Heavy

It’s hard to know what Tim O’Brien was trying to say in his (autobiographical?) novel The Things They Carried. It’s hard to tell truth from fiction. It’s hard to know what he was getting at, beyond an understanding that it can’t be understood.

Let me try to explain. The book opens with a chapter that is little more than a list with brief personal anecdotes thrown in. It is a list of the things they carried. Photographs. Bibles. Comic books. Medicine. Marijuana. Flak jackets. Grenade launchers. Guns.

The guilt and confusion that came with being a young, clueless soldier in Vietnam.

O’Brien, himself a soldier in Vietnam, and having written several nonfiction books about his time there, obviously pours himself into the book. The short vignettes that comprise the rest of the book are set mostly in Vietnam, but one follows a young man—a young man named Tim O’Brien—who sets off for the Canadian border hoping to escape the draft, but ends up lacking the courage to bail for real. You wonder what might be real and what might not. Several chapters address this directly; notably, “How to Tell a True War Story,” which begins, “This is true,” and which I maybe believe and maybe don’t, and “Good Form,” which implores, “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” As a novelist, I understand what he means, completely and unquestionably. That’s how novelists live; that’s what they swear by. You lie to tell a greater truth, and, within the context of the book, people believe those lies, and they walk away recognizing those lies as such but clutching that greater truth in their place.

But what was the greater truth here? O’Brien says repeatedly that no real war story should have a moral, and that if it does, it isn’t true. War is senseless, he says. War is weird. War makes people do things, become people, that they aren’t. True war stories don’t give people a new view of the world. They just make people cringe. So tell me, what was the truth? What did I walk away from it with? When everything is laid out on the table, I don’t need to dig, and I read to get my hands dirty. I love to dig. This book made some excellent points, and it was phenomenally written. The blurring of fact and fiction was at times frustrating, but after I learned to take everything I read at face value, even the corrections and supposed truths which supplemented the supposed lies, it was the right choice for the book.

My only other gripe about the book had to do with the lack of continuity in the storylines. I understood that it was really just a collection of vignettes, a collection of “true war lies,” as I’ve dubbed them. But to really understand a character, and to come to truly care about him, you need to see his everyday life. The most stable and continuous character in the book was Tim, the only one you saw before departure for Vietnam. It was after his draft notice, though, and he was running for his life and for his values. The book deals only briefly with his return from Vietnam. In any novel, but particularly, I think, a war novel, one needs to see the monotony of the before, the excruciation and occasional beauty of the during, and the irreducible change of the after. The before was undersized, the during choppy, and the after interesting only in the story of one of O’Brien’s comrades. I could appreciate the stories for what they were, but I could never really get inside the people and see it through their eyes.

Maybe that was the point. You can’t understand unless you’ve been there.