The Vietnam Reader (69 page)

This book is essentially different from any other that has been published concerning the “late war” or any of its incidents. Those who have had any such experience as the author will see its truthfulness at once, and to all other readers it is commended as a statement of actual things by one who experienced them to the fullest.

With this mysterious blending of the real and the imaginary, O’Brien opens his third major work on Vietnam, and throughout the book he never lets the reader get too comfortable about what is and what isn’t real. What is true, however, not what is real, is O’Brien’s final goal, and he uses all of fiction and metafiction’s effects to get there. O’Brien himself presides over the book, illuminating the creation of the stories, letting us know what really happened. Or is it a fictional character named Tim O’Brien, very much like the fictional Jorge Luis Borges who in one of Borges’s stories meets his own creator on the banks of the Charles? There’s no way of telling, and perhaps that’s O’Brien’s point—that fiction has a life of its own, and that story-truth, as he says in “How to Tell a True War Story,” is more important than happening-truth.

Like his earlier
Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried
alternates between a richly observed realism and fanciful yarn-spinning. There are ghosts and tall tales, shaggy-dog stories, metaphorical anecdotes, and on top of these, O’Brien and his characters comment on how stories operate, sometimes coming up with supposedly unwitting metaphors for that as well. It’s a daring performance, especially in an area where stringent realism has commonly been the ultimate goal. O’Brien, both drawing on and disowning his authority as a veteran, seems to be claiming as an ideal the power of fiction rather than that of witness.

The book is fractured, often contradictory. O’Brien loves to give us a ready-made sentimental image and then explode it, throw a different spin on it. Half the time it seems O’Brien is painting his fellow platoon members as innocent kids playing games, the other half as hardened killers. The book is sweet and vicious, deadly serious and whoopie-cushion goofy. Throughout, O’Brien and his characters find they can’t make other people understand their stories or their experiences, yet they (and O’Brien, in writing for us) continue to try. As in
If I
Die, there’s a split between private thought and public speech that only story can fill. And yet, can story really fill it? O’Brien seems to be saying yes, maybe.

O’Brien’s view of the soldier here is complex, and he extends this vision, for the first time, to the enemy, imagining the life and dreams of “The Man I Killed,” whose life is strikingly similar to that of the real Tim O’Brien in
If I Die.
His portrait of his fictional self as a vet and his take on the effect of memory are equally thoughtful. “It wasn’t a war story,” he says at one point. “It was a love story.” In making the reader feel the loss of friends and innocence and the resulting confusion of the years gone by, O’Brien gives the war a deeply personal resonance—all the while telling us that it’s a fake, a construction, just a story.

The Things They Carried
garnered excellent reviews, as all of O’Brien’s Vietnam books have, and while it didn’t win any of the major literary awards that year (possibly because by 1990 the critics, like the publishers, considered Vietnam over and done with), it has attracted a large following among writers and readers, and is often regarded as the finest single volume of fiction written about the Vietnam War.

The Things They Carried
T
IM
O’B
RIEN
1990

SPIN

The war wasn’t all terror and violence. Sometimes things could almost get sweet. For instance, I remember a little boy with a plastic leg. I remember how he hopped over to Azar and asked for a chocolate bar—“GI number one,” the kid said—and Azar laughed and handed over the chocolate. When the boy hopped away, Azar clucked his tongue and said, “War’s a bitch.” He shook his head sadly. “One leg, for Chrissake. Some poor fucker ran out of ammo.”

I remember Mitchell Sanders sitting quietly in the shade of an old banyan tree. He was using a thumbnail to pry off the body lice, working slowly, carefully depositing the lice in a blue USO envelope. His eyes were tired. It had been a long two weeks in the bush. After an hour or so he sealed up the envelope, wrote
FREE
in the upper right-hand corner, and addressed it to his draft board in Ohio.

On occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put fancy spin on it, you could make it dance.

I remember Norman Bowker and Henry Dobbins playing checkers every evening before dark. It was a ritual for them. They would dig a foxhole and get the board out and play long, silent games as the sky went from pink to purple. The rest of us would sometimes stop by to watch. There was something restful about it, something orderly and
reassuring. There were red checkers and black checkers. The playing field was laid out in a strict grid, no tunnels or mountains or jungles. You knew where you stood. You knew the score. The pieces were out on the board, the enemy was visible, you could watch the tactics unfolding into larger strategies. There was a winner and a loser. There were rules.

I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now, and the war has been over for a long while. Much of it is hard to remember. I sit at this typewriter and stare through my words and watch Kiowa sinking into the deep muck of a shit field, or Curt Lemon hanging in pieces from a tree, and as I write about these things, the remembering is turned into a kind of rehappening. Kiowa yells at me. Curt Lemon steps from the shade into bright sunlight, his face brown and shining, then he soars into a tree. The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over. But the war wasn’t all that way.

Like when Ted Lavender went too heavy on the tranquilizers. “How’s the war today?” somebody would say, and Ted Lavender would give a soft, spacey smile and say, “Mellow, man. We got ourselves a nice mellow war today.”

And like the time we enlisted an old poppa-san to guide us through the mine fields out on the Batangan Peninsula. The old guy walked with a limp, slow and stooped over, but he knew where the safe spots were and where you had to be careful and where even if you were careful you could end up like popcorn. He had a tightrope walker’s feel for the land beneath him—its surface tension, the give and take of things. Each morning we’d form up in a long column, the old poppa-san out front, and for the whole day we’d troop along after him, tracing his footsteps, playing an exact and ruthless game of follow the leader. Rat Kiley made up a rhyme that caught on, and we’d all be chanting it together:
Step out of line, hit a mine; follow the dink, you’re in the pink.
All around us, the place was littered with Bouncing Bet-ties and Toe Poppers and booby-trapped artillery rounds, but in those
five days on the Batangan Peninsula nobody got hurt. We all learned to love the old man.

It was a sad scene when the choppers came to take us away. Jimmy Cross gave the old poppa-san a hug. Mitchell Sanders and Lee Strunk loaded him up with boxes of C rations.

There were actually tears in the old man’s eyes.

“Follow dink,” he said to each of us, “you go pink.”

If you weren’t humping, you were waiting. I remember the monotony. Digging foxholes. Slapping mosquitoes. The sun and the heat and the endless paddies. Even in the deep bush, where you could die any number of ways, the war was nakedly and aggressively boring. But it was a strange boredom. It was boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom that caused stomach disorders. You’d be sitting at the top of a high hill, the flat paddies stretching out below, and the day would be calm and hot and utterly vacant, and you’d feel the boredom dripping inside you like a leaky faucet, except it wasn’t water, it was a sort of acid, and with each little droplet you’d feel the stuff eating away at your important organs. You’d try to relax. You’d uncurl your fists and let your thoughts go. Well, you’d think, this isn’t so bad. And right then you’d hear gunfire behind you and your nuts would fly up into your throat and you’d be squealing pig squeals. That kind of boredom.

I feel guilty sometimes. Forty-three years old and I’m still writing war stories. My daughter Kathleen tells me it’s an obsession, that I should write about a little girl who finds a million dollars and spends it all on a Shetland pony. In a way, I guess, she’s right: I should forget it. But the thing about remembering is that you don’t forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up in your head, where it goes in circles for a while, and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That’s the real obsession. All those stories.

• • •

Not bloody stories, necessarily. Happy stories, too, and even a few peace stories.

Here’s a quick peace story:

A guy goes AWOL. Shacks up in Danang with a Red Cross nurse. It’s a great time—the nurse loves him to death—the guy gets whatever he wants whenever he wants it. The war’s over, he thinks. Just nookie and new angles. But then one day he rejoins his unit in the bush. Can’t wait to get back into action. Finally one of his buddies asks what happened with the nurse, why so hot for combat, and the guy says, “All that peace, man, it felt so good it
hurt.
I want to hurt it
back.”

I remember Mitchell Sanders smiling as he told me that story. Most of it he made up, I’m sure, but even so it gave me a quick truth-goose. Because it’s all relative. You’re pinned down in some filthy hellhole of a paddy, getting your ass delivered to kingdom come, but then for a few seconds everything goes quiet and you look up and see the sun and a few puffy white clouds, and the immense serenity flashes against your eyeballs—the whole world gets rearranged—and even though you’re pinned down by a war you never felt more at peace.

What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end:

Norman Bowker lying on his back one night, watching the stars, then whispering to me, “I’ll tell you something, O’Brien. If I could have one wish, anything, I’d wish for my dad to write me a letter and say it’s okay if I don’t win any medals. That’s all my old man talks about, nothing else. How he can’t wait to see my goddamn medals.”

Or Kiowa teaching a rain dance to Rat Kiley and Dave Jensen, the three of them whooping and leaping around barefoot while a bunch of villagers looked on with a mixture of fascination and giggly horror. Afterward, Rat said, “So where’s the rain?” and Kiowa said, “The earth
is slow, but the buffalo is patient,” and Rat thought about it and said, “Yeah, but where’s the
rain?”

Or Ted Lavender adopting an orphan puppy—feeding it from a plastic spoon and carrying it in his rucksack until the day Azar strapped it to a Claymore antipersonnel mine and squeezed the firing device.

The average age in our platoon, I’d guess, was nineteen or twenty, and as a consequence things often took on a curiously playful atmosphere, like a sporting event at some exotic reform school. The competition could be lethal, yet there was a childlike exuberance to it all, lots of pranks and horseplay. Like when Azar blew away Ted Lavender’s puppy. “What’s everybody so upset about?” Azar said. “I mean, Christ, I’m just a
boy.”

I remember these things, too.

The damp, fungal scent of an empty body bag.

A quarter moon rising over the nighttime paddies.

Henry Dobbins sitting in the twilight, sewing on his new buck-sergeant stripes, quietly singing, “A tisket, a tasket, a green and yellow basket.”

A field of elephant grass weighted with wind, bowing under the stir of a helicopter’s blades, the grass dark and servile, bending low, but then rising straight again when the chopper went away.

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.”

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. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

HOW TO TELL
A TRUE WAR STORY

This is true.

I had a buddy in Vietnam. His name was Bob Kiley, but everybody called him Rat.

A friend of his gets killed, so about a week later Rat sits down and writes a letter to the guy’s sister. Rat tells her what a great brother she had, how together the guy was, a number one pal and comrade. A real soldier’s soldier, Rat says. Then he tells a few stories to make the point, how her brother would always volunteer for stuff nobody else would volunteer for in a million years, dangerous stuff, like doing recon or going out on these really badass night patrols. Stainless steel balls, Rat tells her. The guy was a little crazy, for sure, but crazy in a good way, a real daredevil, because he liked the challenge of it, he liked testing himself, just man against gook. A great, great guy, Rat says.

Anyway, it’s a terrific letter, very personal and touching. Rat almost bawls writing it. He gets all teary telling about the good times they had together, how her brother made the war seem almost fun, always raising hell and lighting up villes and bringing smoke to bear every which way. A great sense of humor, too. Like the time at this river when he went fishing with a whole damn crate of hand grenades. Probably the funniest thing in world history, Rat says, all that gore,
about twenty zillion dead gook fish. Her brother, he had the right attitude. He knew how to have a good time. On Halloween, this real hot spooky night, the dude paints up his body all different colors and puts on this weird mask and hikes over to a ville and goes trick-or-treating almost stark naked, just boots and balls and an M-16. A tremendous human being, Rat says. Pretty nutso sometimes, but you could trust him with your life.