thing is that a story becomes so much a part of the present that “there is nothing to remember (while we are reading it) except the story” (40). This is why O'Brien's narrator is condemned, perhaps in a positive sense, to telling and then retelling numerous variations of the same story over and over and over again. This is also why he introduces each new version of a story with such comments as: “This one does it for me. I have told it before many times, many versions—but here is what actually happened” (85). What actually happened, the story's truth, can only become apparent for the fleeting moment in which it is being told; that truth will vanish back into the fog just as quickly as the events that occurred in Vietnam were sucked into a realm of uncertainty the moment they occurred.

O'Brien demonstrates nothing new about trying to tell war stories—that the “truths” they contain “are contradictory” (87), elusive, and thus indeterminate. Two hundred years ago, Goethe, as he tried to depict the senseless bloodshed during the allied invasion of revolutionary France, also reflected in his autobiographical essay Campaign in France on the same inevitable contradictions that arise when one speaks of what happened or might have happened in battle. Homer's Illiad is, of course, the ultimate statement on the contradictions inherent in war. However, what is new in O'Brien's approach in The Things They Carried is that he makes the axiom that in war “almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true” (87) the basis for the act of telling a war story.

The narrative strategy that O'Brien uses in this book to portray the uncertainty of what happened in Vietnam is not restricted to depicting war, and O'Brien does not limit it to the war alone. He concludes his book with a chapter titled “The Lives of the Dead” in which he moves from his experiences in Vietnam back to when he was nine years old. On the surface, the book's last chapter is about O'Brien's first date, his first love, a girl named Linda who died of a brain tumor a few months after he had taken her to see the movie, The Man Who Never Was. What this chapter is really about, however, as its title suggests, is how the dead (which also include people who may never have actually existed) can be given life in a work of fiction. In a story, O'Brien tells us, “memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness” (260). Like the man who never was in the film of that title, the people that never were except in memories and the imagination can become real or alive, if only for a moment, through the act of storytelling.

According to O'Brien, when you tell a story, really tell it, “you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself” (178). By doing this you are able to externalize “a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse” (179). However, the storyteller does not just escape from the events and people in a story by placing them on paper; as we have seen, the act of telling a given story is an on-going and never-ending process. By constantly involving and then re-involving the reader in the task of determining what “actually” happened in a given situation, in a story, and by forcing the reader to experience the impossibility of ever knowing with any certainty what actually happened, O'Brien liberates himself from the lonesome responsibility of remembering and trying to understand events. He also creates a community of individuals immersed in the act of experiencing the uncertainty or indeterminacy of all events, regardless of whether they occurred in Vietnam, in a small town in Minnesota (253-273), or somewhere in the reader's own life.

O'Brien thus saves himself, as he puts it in the last sentence of his book, from the fate of his character Norman Bowker who, in a chapter called “Speaking of Courage,” kills himself because he cannot find some lasting meaning in the horrible things he experienced in Vietnam. O'Brien saves himself by demonstrating in this book that the most important thing is to be able to recognize and accept that events have no fixed or final meaning and that the only meaning that events can have is one that emerges momentarily and then shifts and changes each time that the events come alive as they are remembered or portrayed.

The character Norman Bowker hangs himself in the locker room of the local YMCA after playing basketball with some friends (181), partially because he has a story locked up inside of himself that he feels he cannot tell because no one would want to hear it. It is the story of how he failed to save his friend, Kiowa,² from drowning in a field of human excrement: “A good war story, he thought, but it was not a war for war stories, not for talk of valor, and nobody in town wanted to know about the stink. They wanted good intentions and good deeds” (169). Bowker's dilemma is remarkably similar to that of Krebs in Hemingway's story “Soldier's Home”: “At first Krebs … did not want to talk about the war at all. Later he felt the need to talk but no one wanted to hear about it. His town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities” (Hemingway 145).

O'Brien, after his war, took on the task “of grabbing people by the shirt and explaining exactly what had happened to me” (179). He explains in The Things They Carried that it is impossible to know “exactly what had happened.” He wants us to know all of the things he/they/we did not know about Vietnam and will probably never know. He wants us to feel the sense of uncertainty that his character/narrator Tim O'Brien experiences twenty years after the war when he returns to the place where his friend Kiowa sank into a “field of shit” and tries to find “something meaningful and right” (212) to say but ultimately can only say, “well … there it is” (212). Each time we, the readers of The Things They Carried, return to Vietnam through O'Brien's labyrinth of stories, we become more and more aware that this statement is the closest we probably ever will come to knowing the “real truth,” the undying uncertainty of the Vietnam War.

Notes

1. The reviewers of this book are split on whether to call it a novel or a collection of short stories. In a recent interview, I asked Tim O'Brien what he felt was the most adequate designation. He said that The Things They Carried is neither a collection of stories nor a novel: he preferred to call it a work of fiction.

2. In the “Notes” to this chapter, O'Brien typically turns the whole story upside down “in the interest of truth” and tells us that Norman Bowker was not responsible for Kiowa's horrible death: “That part of the story is my own” (182). This phrase could be taken to mean that this part of the story is his own creation or that he was the one responsible for Kiowa's death.

Works Cited

Baritz, Loren. Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did. New York: Morrow, 1985.

Beidler, Philip. American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1982.

Halberstam, David. One Very Hot Day. New York: Houghton, 1967.

Hartman, Geoffrey. Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980.

Hemingway, Ernest. Short Stories. New York: Scribner, 1953.

Iser, Wolfgang. Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.

Lomperis, Timothy, “Reading the Wind”: The Literature of the Vietnam War: An Interpretative Critique. Durham: Duke UP, 1989.

Miller, J. Hillis. “Heart of Darkness Revisited.” Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Ross C. Murfin. New York: St. Martin's, 1989.

O'Brien, Tim. Going After Cacciato. New York: Dell, 1978.

———. The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton, 1990.