Maddenation
The Things They Carried
David recommended this book by Tim O’Brien to everyone in the family. I finished it last week, but didn’t get around to writing this review until today. It’s Veteran’s Day and I didn’t realize that until this very moment.
The Things They Carried is a great book. Straightforward and poignant. A work of fiction, Tim says, but then he hits you with truth. That’s the difference between ordinary writing and great writing—truth. Great writing is the truth. I said that to myself one day many years ago and immediately knew I was right. Don’t ask me to explain it.
Is O’Brien’s book fiction because he embellished the facts, or is it creative non-fiction because, in essence, his stories really happened? Or is it true because the feelings his stories invoke are true? For example, did O’Brien’s trip to northern Minnesota really happen? (On the rainy river, p. 40) I’m not sure, but it made me remember those days in the 60’s when we were being drafted and some of us were escaping to Canada. It made me feel again what it was like. It will help you feel it too, maybe better than an accurate telling of whatever really happened.
The book was believable to me except for, oddly, the chapter How to Tell a True War Story. Maybe O’Brien did that on purpose. I mean, I get the picture. Use young Vietnam GI lingo, make it stark, surprise the reader with your matter-of-fact delivery and understatement. O’Brien does all that, but then he starts to generalize; just what he tells you not to do. The believable parts are lies, he says, the unbelievable parts are real.
But is a true war story never moral? Does it not instruct? Or encourage virtue? Or suggest models of proper behavior? O’Brien says, “if a story seems moral, do not believe it”! And so I am confused. Am I to believe O’Brien’s truth? I still don’t know.
My story is different. Yes, I served in Vietnam, but I was an REMF, the first two letters of which stand for “Rear Echelon.” I didn’t make war, I helped the real soldiers make war better. In reality, I did nothing of value. I did occasionally see real soldiers come in from the bush, and held them in a kind of awe. They knew it too. They were out there risking their lives and doing the dirty work, so they deserved our respect. They were the ones who risked being loaded into a body bag every day. They are the ones who later had the bad dreams and the difficulty adjusting and the “post traumatic stress.” So the stories I may tell you are true, except they aren’t war stories.
For O’Brien, Vietnam was life changing, life shaping, life creating. In his chapter, The Man I Killed, he tells you about the man he killed, or that he might have killed. That’s where I really started to respect the book, and to be emotionally involved in it. He’s repetitive. He keeps telling you about the young man with clean fingernails whose chest was sunken and poorly muscled. He speculates about the young man’s education, his aspirations. He tells you more than he could know, but still it is true, or might be true, because it could be true. And when he writes about it, it’s 20 years later and he’s 43 years old, and he’s a writer, and his young daughter asks him why he keeps writing war stories, and he can’t or won’t answer her, because how could she understand?
So in the end, you don’t know what’s true; maybe it’s all true, or none of it. I mean he even tells you that the believable parts are lies, the unbelievable parts are real. On page 180 he tells you the “happening truth” and contrasts it to the “story truth” which is more graphic and more dramatic, and initiates more of the feelings he must have had when he was there. And that raises my question again. Is it more important to convey the accuracy of events or to invoke the feelings? I think maybe the truth is in the feelings.
As I’m writing this tonight, Veteran’s Day, Jessica Lynch’s interview with Diane Sawyer is being aired. So I’m listening to it and watching it over my shoulder as I sit facing the computer. I am struck by Jessica’s youth, her small, delicate body, the pain she is still enduring, the memories her brain has mercifully repressed. Like so many others, she signed up for active duty with no real understanding of where it would ultimately take her. She knew there was risk, sure, but before it happens to you it’s the other guy who’s going to get hurt. When her ordeal came, she did her best to bear it. Now that she’s home she says she doesn’t consider herself a hero, only a survivor. That seems like truth to me.
Dad • Reviews • 11/12/03 • 5 comments
Comments
Dad • 11/12/03 • 11:07 AM:I was tired last night, and missed an obvious opportunity to relate the Jessica Lynch story to O’Brien’s book. The war story we heard first was of her “fighting to the death” against hopeless odds, being captured only after her ammunition was spent, her body broken. Later, there was the video-taped rescue from the Iraqi hospital by special forces. O’Brien could have told us this was a lie. It sounded too good, it confirmed our moral authority, it made her and her rescuers heros.
Now we know that her weapon was jammed, that she spent most of the firefight praying, that the rescue team encountered no resistance (although they probably didn’t know that going in). She may have been sexually assaulted, but she doesn’t remember. It’s still a great story with a happy ending, but we are left with a bitter taste of propaganda.
Dan • 11/12/03 • 3:09 PM:I think that I will get around to reading that book.
David • 11/13/03 • 12:01 PM:Very well put, Dad. The difference, and maybe the battle between, what actually happened and is experienced and (in this case) what O’Brien writes about, is definitely cause for thought and conversation.
When I saw him give a talk here in Chicago two weeks ago he addressed this seeming contradiction. His example was the fishing story. Each time you tell it the fish gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger (we’ve all told and heard this many times). Because after a while you want to audience/listener to understand and feel what it was like to catch such a fish - get them as close to your experience as you can. And sometimes the experience is greater/more dramatic/ more traumatic than the facts. The truth is in the experience and the facts. You said it Dad - great writing is truth. True.
Man. It’s a lot to think about. I imagine Pat will like thinking about the differences/similarities of truth vs. fact in storytelling. Hmm…
David • 02/16/05 • 3:46 PM:There are three truths: my truth, your truth, and the truth. —Chinese proverb (from today’s AWAD)
Patrick • 02/16/05 • 5:08 PM:Dave-O, make sure you remove the hard returns when you copy and paste from emails. Thanks! And I thought that was an ancient Extreme proverb, from their hit 1992 album III Sides to Every Story! Hey, I just realized that Extreme’s albums are “Extreme”, “Extreme II: Pornograffiti”, “Extreme III Sides to Every Story”, and “Extreme Waiting IV the Punchline.” Clever. They quit because they couldn’t pun V (five) (though they didn’t do II very well either). And doesn’t “Pornograffiti” just sound like something Cannibal Corpse would think of? It’s like the Grateful Dead with their skeleton fiddler guy. Just looking at that image and hearing the band name, you’d expect some heavy acid metal, but they’re a weaselly folk jam band!
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