Having recently listened to The Mountains Sing, the latest in quite a number of Vietnamese war testimonies that I've tackled, I realized that I had read very little fiction on Viet Nam written from the American point of view. Plenty of non-fiction, of course, most notably A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan, and the controversial In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam by former US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara. But few stories. The closest I've come was Benjamin Alire Saenz's 2008 novel, Names on a Map. 

So Tim O'Brien's 1990 set of interlocking stories, beautifully read by Bryan Cranston, was pretty much my first foray into the world of the US "grunt", as infantrymen were apparently designated.

One of the things grunts routinely did was "hump", which means carry, and the opening chapter is a meticulous and very moving account of exactly what they carried. The literal burden (of the things they needed in order to physically and emotionally survive, and the things they needed in order to kill) was substantial, and the spiritual burden (encompassing grief, fear, guilt, and haunting memories of loss or cowardice) was even heavier in many cases.

The writing is interesting in that it keeps circling round an event, recounting it from different perspectives and angles, holding it up, as it were, to different lights. In this way, like moths around a flame, we make multiple passes at deaths and injuries, pranks and betrayals, combat and life after combat.

Some of the stories are horrific. They would be, of course. They're about war. It's not pretty; it's evil.

But I was left at the end not knowing quite what to do with this book, my mind continually revolving around a couple of knotty problems.

Firstly, what was "true" at the end of the day? And does that matter? Stories, as we also learn from The Life of Pi, often convey more "truth" than hard facts do. And usually, I'm quite happy with the idea that "story-truth", as O'Brien puts it, can be more authentic than "happening-truth". In this case, though, I found myself wanting to know... What did he experience, what did he make up?

The book's "I-figure" is called Tim O'Brien, and metamorphoses from soldier in Viet Nam to author writing about the war. But he is meant to be distinct from the actual author Tim O'Brien, who also goes through exactly the same evolution. Narrator Tim tells us that if a war story sounds believable, it's probably not. And if it somehow makes sense, you've been had: "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 made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil."

But the more horrible a war story is, the more believable I tend to find it... Where does that leave me?


All the photos in this post are from Nha Trang and Hoi An, 2003

Secondly, how do I respond to the fictional Tim O'Brien when he tells us: "War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead. The truths are contradictory." 

As a person who hates the very idea of war (and has never personally fought in one), I almost resent hearing anything that's positive about it. What is also clear, however, is that war stays with you: "The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over." 

The "I" of the book is fundamentally and categorically opposed to the war he fought in, of course. He says he was a coward for going to Viet Nam, and participating in what was intrinsically a bad war (there is a beautiful story about the fictional Tim escaping to the Rainy River, and contemplating escape to Canada, but bottling out of that solution because he "couldn't risk the embarrassment"). Do we forgive him? Has he forgiven himself? What about the real Tim O'Brien? Where is he in this process?

As perplexity induced me to follow up these interlinked questions, though, I started to value the book more.





First, then, the true/untrue thing, which is a very thought-provoking business.

Most helpful here was Leslie Pietrzyk, who ponders -- from the point of view of a writer -- why it is that "readers insist on knowing if the story that held them enthralled was 'real'".

She explains: "My newest book, a collection of short stories, is based on a tragic incident in my life... I assigned myself the task of writing at the core of each story 'one true hard thing' that happened... Also I made up stuff... Why did I assign myself this task, to use the truth in this way? Why did I, a fiction writer, try to make this book about a true thing sound true...?" Eventually the question becomes: "Why do I want you to know that this book is true?"

Having had the book rejected because it was too shatteringly "real", the author starts to understand not only the reason readers perpetually ask whether this or that event really happened, but also the reason that in this case she WANTS them to ask ("going out of my way -- almost taunting -- them into asking, as Tim O’Brien does in The Things They Carried") whether it's "true".

This is her conclusion: "I know that in life unspeakable things happen... Because it has happened to me, you think it can’t happen to you. Because the bad things that happen in life, in war, are so random and so terrible, we put them into a story because otherwise they don’t make sense. They just don’t make sense. A world with so many terrible things happening is the only world we know and yet it’s the world that should be impossible to live in. How can we live in it, this world?... [I didn't write these stories] to make myself feel better. I wrote them because they happened. To me. For real. And I want you to know. I want you to know this is true, this is all true, whether it happened or not."

There we have it again: The reader needs an escape route -- the possibility that this awful thing she's just read about might not be true. But the reader also needs to at least suspect that the essence of the thing that has so appalled her IS true.

As the fictional O'Brien puts it: "By telling stories you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths."

(The real O'Brien expands on this in a 1999 lecture and Q&A. The process seems akin to the distancing achieved by writing in a different language.)

In a 1990 review by Robert R. Harris, there is another discussion about what is real, and what is made up, which concludes: "By subjecting his memory and imagination to such harsh scrutiny, he seems to have reached a reconciliation, to have made his peace -- or to have made up his peace."





Which brings me to my second area of cogitation: Did he make his peace? How did O'Brien continue to process his experience?

In an interview for that 1990 review, O'Brien (the real one) says of The Things They Carried: "It is a writer's book on the effects of time on the imagination. It is definitely an antiwar book; I hated the war from the beginning. [The book] is meant to be about man's yearning for peace."

Four years later, in February 1994, O'Brien returns to Viet Nam to visit some of the places he had fought in. The audiobook closes with this piece, written for The New York Times, and read by the author himself. Here there is no fictional overlay. He's writing as himself, and what he is still experiencing is searing.

The area covered by Alpha Company, with which O'Brien served, included My Lai. They arrived there a year after the infamous massacre committed by members of Charlie Company, but knew nothing about it. Now he meets some of the survivors, and hears first-hand about the horrors that took place there.

Later, in a hotel in Quang Ngai city, he reads the history of the area where he had served: "Twenty-five years ago, like most other grunts in Alpha Company, I knew next to nothing about this place -- Vietnam in general, Quang Ngai in particular. Now I'm learning. In the years preceding the murders at My Lai, more than 70 percent of the villages in this province had been destroyed by air strikes, artillery fire, Zippo lighters, napalm, white phosphorus, bulldozers, gunships and other such means. Roughly 40 percent of the population had lived in refugee camps, while civilian casualties in the area were approaching 50,000 a year... In a war without aim, you tend not to aim. You close your eyes, close your heart. The consequences become hit or miss in the most literal sense. With so few military targets, with an enemy that was both of and among the population, Alpha Company began to regard Quang Ngai itself as the true enemy... What had started for us as a weird, vicious little war soon evolved into something far beyond vicious, a hopped-up killer strain of nihilism, waste without want, aimlessness of deed mixed with aimlessness of spirit..."

On that return journey, he also learns about the inequities of the search for those Missing In Action. American teams of experts, aided by the Vietnamese, are beavering away trying to find their lost soldiers. Vietnamese villagers, on the other hand, having suffered much heavier losses, have to do it themselves. O'Brien: "I get angry at the stunning, almost cartoonish narcissism of American policy on this issue. I get angrier yet at the narcissism of an American public that embraces and breathes life into the policy -- so arrogant, so ignorant, so self-righteous, so wanting in the most fundamental qualities of sympathy and fairness and mutuality."

I guess this inequity bothered me all through the book. The Americans always seemed so very well supplied. They wanted for nothing, in material terms. The contrast with the privations recorded in The Mountains Sing was extraordinary. 

From a Vietnamese soldier, who has fought not only the Americans and the South Vietnamese, but also the Khmer Rouge and the Chinese (inequity again), O'Brien learns about the view from the other side: "Mr Tan speaks genially of military tactics... 'US troops not hard to see, not hard to fight,' he says. 'Much noise, much equipment. Big columns. Nice green uniforms.' Sitting ducks, in other words, though Mr Tan is too polite to express it this way." 

Tan explains that it was the "Saigon puppet troops" who were the main target: "'You brought many soldiers, helicopters, bombs, but we chose not to fight you, except sometimes. American was not the main objective.' God help us, I'm thinking, if we had been. All those casualties. All that blood and terror."



In June, a few months after the return visit, O' Brien has clearly made no peace with the past. He is on medication for depression, is contemplating suicide. His relationship with the woman who accompanied him back to Viet Nam has ended.

By the following month, he is still saying: "The hardest part, by far, is to make the bad pictures go away. On war time, the world is one long horror movie, image after image." But at least he has broken out of his limbo: "Starting can start."

I found this piece enormously moving -- more so, in some ways, than the book. Was this because it really was "true"? Because there was no layer between me and the pain of this writer, still fighting to come to terms with what he had been through?





In 2017, O'Brien's appearance in a documentary on the war reminds Michael Rosenwald of that NYT piece, which had "devastated" him at the time. He calls O'Brien to ask what it was like for him to relive all this on screen. His reply: "I can’t stop crying. I can’t stop thinking of what a waste it all was... It's a sense of my life too -- it was kind of wasted."

He acknowledges that many veterans and their families, and indeed others troubled by very different burdens, have found his books helpful -- and there's a very moving testimony to that in this 2010 NPR interview and call-in show, when caller after caller explains how The Things They Carried has eased his burden slightly by opening up channels of communication -- but he admits that "on a personal level, they weren’t in any way I know of therapeutic, like I got it off my chest or something. You are plagued by it. It’s not every waking moment, but almost."

As he explains in that 1999 lecture: "When you return from a war, you have to assume responsibility... Whether I literally killed a man or not is finally irrelevant to me. What matters is I was part of it all, the machine that did it."

Another 17 years down the track, that sense of responsibility had obviously not gone away.

So..., a very moving and challenging piece of writing.

The moral of the story: Don't start WARS.