SOURCE: "Can Stories Save Us? Tim O'Brien and the Efficacy of the Text," in Critique, Vol. XXXVI, No. 1, Fall, 1994, pp. 2-15.

[In the essay below, Bonn discusses the significance of O'Brien 's persistent concerns about the relationship between fiction and experience throughout his writing career, highlighting "the effective potential of the stories" related in If I Die, Going after Cacciato, and The Things They Carried.]

Tim O'Brien tells us at the beginning of the final story in The Things They Carried, an installment of his literary exploration of the terrain of the Vietnam War, "But this too is true: Stories can save us." But the Vietnam veteran and prize-winning author has spent two decades in skirmishes with the question of just what kind of stories might be able to effect this rescue. O'Brien's Vietnam War works persistently examine the function of stories. Throughout a memoir and two novels he has investigated the polarity of fact and fiction, lived experience and texts, documentation and art, memory and imagination. In the creative space between these poles he locates "story" and "truth" as agents of reconciliation and education.

At times, O'Brien has expressed concern that the literature of the Vietnam War, a literature dominated by author-veterans, might be "held prisoner by the fact of [the authors'own] Vietnam experiences. The result is a closure of the imagination, predictability and melodrama, a narrowness of theme and an unwillingness to stretch the fictive possibilities." He argues that writers must be less concerned with the facts than with the truth and that "lying is a way one can get to a kind of truth … [not] a definitive truth, but at a kind of circling … hoping that a kind of clarity emerges, not a truth … issues can be clarified sometimes by telling lies." In his pursuit of artistic lying to clarify the truth O'Brien has written the two Vietnam War novels Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried. Going After Cacciato with its careful blend of picaresque fantasy, magic realism, and combat realism and The Things They Carried, a mix of war parables and highly self-conscious metafiction, are novels that could never be accused of failing to explore fictive possibilities.

But O'Brien's espoused belief that fiction has greater potential for conveying essential truth than does nonfiction is one he has arrived at by working through his own personal experience. His first book was the autobiographical narrative If I Die in a Combat Zone … Box Me up and Send Me Home, in which he questions the efficacy of literature and the relationship between experience and understanding in a different light than he will later in open discussion and in his novels.

O'Brien is self-effacing and ambivalent about setting forth his project in If I Die. Early in the book he tells us:

I would wish this book could take the form of plea for everlasting peace, a plea from one who knows, from one who's been there and come back, an old soldier looking back at a dying war.

That would be good. It would be fine to integrate it all to persuade my younger brother and perhaps some others to say no to wrong wars.

Or it would be fine to confirm the old beliefs about war: it is horrible, but it's a crucible of men and events and, in the end, it makes more of a man out of you.

But, still, none of that seems right….

Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken, and analyze them and live out our lives and advise others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely from having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.

O'Brien is very conscious of his position as an intermediary between those with personal knowledge of the war and those without. He is the one who has been there and back; he has lived to tell the tale. Yet at the end of this statement he denies the educational potential of such a position. He cannot advise or teach. All he can do is tell his war stories.

But he is not always reductive about war stories. In an Asia Society forum on the literature of the Vietnam War, he asserts "I'm a believer in the power of stories, whether they're true, or embellished, and exaggerated, or utterly made up. A good story has a power … that transcends the question of factuality or actuality." It is not clear whether O'Brien has changed his mind about the power of war stories or whether this apparent contradiction is a rhetorical stance, but the disparity between these two statements reflects a divided attitude about the adequacy of art for revealing and teaching.

This division is suggested throughout the pages of If I Die and becomes one of its driving tensions. Throughout the memoir O'Brien repeatedly privileges the written text and the story; but throughout the memoir O'Brien also undermines that privilege, until it is ultimately unclear whether he embraces or rejects the power of the story and the storyteller.

If I Die is an educated and literate man's response to war. As O'Brien attempts to make sense of his circumstances, he is continually interpreting them through a structure of texts ranging from Plato to A Farewell to Arms. His attitude toward the written text initially seems uncomplicated. The good guys read books and the bad guys don't. We see this at work early in If I Die as O'Brien forms his first real friendship in the army—with another recruit, Erik Hansen (to whom he will later dedicate Going After Cacciato). Their bonding begins when O'Brien sees Erik reading; the book is T. E. Lawrence's The Mint, which Erik is reading because "'He [Lawrence] went through crap like this. Basic training. It's a sort of how-to-do-it book.'" Erik shares the book with O'Brien and, with Lawrence as their guide, the two recruits struggle to maintain their humanity in the face of basic training. We see another attitude altogether toward books when O'Brien discusses his serious reservations about going into combat with the battalion chaplain. The chaplain, incensed at what he sees as O'Brien's lack of courage and patriotism, blames O'Brien's hesitations on reading: "'I think you're very disturbed, very disturbed. Not mental you understand—I don't mean that. See … you've read too many books, the wrong ones, I think there's no doubt, the wrong ones. But goddamn it—pardon me—but goddamn it, you're a soldier now, and you'll sure as hell act like one!'" The battalion commander, whom O'Brien goes to see next, similarly blames O'Brien's difficulties with the military system on an over-reliance on books. He complains: "'But you're hearing this from an old soldier … I suppose that you've got to read it to believe it, that's the new way.'" Our protagonists know how to make use of literature as interpretive schema; their enemies deny the ability of literature to cast any relevant light on real experience.

There are numerous examples in If I Die of O'Brien's reliance upon literary and philosophical texts to provide a structure for his time in Vietnam. He describes his platoon leader, Mad Mark, as working by an Aristotelian ethic; his company commander, Captain Johansen, becomes his hero, a hero he examines in the light of Plato, Hemingway, and Melville (as well as Alan Ladd as Shane and Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca); a night ambush reminds him of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, "of imminent violence and guileless, gentle Ichabod Crane." While O'Brien is in the field, Erik writes him a letter that quotes The Wasteland: "'April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain'" and asserts explicitly that there is a practical lesson to be learned from the poetry: "'Take care. For it is not a fantasy.'"

Even as he contemplates escaping the army, O'Brien relies upon the written text. To make a decision about deserting he goes to the library and researches the question. When he eventually commits himself to going AWOL, he also commits all his plans to paper—so he can check and recheck his vision of escape against the documented plan he carries with him. When at the last moment he backs out of desertion, his first act is to burn the plans—as if destroying the text will destroy the idea.

The central question that O'Brien explores through texts, especially through Plato and Hemingway, is about the nature of courage. If I Die revolves around this question and its relationship to O'Brien's decision not to desert the military. Throughout the memoir—and indeed throughout his novels that will follow it—O'Brien relentlessly works over the problem of which choice represents true courage: to desert to keep faith with his moral and political principles or to fight out of obligation to his duties as a citizen and a son of an American family. This choice is embodied in the actions of O'Brien's greatest heroes—Socrates and Hemingway's Frederic Henry.

Very early in If I Die O'Brien considers his position in terms of his reading of Plato: "I remembered Plato's Crito, when Socrates, facing certain death—execution, not war—had the chance to escape. But he reminded himself that he had seventy years in which he could have left the country, if he were not satisfied or felt the agreements he made were unfair. He had not chosen Sparta or Crete. And, I reminded myself, I hadn't thought much about Canada until that summer." Much later in the book he lists his heroes, "especially Frederic Henry. Henry was able to leave war being good and brave enough at it, for real love, and although he missed the men of war, he did not miss the fear and killing." O'Brien tries to reconcile these two mentors by positing that "courage, according to Plato, is [only] one of the four parts of virtue," and that "Henry, like all my heroes, was not obsessed with courage; he knew it was only one part of virtue, that love and justice were other parts," but the fundamental choice between departing and enduring remains unresolved.

Because O'Brien elected to remain with the army, we assume that, at least in part, he chose to follow the model of Socrates rather than Frederic Henry, and thus opted for a Platonic ethic. This ethic appears to be affirmed late in the book, when O'Brien returns to the question of courage, in the chapter entitled "Courage Is a Certain Kind of Preserving." The chapter opens with a long quotation from The Republic (Book IV):

"So a city is also courageous by a part of itself, thanks to that part's having in it a power that through everything will preserve the opinion about which things are terrible—that they are the same ones and of that same sort as those the lawgiver transmitted in the education. Or don't you call that courage?"

"I didn't quite understand what you said," he said. "Say it again."

"I mean," I said, "that courage is a certain kind of preserving."

"Just what sort of preserving?"

"The preserving of the opinion produced by the law through education about what—and what sort of thing—is terrible…."

If O'Brien embraces these reflections on the nature of courage, then his purpose in telling his war stories is simultaneously affirmed and complicated. If we are to come to understand courage through education, then it is essential that we have educational texts. This is how O'Brien arrives at his definition of courage—through his reading. Thus his book, rather than merely telling war stories, can begin to serve some of the moral function that he earlier abnegated.

But the Platonic model also has adverse ramifications for O'Brien as a writer, because there is no place for O'Brien as a writer in the Platonic state. At the end of Book II and the beginning of Book III of The Republic Plato makes it clear that the place of the poet and the teller of tales should be a very limited and controlled one. Poets should be subject to censorship and not be permitted the egregious fault of telling lies; they must only represent truth—truth that is advantageous to the state. A little later on in Book III we read "if any one at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the State should be the persons; and they, in their dealings either with their enemies or with their own citizens, may be allowed to lie for the public good." As a writer, particularly as a writer of Vietnam War literature, a literature that has been so concerned with creating fictions that counter all the officially sanctioned public lies of that war, O'Brien must have difficulty with Plato's sentiments here. O'Brien believes in lying as a way to get to a kind of truth. And true courage may not come through education.

In his first book O'Brien was writing literature that would be acceptable in the Platonic model, by creating a straight historical text rather that a fictional one. In an interview with Eric James Schroeder O'Brien says of If I Die, "'it's just there as a document. It's not art.'" Yet, as Schroeder points out in a later article, in that same interview he tells about how he had written many of the episodes in If I Die when he was in Vietnam, and that upon returning to the United States he "'stitched it together into a book and sent it off.'" O'Brien also admits to fictionalizing dialogue: "'Often I couldn't remember the exact words that people said, and yet to give it a dramatic intensity and immediacy I'd make up dialogue that seemed true to the spirit of what was said.'" In addition to creating dialogue O'Brien tampered with chronology. "'I didn't follow the chronology of events; I switched events around for the purposes of drama.'" This "stitching" combined with the fictive dialogue and rearranged time scheme, as well as a formal structure that begins the story in medias res and then moves back to O'Brien's childhood, education, and basic training, suggest considerably more artistry than O'Brien is perhaps willing to admit.

The contradictions between O'Brien's creation of a text fitting for education in the Platonic model and his ideas about the role of fiction suggest a contradiction that is pointed to throughout the memoir. For most of the book, reading is portrayed as a worthwhile activity; books are friends and guides. But there is a thread throughout If I Die that contravenes this theme. After O'Brien has quoted the letter from his friend Erik that contains excerpts from The Wasteland and stresses that it "is not a fantasy," O'Brien immediately follows the letter by reporting "April went on without lilacs. Without rain" suggesting that perhaps the poem is not so pertinent after all. In describing guard duty at night, O'Brien once more uses texts to structure his present experience: "Then the guard started, the ritual come alive from our pagan past—Thucydides and Polybius and Julius Caesar, tales of encampment, tales of night terror." But the paragraph ends: "all the rules passed down from ancient warfare, the lessons of dead men." If the rules did not succeed in keeping their creators alive, perhaps they are not useful for the Vietnam soldier either. Similarly, O'Brien dismisses the relevance of "Horace's old do-or-die aphorism—'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori'" as "just an epitaph for the insane."

The suggestion that texts may complicate as much as they clarify is present as early as the basic training section of the book. At the exact same time as he is gaining understanding from T. E. Lawrence, other texts are perpetuating a lack of understanding between O'Brien and his absent girlfriend. His thoughts dwell on his girlfriend as a way of escaping basic training, and he tells us:

I memorized a poem she sent me. It was a poem by Auden, and marching for shots, and haircuts, and clothing issues, I recited the poem, forging Auden's words with thoughts I pretended to be hers. I lied about her, pretending that she wrote the poem herself, for me. I compared her to characters out of books by Hemingway and Maugham. In her letters she claimed I created her out of the mind. The mind, she said, can make wonderful changes in the real stuff.

Here the texts obfuscate instead of enlightening. Literature may give O'Brien a clearer understanding of the experience of boot camp, but it is also becoming a replacement for the real experience of another human being.

O'Brien also begins to doubt the applicability of works written about other wars to his positions in Vietnam. He wonders "how writers such as Hemingway and Pyle could write so accurately and movingly about war without also writing about the rightness of their wars." To O'Brien it seems that soldiers in war stories are all convinced of the rightness of their causes, or, at the least, "resigned to bullets and brawn." But for O'Brien, who likens his own position as similar to that of a "conscripted Nazi," the stance taken by legendary warriors may be impossible for him to assume.

O'Brien finds his reliance upon texts inadequate to create an ethical system suitable for Vietnam. His old, fictionally inspired notions about courage and battlefield behavior simply do not withstand the experiential assault of the war. He reports "it is … difficult, however, to think of yourself in those ways. As the eternal Hector, dying gallantly. It is impossible. That's the problem. Knowing yourself, you can't make it real for yourself. It's sad when you learn you're not much of a hero." As he arrives at this knowledge, O'Brien also begins to dismiss the fictions that he has used to direct his life:

Grace under pressure, Hemingway would say. That is how you recognize the brave man. But somehow grace under pressure is insufficient. It's too easy to affect grace, and it's too hard to see through it…. Or the other cliché: a coward dies a thousand deaths, but a brave man only one. That seems wrong too. Is a man once and for always a coward? Is a man once and for always a hero?

As he rejects these too-easy ways of understanding courage, O'Brien replaces these written texts with a text of physical, lived experience. For him this new definition of courage comes when "you look at the other men, reading your own caved-in belly deep in their eyes. The fright dies in the same way the novocain wears off in the dentist's chair. You promise, almost moving your lips, to do better next time; that by itself is a kind of courage."

By opting for the text of a fellow-soldier's eyes over a Hemingway novel, for the flesh rather than for the word, O'Brien appears to have arrived at the point from which he begins the book. War stories are only stories; they do not have any practical ramifications. But we know that the issue cannot be allowed to rest there. O'Brien does write the book, a book that is an actively created and ordered thing, a book presumably written to comprehend his own experience. He returns to the written text for structure. The question that If I Die poses it leaves largely unanswered.

Going After Cacciato is a return to those questions and a reopening of the issues. Schroeder posits that the book is a long answer to the question O'Brien posed for himself in If I Die: "Do dreams offer lessons?" Certainly Cacciato returns to the question of courage. But even more than that it is a return to a consideration of war stories. O'Brien again takes up the question of the relationship between fiction and experience, this time in a more explicit and self-conscious manner; and he attempts to discover the kind of stories that we must tell for them to have a real efficacy in our lives.

The structure of Cacciato emphasizes the disparities between experiential realism and fantastic imagination as a way of understanding lived experience. Cacciato is written using a tripartite structure. The narrative present is contained in a series of chapters entitled "The Observation Post," where the novel's protagonist, Paul Berlin, spends a quiet night of guard duty remembering and imagining—a remembering and imagining that are the substance of the rest of the novel. A series of flashback chapters detail many of the events that he remembers from the first part of his tour in Vietnam—a tour that is now about halfway over. Finally, "The Road to Paris" chapters make up Paul Berlin's elaborate imaginative voyage overland from Vietnam to Paris. The scheme of the novel is such that not until about a third of the way through the book is the reader able to sort out this structure and be certain about what is present, past, and dreamed, what is the book's fiction, and what is its reality.

The "Road to Paris" is Paul Berlin's fiction, a fiction that he creates as an alternative to the untenable life of war that is recorded in several flashback sections. These flashbacks are Paul Berlin's war stories. But for this young soldier these stories do not offer adequate lessons. Memory alone proves inadequate for Paul Berlin. As he concludes the flashback sections near the end of the book he muses:

Out of all that time, time aching itself away, his memory sputtered around those scant hours of horror…. Odd, because what he remembered was so trivial, so obvious and corny, that to speak of it was embarrassing. War stories. That was what remained: a few stupid war stories, hackneyed and unprofound. Even the lessons were commonplace. It hurts to be shot. Dead men are heavy. Don't seek trouble, it'll find you soon enough.

In language almost identical to that which he uses in If I Die O'Brien once again denies war stories any heuristic function. But Paul Berlin pursues another alternative. Instead of relying upon memory alone to arrive at truth, he transforms memory through his imagination. He alchemizes his experience in Vietnam into a picaresque voyage in search of Cacciato, Paris, and understanding.

If the narrative past in Cacciato is the realm of "fact" and reality, and the trip to Paris is the territory of fiction and imagination, then "The Observation Post" chapters are best described as metafiction. In these chapters Paul Berlin deliberates both on the nature of his memories and on the course that his fiction is taking, and the complex interplay between the two. It is through these chapters that we come to understand Paul Berlin's purpose in creating his elaborate journey and that although the imaginative escape to Paris is a way of mentally escaping the facts of war that he cannot confront, the journey is also a way of arriving back at the war, but this time with a greater degree of moral comprehension and a clear definition of courage.

For Paul Berlin, Vietnam is an unreadable and unknowable text. He arrives in Vietnam without the historical or political sense that would enable him to understand the United States position in Vietnam and his part in that position. O'Brien explicates Paul Berlin's sense of lostness upon the protagonist's arrival in country: "He was lost. He had never heard of I Corps, or the Americal, or Chu Lai. He did not know what a Combat Center was." To try to rectify his ignorance, Paul Berlin writes home to ask his father to look up Chu Lai in the world atlas, confessing "'Right now … I'm a little lost.'"

This geographic dislocation is symptomatic of the American soldiers' lack of any sort of historical or moral bearing while fighting the Vietnam War, a moral dislocation that is elaborated upon in the chapter "The Things They Did Not Know." Here O'Brien enumerates the many kinds of ignorance that compound the predicament of Paul Berlin and his fellows. They do not know the language, and therefore they cannot know the people of Vietnam. They do not know the political circumstances that have brought them to Vietnam. They do not know "even the simple things: a sense of victory, or satisfaction, or necessary sacrifice." Perhaps most significant "they did not know what stories to believe. Magic, mystery, ghosts and incense, whispers in the dark, strange tongues and strange smells, uncertainties never articulated in war stories, emotions squandered in ignorance. They did not know good from evil." O'Brien's soldiers are mired in their lack of knowledge; they have no geographical context within which to locate themselves and no textual guides to lead them to greater moral understanding.

What knowledge Paul Berlin does have is only superficial because he is unable to relate it to the reality of Vietnam. His expectations that have been formed by the texts that he has read before coming to Vietnam obscure any ability to theorize about his experience of the war. O'Brien tells us:

He had seen it in movies. He had read about poverty in magazines and newspapers, seen pictures of it on television. So when he saw the villages of Quang Ngai, he had seen it all before. He had seen before seeing, hideous skin diseases, hunger, rotting animals, huts without furniture or plumbing or light. He had seen the shit-fields where villagers squatted. He had seen chickens roosting on babies. Misery and want, bloated bellies, scabs and pus-wounds, even death. All of it he'd seen before. So when he saw it—when he first entered a village south of Chu Lai—he felt a kind of mild surprise, a fleeting compassion, but not amazement. He knew what he would see and he saw it. He was not stricken by it; he was not outraged or made to grieve. He felt no great horror. He felt some guilt, but that passed quickly because he had seen it all before seeing it.

Paul Berlin's reliance upon texts to confront the violence he is complicit in here takes him into some dangerous moral waters. He replaces the experience he is undergoing with the vicarious experience of books and magazines, a substitution that inures him to the very real and painful suffering of Vietnam and its people. The violence is familiar, even though now it is unmediated. At the same time Paul Berlin is unable to see past the suffering and poverty that he expected to any other aspect of Vietnamese life. He can only make his experience conform to categories that he had established well before arriving in Vietnam. Because he is over-reliant upon textual surrogates, he is unable to alter his epistemology in response to new experience.

Paul Berlin does not resolve his relationship to texts nor the uneasiness about his courage that prompts his imaginative odyssey until the climactic section on "The End of the Road to Paris" wherein Paul Berlin and Sarkin Aung Wang, the Vietnamese refugee he has fallen in love with, debate the location of Paul Berlin's deepest commitment. This scene consolidates the issues of courage and fiction that have driven O'Brien through both If I Die and Cacciato. Sarkin Aung Wang demands that Paul Berlin step out of his imagination and make his fiction real. For Paul Berlin this is tantamount to desertion, and thus he must resolve the question that O'Brien has been pondering since his own incomplete desertion: might desertion be the real act of courage? For Sarkin Aung Wang it is clearly embracing peace. She urges: "Having dreamed a marvelous dream, I urge you to step boldly into it, to join your own dream and live it. Do not be deceived by false obligation." For Paul Berlin it is not so simple, and he must ultimately reject Sarkin Aung Wang's offer. He declares "by my prior acts—acts of consent—I have bound myself to performing subsequent acts…. These were explicit consents. But beyond them were many tacit promises: to my family, my friends, my town, my country, my fellow soldiers."

Paul Berlin's resolution is also the resolution of his fiction, and of the moral questions that perpetrated that fiction. Some readers argue that Paul Berlin's inability to embrace his dream is the true failure of the imagination in the novel. A failure of the imagination has been presaged earlier in the fiction when the reality of the war threatened to bleed through into the trip to Paris: the disappearance of Harold Murphy and Stink Harris along the road to Paris, and the squad's near execution in Tehran are more a part of the wartime world than Paul Berlin's fantastic journey. But Paul Berlin's decision does not really seem like failure of the imagination—the fiction brings him to the point where he wished to arrive. He has discovered the values he wishes to live for. If the resolution he finds in Paris is not a triumph of the imagination either, this may well be a commentary on the American failure to imagine a happy ending out of Vietnam.

Paul Berlin's dream has finally offered him a lesson; but it may not be the lesson that we, as readers, want him to learn. O'Brien in part affirms a sensibility that he said in If I Die did not seem right. War "is horrible, but it is a crucible of men and events, and in the end it makes more of a man out of you." By refusing to step into his dream, Paul Berlin acquiesces to his position in Vietnam. He rejects the fiction that he has created and embraces the reality of his tour of duty—but this time it is a reality informed by fiction. Memory informed by imagination.

If Paul Berlin ultimately refuses to let the fiction be reality, is this the resolution of O'Brien's uneasy relationship to texts that we have seen at play throughout If I Die and Cacciato? If so, how do we balance that against the indications earlier in Cacciato that war stories are simply not adequate to teach us what we need to know about war? On which does O'Brien finally place a higher premium, experience or fiction, memory or imagination? On the one hand Paul Berlin's resolution and Tim O'Brien's own writing come out of autobiographical experience. But on the other it is clear that one cannot learn from experience unless one sets imagination to work upon it. Although the ending of Going After Cacciato is more conclusive than that of If I Die—through Paul Berlin O'Brien seems to affirm his own decision not to desert—the novel still leaves many open questions. If we cannot learn about courage from Hemingway or Captain Vere, if we cannot learn about Vietnam from television and magazines, if Paul Berlin cannot create an acceptable alternative to his reality, then why write at all? Despite this pending question, Paul Berlin does seem to have achieved moral understanding from fiction. And O'Brien seems to have made a truce—albeit an uneasy one—between memory and imagination.

It is the terms of this truce that he re-examines twelve years later in The Things They Carried. O'Brien returns to the material of his experience as a foot soldier in Vietnam. In this novel, the relationship between truth and fiction and the consideration of the effective potential of stories has moved to center stage. In person and in interviews O'Brien presents himself as a bluff ordinary guy, who claims his literary influences are "'the books I read as a kid. The Hardy Boys and Larry of the Little League'" and who has little interest in aesthetic theory. But his work belies this stance. When asked if The Things They Carried is nonfiction O'Brien appears startled by the question and says off-handedly that every bit of it is fiction. Yet the narrator of The Things They Carried is a forty-three-year-old Vietnam veteran named Tim O'Brien who has previously written a memoir called If I Die in a Combat Zone and the novel entitled Going After Cacciato.

An examination of even the prefatory material to The Things They Carried reveals that O'Brien is far more of a literary trickster than he acknowledges. The title page asserts the novel is "a work of fiction by Tim O'Brien." It is followed by a disclaimer that "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." So far this is clear enough. But by the dedication page O'Brien is already beginning to muddy the textual waters. The book is dedicated to "the men of Alpha Company"; the dedication goes on to list their names. They are the names of the characters of The Things They Carried.

In and of itself this dedication to fictional characters might be passed over as whimsy on O'Brien's part, but it is soon revealed as part of the novel's elaborate interlocking pattern of truth and fiction. For example, in "Notes" O'Brien tells us that the story "Speaking of Courage" was written at the suggestion of Norman Bowker, one of those fictional men of Alpha Company, who wrote to O'Brien after reading If I Die in a Combat Zone. "The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," one of the most apparently fictive of the twenty-one pieces that make up The Things They Carried, is based, according to O'Brien, on a story told to him by a battle-field medic in Vietnam, who was "'desperate to make me believe him.'" The instructive piece "How to Tell a True War Story"—which begins by helpfully reporting "this is true"—explicates: "a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical." Clearly O'Brien is nudging his readers to question some of their assumptions about fiction and truth.

The three consecutive pieces "Speaking of Courage," "Notes," and "In the Field," exemplify O'Brien's relentless investigation of how to tell a true war story. The first story relates how the character Norman Bowker is unable to save Kiowa, a comrade who suffocates in the muck of excrement when Alpha Company is pinned down in a field full of night soil. In "Notes" the author-character Tim O'Brien tells us that the story was originally written at the suggestion of Norman Bowker who was dissatisfied with If I Die In a Combat Zone. As originally published the story featured Paul Berlin of Going After Cacciato and was only about the after-effects of the night in the night-soil field and did not discuss the incident itself. The intertextuality thickens. The fictional Norman Bowker expresses further dissatisfaction; he later kills himself. Prompted by the suicide, the author-character O'Brien rewrites the story for inclusion in The Things They Carried. The record is set straight—until the conclusion of "Notes" where O'Brien reports: "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 … that part of the story is my own." "In the Field" then is the final elucidation, the story in which O'Brien explains that he, not Norman Bowker, was the friend unable to save Kiowa that night.

Lest his readers should be tempted to believe that with "In the Field" they have at last been granted a definitive or foundational story, O'Brien follows that story with "Good Form," another authorial commentary by the character Tim O'Brien. It opens with the statement "it's time to be blunt"—surely an alarming declaration to readers that have been struggling through the book's labyrinth of truth. He then goes on:

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

Almost everything else is invented.

But it's not a game. It's a form. Right here, right now, as I invent myself, I'm thinking of all I want to tell you about why this book is written as it is. For instance, I want to tell you this: twenty years ago I watched a man die on a trail near the village of My Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present you see, and my presence was guilt enough…. I blamed myself. And rightly so, because I was present.

But listen. Even that story is made up.

So much for being blunt. But the dizzying interplay of truth and fiction in this novel is not solely aesthetic postmodern gamesmanship but a form that is a thematic continuation of the author's concern throughout his career with the power and capability of story.

The Things They Carried is more polished and manipulative even than the sophisticated triple play of Going After Cacciato. But for all its interrogation of the liminal space between lived experience and imagination and for all its insistence on abjuring any notion of static truth it is still finally more definitive about the potential of the story than either of O'Brien's earlier Vietnam War works. At the end of Going After Cacciato Paul Berlin has found a way of making use of war stories to define his moral position, but The Things They Carried makes a renewed attack on war stories: "A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper behavior … as a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil."

Yet at the same time that O'Brien strongly rejects any didactic moral function for war stories he clarifies his position on just what stories can do. Early on he declares that "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," and he later muses "what stories can do, I guess, is make things present." Story's ability to "make things present" is O'Brien's apparent resolution of the ambivalence toward fiction that has driven him through his Vietnam War books. He has been troubled by the question of whether dreams offer lessons. In The Things They Carried he sees his dreams and stories not as lessons but as elegies; they do not teach, but they do preserve.

In Vietnam, O'Brien tells us, "we kept the dead alive with stories." "The Lives of the Dead," the novel's final story, contains O'Brien's most definitive articulation of the relationship between memory and story. O'Brien recalls the death of his childhood sweetheart and how night after night he would invent dreams to bring her back. He recalls a conversation in one such dream:

"Right now," she said, "I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like … I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading."

"A book?" I said.

"An old one. It's up on the library shelf, so you're safe and everything, but the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody'll pick it up and start reading."

So stories can save us, but through preservation rather than through salvation. In If I Die in a Combat Zone O'Brien rejected "the lessons of dead men," and in The Things They Carried reading becomes a way of dreaming those dead men back to life. The flesh is made back into word.

O'Brien's Vietnam War works persistently deconstruct the distinctions between memory and imagination, lessons and dreams, truth and fiction, and reality and the text. But the final movement in The Things They Carried is toward reconstruction—not of distinctions but rather of a creative connection that draws together experience and art. For O'Brien, stories are that privileged connection that can lift us out of the quagmire of a dualized reality and fantasy and place us on the solid ground of truth. But even this apparent resolution is finally suspended. Because the novel offers us a double lesson: Stories can save us. But if O'Brien's readers have truly accepted his wiley postmodern perceptions of the reader's relationship to the text then they know that they must reject any lessons. O'Brien warns "if at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been the victim of a very old and terrible lie." So any sense of conclusion or epiphany must be its own undoing. And as O'Brien might say, "this is true."