True war stories: Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried'

Southern Illinoisan, June 1, 2016

For years in teaching the Vietnam War, I've used Tim O'Brien's 1990 classic The Things They Carried, based loosely on O'Brien's own tour in 1969-1970. More than a collection of short stories, but something less than a full novel, the book recounts the experiences of O'Brien and the men in his platoon, with a time frame shifting from the war, to their lives both after and before their service.  

The book is a meditation on the art of storytelling. Characters constantly spin tales, often incredible, desperately wanting to be believed. Or they bemoan the fact that they will never be able to place their experiences in a comprehensible narrative, or that their audience will never grasp their point.  

The war represents the most significant event in these men's lives. They find themselves yanked out of their normal lives and deposited in a chaotic and surreal environment, dominated by the omnipresence of death. And then, when their tours are finished—if they survive—they are returned stateside with the idea they can resume their lives. And telling stories might help make sense of their experiences.

But as O'Brien says, there are problems inherent in telling war stories. "In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.... The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed."

I warn students beforehand about the book's brutality, telling them they might need to set it aside on occasion to watch kitten videos on Youtube. But even warned, students often recoil at the savagery of some of the stories: a soldier loses his best friend and takes his hurt out by shooting to death a nearby baby water buffalo; a wholesome-looking teenage girls sneaks into Vietnam to visit her boyfriend, only to be sucked into the war's heart of darkness, spending nights on patrol with the Green Berets, and ends up wearing a necklace of human tongues, telling her boyfriend, "Vietnam. I want to swallow the whole country—the dirt, the death—I just want to eat it and have it there inside me," before disappearing into the mountains never to be seen again.

As O'Brien reminds us, in war certainties are undermined and common assumptions overturned. "For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel—the spiritual texture—of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity."

The central story—told multiple times from various points of view—concerns a young lieutenant ordered to set up in a low-lying field. Uneasy about the location and warned away by locals, the lieutenant decides to obey orders despite his hesitation. That night it begins to rain and the men discover they are camped in the middle of the village latrine. Struggling to keep from being sucked under, they come under enemy fire and the one soldier who had served as the conscience of the platoon is hit and sinks into the muck as the others struggle vainly to pull him out. 

The story serves as a metaphor of the entire American experience in Vietnam—troops ordered into a land by leaders who have no understanding of the region's history, under fire by an enemy they never see, watching in horror as America's moral values get sucked into a quagmire of human waste.

Today, as American forces remain caught in another quagmire, this time in the Middle East, sent by leaders who refuse to understand the ambiguities of the fog of war—who, in the words of George W. Bush, "don't do nuance"—I tell my students we need to listen to these stories, even if they make us sick. Perhaps especially if they make us sick. 

In a cogent reminder for an election year, O'Brien observes, "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."