What makes a good war story? How much needs to be true for it to feel real?

Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" is a powerful, heartbreaking and gut-wrenching book about the Vietnam war. I had previously read the title story, which is excellent on its own, but I can thank the Ken Burns & Lynn Novick documentary for pushing me to read the entire book. O'Brien was interviewed in their TV series, and his wartime experiences fueled his writing.

"The Things They Carried" isn't really a novel or memoir, it's more a collection of linked short stories, each one looking at a different aspect of the war or of Tim's life. He remembers and mourns his friends who died, and he tries to reckon with what the war really meant. One of my favorite stories was when he considered running away to Canada to escape the military draft, and how he finally decided to return home and report for duty. He realized he would rather fight in a war he didn't believe in than risk being ostracized by his family and hometown.

The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.

I listened to this on audio, which was narrated by the actor Bryan Cranston, and he was a great choice. His gravelly voice handled both the grim and the bizarre elements of the war, and he has the warmth of character to make it feel like we were sitting around a campfire, sharing our deep, dark stories.

Five stars to Mr. O'Brien for working through a lot of angst and for writing so well, and five stars to Mr. Cranston for conveying it so beautifully.

Meaningful Quotes
"To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil -- everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble."

"For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity. Now and then, however, there were times of panic, when they squealed or wanted to squeal but couldn't, when they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons blindly and cringed and sobbed and begged for the noise to stop and went wild and made stupid promises to themselves and to God and to their mothers and fathers, hoping not to die. In different ways, it happened to all of them. Afterward, when the firing ended, they would blink and peek up. They would touch their bodies, feeling shame, then quickly hiding it. They would force themselves to stand. As if in slow motion, frame by frame, the world would take on the old logic -- absolute silence, then the wind, then sunlight, then voices. It was the burden of being alive."

"We kept the dead alive with stories. When Ted Lavender was shot in the head, the men talked about how they'd never seen him so mellow, how tranquil he was, how it wasn't the bullet but the tranquilizers that blew his mind. He wasn't dead, just laid-back. There were Christians among us, like Kiowa, who believed in the New Testament stories of life after death. Other stories were passed down like legends from old-timer to newcomer. Mostly though, we had to make up our own. Often they were exaggerated, or blatant lies, but it was a way of bringing body and soul back together, or a way of making new bodies for the souls to inhabit."

"There were occasions, I believed, when a nation was justified in using military force to achieve its ends, to stop a Hitler or some comparable evil, and I told myself that in such circumstances I would've willingly marched off to battle. The problem, though, was that a draft board did not let you choose your war."

“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of things they carried”.

“He wanted her to be a virgin and not a virgin, all at once. He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets. Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely—just alone—riding her bike across campus or sitting by herself in the cafeteria—even dancing, she danced alone—and it was the aloneness that filled him with love”.

Lieutenant Cross was just a kid, 24 years old, at war, in love with Martha. He couldn’t help it.

Some things they carried were superstition. Lieutenant Cross carried a good luck pebble.

“They carried the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often they carried each other, the wounded or weak”.

“They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various tots and molds. They carried the land itself—Vietnam, the place, the soul—powdery Orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces”.

They tried not to cry- or tremble—when a friend died—when digging a hole in the earth.

Feelings of shame.
“Lieutenant Cross hated himself. He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Ted Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war”.

“Men killed and died because they were embarrassed not to”.

Nothing positive. No dreams of glory or honor.

War is hell, nasty, fun, mysterious, terror, grotesque, adventurous, pity, despair, thrilling, beautiful, drudgery, longing, and love.

“War makes you dead”.

Devastating, haunting, lyrical, fiction, ( but real), powerful....
This book was first published in 2008. Reads like essays- memories- it’s extraordinary.
It takes only a few hours to read. I’m sorry I didn’t read it sooner.


Wishing this community a Merry Christmas- Happy Chanukah- a peaceful, healthy, happy holiday season.

I really, really wanted to like this book. It's received many awards, and is generally known to be a good book. But you know what? It was actually pretty f'in boring. Yes you heard that right. So, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien is only getting a short review.

It starts off pretty well. But if you're expecting a plot line you're going to be disappointed. It a collection of short stories that get pretty nonsensical, jumping all over the place. And boy is there some repetition. I know the author is trying to make a point, how vets come to terms with different aspects of the war twenty years down the road. But boy did I loose interest.

And reading some of the other reviews there's a lot of veterans not too happy with the way soldiers are portrayed. Which I can fully understand. Unprofessional with poor leadership. And this guy used to be a soldier.

The prose are actually pretty good, but still the approach to the subject is far from satisfying. If you're looking for a gripping tale that keeps you on the edge of your seat, then please look elsewhere.

And that is all she wrote. Not like me at all. I do like the sound of my own voice. But not when it comes to this book. Being pretentious can only do so much.

Thanks for reading and...cheers!

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. 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.

This is a great book about the Vietnam War. It's classified as fiction, but it really is non-fiction in a way. In the way that sometimes only fiction can encapsulate the truth.

I found this a quick and very engaging read. O'Brien is a wonderful author.

Note: If you're upset about baby animals purposefully being blown up and/or tortured to death, you might want to avoid this book.

"Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn't hit you until twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you get to the end you've forgotten the point again. And then for a long time you lie there watching the story in your head."

I don't know how much of this book is true. The title page says "The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction by Tim O'Brien." I'm willing to bet more is true than I would hope, and less is true than I would believe. O'Brien treats it like it's the truth, and then will tell you he's lying at different points. In the end, the point seems to be that it doesn't matter. What happened was chaos, it's the feeling the people are left with after which is the only fact to the individual, and as such he will give you the feeling that he remembers.

It often feels horrible. It often is funny. It's often exciting. He sums it up best: “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.”

Much like a character he meets at one point, I do not typically like war stories. The only time I tend to truly enjoy such works is when they are in the Science Fiction or Fantasy genres, far away from reality. Again like the character he meets, I did like this. This book was fascinating, not just in terms of the stories he tells, but his very postmodern way of deconstructing narratives. He frequently has characters chime in to interrupt the story saying it shouldn't be told that way. He blurs reality as Tim O'Brien is himself a character in the book, but his history is admittedly different than the author's own. He flat out lies to you, then explains why this is better than the truth. It's chaos… it's kind of beautiful. It works.

Typically on books of short stories I try to do a mini-review for each story. I won't be doing that here. They are all so connected, that even if they could stand alone, they really are all one tale. I'll make note that my favorite was "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," but overall they all get the same rating. A solid 4/5 stars

“A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.”

I had a friend who went to war. Part of him did not come home. His shoulder and much of his upper body was metal plate, but that is not the part I am talking about. The part that was left there was a piece of his soul, an innocence and lightness that could never be recaptured. He talked about the war when he was in his cups, which he was too often. His best buddy in the war was killed in front of his eyes, and Sam was convinced (be it true or not) that the bullet he took was meant for Sam. He felt his friend had saved his life and that he was not worthy of that sacrifice. Knowing him made reading this book a harder experience for me, it made the stories more real, it reminded me how many Sams there were out there in the jungles of Vietnam.

This is, of course, a book about war, and as such, not surprisingly, a book about loss. It is also a book about death, even the deaths of those who live, for people die in stages sometimes, they die in bits and pieces that they bury and exhume and rebury.

I cannot imagine anyone reads this book without taking it personally. Certainly the men who fought this war must find something I can never touch inside its pages. What I found myself seeing were Sam’s eyes, the way they sparkled when he was free of war for a moment and the way they clouded and glazed when he tried to tell anyone about what he was feeling. I would sometimes catch him in a quiet moment at his desk, and I knew without a word that he was there. From the first page, I was walking with Sam, not with Tim, but then I realized Sam and Tim and Kiowa and Curt Lemon, are all the same person for one short moment in time.

I know why I have had this on my TBR for so long and procrastinated about opening it to read. No one really wants to go back to that war for even a second. I understand as little now about why we were there as I did then, and history usually gives a person more perspective, not less. I think about all the potential we lost, not only in the person of those who died, but in those who came back so changed and could find no way to move forward. Tim O’Brien is one of the lucky ones. He found a voice through his writing and purged some of his ghosts in that way. Some men just carried them to the grave, unpurged...and that must be the worst weight they were asked to carry.

The blurb on the back says it all:"The Best American writer of his generation." You can argue with that--as to who is the best American writer of my (Baby Boomer) generation. Having just finished this book--and been blown away by it-- I wouldn't argue the point. This book was published in 1990 but it only came into my hands recently as a donation to my local library book sale. It is powerful and there are some scenes created by the author that are indelible. Based on the author's experience as an American infantryman in Vietnam, it is a mix of fact and fiction, with some real characters and some fictional. I can understand why some readers would not care for that--preferring a book to be either factual or fiction. But O'Brien captures some truths about war in this book, one of the best books written about the Vietnam War or any war--in my opinion.
The book got me thinking about why this country goes from one war right to the next one. The United States having just exited out of a 20-year war in Afghanistan, the thought occurs: did we learn nothing from the Vietnam War? It does occur to me that one reason humans fight wars is that men gain something positive from it, something they need, sad to say. This comes through strongly in "The Things They Carried." And I will end this review with a quote from O'Brien.
"It's a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn't felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake...When you're afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood--you give it together, you take it together.." It seems that peace cannot provide the same intense sense of brotherhood and shared sacrifice that war does. This, to me, is the supreme tragedy of the human race.

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. 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.

This is a book about war, but it does not glorify war, nor does it leave a feeling of complete pointlessness. This is a very personal collection of stories from and about the men of the Alpha Company during their time in Vietnam. O'Brien manages to write a book about war that teaches with out moralizing. I am not someone that typically connects with books that cover war, but this one, while startling, was not about shock and awe, it was informative and made someone like myself that typically can not connect to this type of material connect with these men. The events were tragic, but the ways the men were changed was even more so.

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.

This collection was about more than just the war as well, there was more below the surface. O'Brien explored the idea of what makes something 'real' or 'honest'. The stories are perceptions and are full of embellishments, as well as, omissions, and sometimes that is the only way to convey truth of a situation. A simple reporting of the facts can take the heart out of the situation, leaving a sterilized conveyance, that is no more true than a complete fabrication if that fabrication at least touches on the actual feel of the event, the true experience. This book was tackling something larger, something about human nature and it's flaws and fragility, but also it's resiliency and virtues; this is a dark book much of the time, but through the darkness we can appreciate the pure glimmers of light.

O'Brien's writing sneaks up on you, luring you into the minds of these men, giving you glimpses of their fear, their sense of loss and confusion, he manages to make you empathize with men even when their actions are deplorable.

(Special note for my specific copy: I was given this book by a friend who got it second hand as well, so we both had the unusual pleasure of reading this book with the running commentary of a young lady named Sallie. O'Brien has a clear voice in his writing, but so did Sallie and her voice was a bit more juvenile and well... let's just say it - irritating. I couldn't help, but read the insightful gems Sallie felt she had to jot down in the margins: "Wow, they carried a lot of stuff!" [referencing the opening paragraphs], "That's mean.", "I hate when people are like that!", "Reminds me of my aunt." [this was in reference to a not so flattering description of a woman with loose morals], "Reminds me of my friends" [this in response to a guy that is basically being described as simple-minded], "That would be so hard, I would get so frustrated!!" [when it is stated that the Vietnamese tend not to speak a whole lot of English], and comments such as "That would suck!" and "Aw, that is sad." [you can probably guess from the subject matter that these were pretty epic simplifying understatements]. Well, Sallie wherever you might be... this was a unique reading experience, thanks for bringing some levity to it(or something)... I guess.)

See But wait … way down below

… and sometimes I can see Timmy skating with Linda under the yellow floodlights. I’m young and happy. I’ll never die. I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story.

That’s the last 71 words of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Timmy is Tim O'Brien (or maybe "Tim O'Brien", or maybe both or neither). Linda is a girl who he was in love with when he was nine years old - maybe, unless she's made up. But even if so, the story, the last one in the book, could be "true". Linda died of cancer a few months after Timmy fell in love with her. How much of this story is true? Does it matter? Read on.

I bet a ton of papers and reports have been written for high school and college English courses on this book. It’s so different from anything I’ve read before. I was not able to underline in the book as I read, because I read my daughter’s copy of the book. She probably read it in college. She read it in college. That’s my story. Whether it’s true I don’t know, but it should be.

So, since I couldn’t underline, I have nothing to base an analysis of the book on. So that’s a story I don’t have to write.


Asides, almost

O’Brien has become not only the premier writer on the American Vietnam experience, he has become something of a meta-writer on the concept of truth in “fiction”. The fact that this book has that stuff in it is why, against all my habits, after starting to read the book last night after dinner, I finished it before going to bed (at 4:30 am). There are only two other writers who generally lift me away from all other books I am reading and won’t let me back to them until they put me down – George Pelecanos and Patrick O’Brian (hmm – O’Brian, O’Brien).

In case you don’t know, this is not a novel. It’s a collection of short stories. It’s novel-like because most of the stories take place in Vietnam, within a platoon of men fighting there in the late 60s, and the same characters slide from one story to the next. But the stories aren’t in any particular time-order, though the later stories in the book generally happen later than the earlier ones. And some of the stories are less connected to the others.

Who is “Tim O’Brien”?

There are really two Tim O’Briens here, a character and a writer, and they aren’t the same.

I didn’t realize for a long time that the book’s narrator, “Tim O’Brien”, who is telling these stories is a fictional character. He shares a lot of unlikely details with Tim O’Brien the writer, who wrote the stories. But they aren’t the same!

Or at least we can’t be sure where they are the same, and where they’re distinct. (Actually, “Tim O’Brien” sometimes talks about writing some of the stories – but maybe that’s the other Tim O’Brien, the writer. You do understand where all those English assignments come from, don’t you?) Both the Tim O’Briens grew up in Worthington Minnesota. They both graduated from Macalester College in 1968. They both got drafted soon after college, they both served in Vietnam in 1969-70, they both were involved in combat for about a year. They both came home and became writers. But, did I mention that they aren’t the same?

Get your hands around that.

How O’Brien dances with the truth.

This ambiguity about the O’Briens is part of a larger ambiguity that O’Brien (let’s just use the same name for both of them from now on) writes/talks about throughout the novel – an ambiguity about what is true and what isn’t. There’s even a story in the book about this: “How to Tell a True War Story”.

O’Brien says that if someone tells you a war story, “You’d feel cheated if it never happened … Yet even if it did happen – and maybe it did, anything’s possible – even then you know it can’t be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” What he’s implying is that a story about something that never happened can affect the listener, can impart to him a truth about an overall situation, “reality”, that is not imparted by a mere recounting of what actually happened. O’Brien is reported as once answering the question “Can someone who’s been in war teach us anything about war?”, by saying “No. All he can do is tell us stories about war.”

Fiction and reality can blur; and in war they can’t not blur.

The two stories that nailed Tim O’Brien.

There are two stories in the book which wend their way through multiple other stories, and ultimately illustrate the ambiguous nature of O’Brien’s reality.

The first one is the story of a Vietnamese he killed. Or at least he may have killed. The main description is in The Man I Killed. Other stories that deal with it in depth are Ambush and finally Good Form. But the episode is also mentioned in several other stores.

The second of these extended, and very ambiguous, tales is a story about the death of his closest friend in the platoon. See Speaking of Courage, Notes, In the Field, and finally Field Trip. These four stories could be analyzed from now to next Christmas without coming to a certain conclusion as to what actually happened, and what the two Tim O’Briens had to do with any of it.


The two stories that nailed me.

(2) Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong

The second of these stories was a mind-blowing story called Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong. Tim O’Brien the character plays no part in it, except to introduce it.
Vietnam was full of strange stories, some improbable, some well beyond that, but the stories that will last forever are those that swirl back and forth across the border between trivia and bedlam, the mad and the mundane. This one keeps returning to me. The actual story is told by one of the platoon characters, Rat; it’s about  an assignment that Rat previously had on a remote mountain top near a village (“ville”). It was sort of a Mash-type assignment, where wounded would be brought in by local choppers for emergency and trauma care, then shipped out by chopper to rear areas. Mostly they played volleyball and sat around, probably smoking weed. No officers, no discipline. One day they’re shooting the shit, and someone says hey you know we could fly a broad in here. A few weeks later, a “tall, big-boned blond” steps out of the supply chopper one morning, and is introduced by their young medic as Mary Anne, his seventeen year old girlfriend from Cleveland Heights Senior High, by way of LA, Bangkok, and Saigon.

Well, skipping a whole lot of the story, the girl takes to ‘Nam like a bee to a flower. She starts dressing like the guys, learns how to fire a rifle, goes down into the ville to check out the locals, and finally starts going out on patrols with six Greenies (Berets) that have their own little station in an enclosed area near the medic place (thus sort of leaving her boy friend). Again I’m not going to go into the details, but  the story takes a very strange twist, and we find this seventeen year old morphing into a female Apocalypse Now style Brando character, wearing a necklace made out of human tongues and hanging out with the Greenies in their hootch.

Across the room a dozen candles were burning on the floor near the open window. The place seemed to echo with a weird deep-wilderness sound – tribal music – bamboo flutes and drums and chimes. But what hit you first was … two kinds of smells. There was a topmost scent of joss sticks and incense, like the fumes of some exotic smokehouse, but beneath the smoke lay a deeper more powerful stench …Thick and numbing, like an animal’s den, a mix of blood and scorched hair and excrement and the sweet-sour odor of moldering flesh – the stink of the kill … On a post at the rear of the hooch was the decayed head of a large black leopard … Off in the gloom a few dim figures lounged in hammocks … The music came from a tape deck, but the high voice was Mary Anne’s … she stepped out of the shadows … barefoot. She wore her pink sweater and a white blouse and a cotton skirt.

And that necklace.

Well Rat draws the story out nicely, then finally ends it with
And then one morning, all alone, Mary Anne walked off into the mountains and did not come back.
… But the story did not end there. If you believed the Greenies, Rat said, Mary Anne was still somewhere out there in the dark. Odd movements, odd shapes. Late at night, when the Greenies were out on ambush, the whole rain forest seemed to stare in at them – a watched feeling – and a couple times they almost saw her sliding through the shadows. Not quite, but almost. She had crossed to the other side. She was part of the land. She was wearing her culottes, her pink sweater, and a necklace of human tongues. She was dangerous. She was ready for the kill.      Worth the price of admission, that one.

(1) On the Rainy River

But the first of the stories that nailed me, maybe not as flamboyant, not as good a movie script, was On the Rainy River. I don’t need to really tell this story. Actually I do. But only one spoiler two spoilers. The introduction is simply “This is one story I’ve never told before.”  It’s about “Tim’s” and/or Tim’s summer of ’68, after graduating from Macalester; after receiving within a couple weeks a draft notice; after working in a pig slaughterhouse in Worthington for several weeks; anguishing over what he should do about this war that he doesn’t believe in, that’s he’s being called to; finally leaving a note to his parents, taking off, driving north up through Duluth, International Falls, then to the west along the Rainy River. Just across from Canada. Where he stops at a run-down fishing resort called the Tip Top Lodge, and stays for a few days, the only customer of the eighty-one year old owner, Elroy Berdahl.

Elroy Berdahl: “The hero of my life … the man saved me. He offered exactly what I needed, without questions, without any words at all. He took me in. He was there at the critical time – a silent, watchful presence.”

Tim lays it all on the table, all the things that were urging him to flee to Canada, all the things that were holding him back. (He tells us the readers, that is, not Elroy. He and Elroy only make small talk, but as Tim realizes later, Elroy knows what's going on, yet never says anything.) The last day at the Lodge, Elroy takes him out fishing on a sunny, cold afternoon. He turns the boat north, guns the motor, and steers all the way across the river, cutting the motor to drift twenty feet off the Canadian shore. Baits his hook, says nothing, starts fishing. Tim sits in the bow, looking at the forest, looking at an invisible boundary that, if crossed, will change his life forever.

I think he meant to bring me up against the realities, to guide me across the river and to take me to the edge and to stand a kind of vigil as I chose a life for myself
… You’re twenty-one years old, you’re scared, and there’s a hard squeezing pressure in your chest.
What would you do?
Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you’re leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?

n
He can’t jump. “I did try. It just wasn’t possible.” I couldn’t risk the embarrassment.

He drives home.

The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.

This story affected me deeply. Of course I cried. You have to know that it’s early in the book, before I realized that “Tim” maybe wasn’t Tim, and that the story was probably not actually true. And although I now think its truth is not the truth of happening, it still is true, but its truth is the truth of story.

For it could have been my story. I was less than two years older than Tim. Both my future wife and I had graduated from college in ’66. (She had graduated from Macalester for godsakes.) And I had received my draft notice just a few weeks after graduating, had even driven to Ft. Holabird in Baltimore for my pre-induction physical that summer. I wasn’t working in a slaughterhouse, but at the Dept. of Health Education and Welfare (HEW) that summer, programming some primitive desk top computer with paper tape. And then out of the blue, I can’t even remember how it happened, I wound up going to a job interview at the Naval Research Laboratory, and was hired, and given a deferment.

That was the first really momentous occurrence in my life that taught me that I had no real control over my fate. Things just happen.


A couple years ago my wife and I went to our fiftieth HS reunion in the small town in Minnesota where we grew up. I met a classmate who I hadn’t known very well in school. He was from the country, didn’t go to my church, so we just didn’t know each other real well, despite being in a class of only about a hundred. He said that it was the first reunion he had come to. The reason was, he had skipped to Canada when he was drafted. But ever since, he had been too embarrassed to return to see his old classmates. I told him that I was really glad he had come. I’m also pretty sure I said something to him like “Joe, you were one of the brave ones”. At least I hope I did. I think Tim would have said that.

n  But wait ... an Epiloguen

Here's where I've decided to override the end of my prior narrative.

It's 13 August 2016. Today my wife and I drove to International Falls MN, just a side trip on the way to visit family three hours farther west. Our motel turned out to be right on the south bank of the Rainy River. I talked about Tim's story with her. I took a camera, and we walked behind the motel and down a steep path to the river. Across the water, Canada. The river flowed from right to left, from Rainy Lake up to the northwest, 85 miles into Lake of the Woods - its waters flowing from there, into the Winnipeg River, through Lake Winnipeg, out the Nelson River, finally into Hudson Bay.

To the west the sun was glaring off the rippling water. Somewhere up that 85 miles was the fabled Tip Top Lodge, haunted by the ghosts of Elroy Berdahl and maybe Tim ("Tim"?) O'Brien. I took a picture, thinking that so much glare would ruin it. But no ...

n  n

not at all. It fact that bright sun, in the blue summer sky, seemed to lay down a white pathway on the river, somehow strangely getting wider as it moved into the distance ... perhaps widening more and more as it moved farther and farther, mile upon mile, winding through the Lake of the Woods, on and on into Hudson Bay … and somehow lighting all the possible twists and turns that a life could have taken from that moment when a young man sat in a boat twenty feet from Canada and cried.

Well, that’s what I’ve decided to say about this picture of the Rainy River. Glad I took it.

And guess what. Rereading the comments below, I discovered (#35) that Fionnuala had alrady written this Epilogue, lacking only the photo to illustrate it. Here I thought I'd written something clever.

My expectations for this book were way too high. At my local bookstore, favorites of the employees are marked with a special bookmark filled with signatures of all who loved the book. This had at least ten signatures on it. In addition, a trusted friend on Goodreads hinted that it was one of her favorite books, reminding her of a book we had both read and loved, City of Thieves. With that kind of fanfare, it's no wonder all I could say after I finished reading, "Well, that was disappointing."

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien is part fiction, part non-fiction, part personal memoir and part Intro to Writing about the Vietnam War. O'Brien served in Vietnam and claims the story as his as well as those he served with but by the book's end, I wasn't sure how much of the story was true and how much he thought would make an interesting book. He spends the first chapter outlining his characters, detailing what gear the soldiers were required to carry as well as the few individual tokens each chose to bring along and for what reasons and I suppose by leading with a chapter like that, I expected to form a connection of sorts with these men. Most are reintroduced during various later chapters, but I was never sure who was who or what happened when to which soldier, mostly due to the author being unclear about what was the truth.

For instance, in once chapter, a character is home after the war, driving around a lake in his truck wishing he could tell someone, his father, his old girlfriend, a stranger at a restaurant, about how he didn't earn the Silver Star because he couldn't save his friend from drowning in a sinkhole of sewage because it smelled too bad only to be told in another chapter that none of it actually happened. He hadn't actually let his friend die. Or he hadn't actually almost earned the Silver Star. Or that particular character wasn't actually a real person. The truth comes from that it could have and probably did happen. To someone. At some time. Somewhere. O'Brien uses an entire chapter to boast about this method of writing and what he considers the most honest way to tell the truth about what happens during a war where there is no such thing as truth. He explains that much of what he writes actually happened but is probably not true and the stuff that he makes up probably happened. Wait. So you're telling me....what the...?

While the quirky mixture of fiction and memoir and how-to-be-a-writer is probably what makes it such a darling of reading circles, I found the combination of short stories, modern day confessions and whole chapters explaining why he included the chapters preceding them all tinged with a certain self-importance. I felt he was trying to expose war as it really is, like he was the first one to figure out that war is hell and morally ambiguous. It's his version of the truth. Even if he had to make some of it up to prove it.

I get that the war probably traumatized him for life. I don't see how becoming friends with people, only to see them blown to bits or drowned in a sludge of sewage could be anything but traumatizing. Furthermore, I see how this book might be considered intelligent, even artsy. The writing is unusual for a war story in that its circular and poetic, tangled up without any sense of chronology. But, for a book about a group of men who served together in Vietnam and what they carried and why, I should care more about these men and what happened to them. The writing, however pretty, shouldn't get in the way of that. The unpredictable and incongruent format O'Brien uses prevented me from forming any real intimacies with any of the characters, real or not.

Unfortunately, I think that's exactly what the author was hoping to do with this book. I think he wanted me to care about these individuals and their varied backgrounds, the reasons they served and the manner in which some died. More importantly, he seemed to want me to understand that war isn't really about valiance or honor by sharing stories about heroes who were neither valiant nor honorable. On a certain level, both of those things happened. I saw the gritty reality, the heartbreak and the inhumanity. But, I believe I needed to really know these men and not just their caricatures as O'Brien painted them, for that to happen and so I'm left disappointed and wondering if I missed some different and greater purpose of the book that other readers noticed.

Technically speaking, The Things They Carried is extremely well-written. O'Brien is a good, tight writer who knows how to weave a story. But even while I admire his style and technique, I am put off by the emptiness and moral vacuum he leaves when his machine guns and grenades finish ripping open your insides. While I wasn't looking for Sunday school platitudes from a book about Vietnam, I was looking for some reason, some sense which he could bring to bear after twenty years of writing and reflecting on his experiences there. Instead what I found was a collection of disjointed stories full of nihilism, gore, G.I. trashy talk, suffering and torture.

There's no arguing about the ramifications of war, the terror, the destruction and the loss. And perhaps I should end there. That's what the book is about. Full stop. After twenty years, the author, who actually didn't have it nearly so badly as many who went to Vietnam, is still trying to come to grips with what he saw, felt and did. He writes that men killed and died because they were embarrassed not to, that telling/writing about his experiences heals him and helps him forgive himself. And yet, it seems clear that he still hasn’t healed and doesn't forgive himself. At one point he confesses that the bravest thing on earth sometimes is just to sit through the night and feel the cold in your bones. There are these isolated pockets – or nuggets – of wisdom to be found in this book. But still he credits the wrong source for his insights and continues along his own weary path. For O’Brien, story is the god at whose altar he worships, but so far at least, his god hasn’t lived up to expectation.

Maybe twenty years isn't enough. Maybe Vietnam wasn't enough. Maybe all the books he can ever write won’t be enough.

The first half of this book is amazing. He drops off narratives and picks up them again and intensifies them and I am floored by it. The first few stories are unlike anything I've read before. Burning the girlfriend's picture, fleeing to Canada, cleaning out blood clots. Amazing.

In my opinion the second half gets a little self-indulgent. O'Brien dulls the ax by continually thumping away at the same feelings and the same ideas. Like when he talks about the first dead body he saw as a child, a little nine-year-old girl that he fell in love with in elementary school. It somehow cheapens everything. The intensity with which he describes his nine-year-old affections for this girl makes it seem like perhaps he's just sentimental and would feel the way he does even if he had never been to war.

Or, perhaps, going to war gives him the right to feel this way, regardless of what he's discussing. Perhaps war changed him in some way, or gave him a different kind of permission to access sympathy and sadness. I don't know.

Still good. Definitely put this on your "must read" list.