r— v-
«:5, W“ 1"? 21:.
3a: 55“}! 3.3-“;- . m
figWg:
ffi‘vfi’r. ‘AMJ‘ ‘.
':':‘..c-..":vx

m,

‘1‘? 3’

. “as."
$.33.“ an;
' t

«.‘c

,4}!
«’39:...
Sr? "

'vv 1-
ggéntm -‘
wcm» 'Edfi

C
'fi‘fil
23:2;- «-
('01: ‘ 5
391-7,” ‘xéVfie-eu
.3 ‘é‘afi‘h :2-

! 1 .

c

.
«’
r?‘

 

 

‘ ‘ “45818

GAN STATE

"Wl’l’lllllll

llllllllllll

1018 8476

This is to certify that the
thesis entitled
"Responsibly Inventing History":
The Work of Tim O'Brien
presented by

Brian Cole McNerney

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for '

MASTERS degree in English

g/MW

Major professor

 

 

Date 74 ZO’/9¢/

0-7639 MS U is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution

 

LIBRARY
Michigan State
University

 

 

 

PLACE IN RETURN BOX to romovo this ohookout from your moord.
TO AVOID FINES roturn on or Moro dot. duo.

DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE

 

MM 3998 '
1819‘

3 y. 1
APR 2 9 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MSU Is An Afflnnotivo Action/Emu] Opportunity Institution
Wanna-M

 

"RESPONSIBLY IN VENTING HISTORY": THE WORK OF TIM O'BRIEN

Brian Cole McNerney

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of English

1994

 

ABSTRACT
"Responsibly Inventing History": The Work of Tim O'Brien
By

Brian Cole McNemey

This thesis examines the literature which has emerged in response to the American
involvement in Vietnam using a framework of innocence, experience, and aftermath. I
argue that these narratives should be recognized as a distinct sub-genre within American
literature based on thematic concerns, linguistic patterns, and a self-conscious use of the
"war story. " I then examine the work of Tim O'Brien, using the same framework of
innocence, experience, and aftermath, pointing out correspondences with other narratives,
' and explore O'Brien's self—conscious use of the "war story" as a narrative form. I
consider the metafictional element present throughout his work and investigate his use of
revision as a deliberate artistic strategy. In an appendix, I provide a transcript of an
interview I conducted with Tim O'Brien in East Lansing, Michigan, on 7 April 1994, in

which I pursue these topics in more depth with the writer.

ii.

Copyright by
BRIAN COLE MCNERNEY
1994

iii.

 

an'

This thesis is dedicated to my father--a quite fine soldier;
toTim O'Brien--whose literature inspired this work;
and to the soldiers of C Battery, 3rd Battalion, 17th Field Artillery,
who served with little complaint in the Persian Gulf War.

iv.

Acknowledgments

First, foremost, I must thank Victor Howard, Professor of English at Michigan State
University, who made this happen in a sometimes inhospitable environment. While 1 wish
him unbridled pleasure in his retirement, I also want him to remember that because of his
grace under pressure, outsiders like myself periodically infiltrate academia and make our
modest contributions. With Victor's help.

I wish also to thank Lino Pretto, who proved his mettle as a vet, and assured me of the
value of enduring friendship. Catherine Calloway, of Arkansas State University, provided
invaluable bibliographic help which foreshortened the research portion, and graciously
introduced me to a number of Vietnam War critics whose work I inevitably encountered.
Steven Kaplan provided me an illuminative manuscript of his work in progress,
Understanding Tim O'Brien, which I trust will become the standard—bearer of discussion
on O'Brien. Marilyn Wilson, a distinguished Professor of English Education at Michigan
State, reminded me that academia need not be a constant threat. She helped me become a
(future) teacher in palpable ways.

I wish to formally thank Tim O'Brien, for his willingness to come to East Lansing and
tell true war stories, as well as allowing me to interview him.

Colonel Peter Stromberg deserves special thanks. Thank you for your support of my
entry into the US. Army Advanced Civil Schooling Program as well as the opportunity to
instruct cadets, future Army officers, our fiiture.

My father and mother have been indispensable: encouraging, listening, advising.

Finally, I wish to thank my wife, Sarah, who demonstrated celestial tolerance. She
assisted me invaluably by transcribing the interview, a painstakingly slow and difficult
process. Also, my daughters Angela and Megan, and my son Brendan Patrick, born on 15
February 1991, while I was at the "office" in the Persian Gulf: You have already exhibited

immaculate timing. Let's tell some war stories.

Page

13
23
45
60
62

69
81
86
102
109
111
118

153
158

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1: Biographical Background
Chapter 2: Literary Sub-Genre: Narrative Expressions of
Vietnam
Narratives of Innocence
Narratives of Experience
Narratives of Aftermath: Inevitable Reconciliations
Summary
Chapter 3: "Responsibly Inventing History": The Work of Tim
O'Brien
O'Brien's Elusive Innocence
O'Brien's Experiences in Vietnam (Part 1)
War Stories/ War Records (Experience Part 2)
Healing and Consideration
Conclusion
Notes
Appendix: "Responsibly Inventing History": An Interview with
Tim O'Brien
Works Cited
Selected Bibliography of Reference Material

 

figure 1

List of Figures

Figure 1 Author Tim O'Brien

vii.

FIGURE 1

 

Author Tim O'Brien

The \'
Bush's prr
proudly. F
War mil r

after the f

011 the b3
hi8 0W7] C

iEiiOW Ve

Introduction

The Vietnam War is not over.1

This assertion is made in contradistinction to George
Bush's proclamation after the Persian Gulf in 1991 that America could finally, and even
proudly, put this "other" long war behind us for good.2 The reality is that the Vietnam
War will never end, at least not in the national consciousness. Almost two firll decades
after the final helicopter wobbled off the embassy headquarters in Saigon, the president's
pronouncement reveals how that warcontinues to percolate its unique blend of cultural
symbolism and awareness of military defeat in a country particularly ill-adapted to failure
on the battlefield. The author Tim O'Brien, 3 soldier-writer-storyteller, upon reflection on

his own combat experiences in Vietnam 1969-70, warned Americans and particularly his

fellow veterans not to forget this war:

We should remember. Not in a crippling, debilitating way, but rather a form of
affirmation: Yes, war is hell. The cliché is true. Oh, we all know it's true, we
know it in an abstract way, the way we know that the moon is a lonely place. But
soldiers, having been there, have witnessed the particulars which give validity and
meaning to the abstract. That's an important kind of knowledge, for it reminds us
of the stakes: human lives, human limbs. Real lives, real limbs. Nothing abstract.
("We've Adjusted Too Well," 205-06).

O'Brien's caution above, written in 1981, resonates still: his plea for remembrance
coincides with what has turned out to be a deluge of films, poetry, memoirs, and both
short and long fictional narratives about the Vietnam conflict. O'Brien's caution coincided
with the commemoration of the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington, DC, and

followed the publication of his novel, Going After Cacciato.3

The country has not, in
fact, forgotten. In these intervening years O'Brien followed a trajectory fiom ex-soldier
and ex—student to the pursuit of writing fiction, much of it war stories of the war in which
he proved to be a reluctant participant. Though he at times worries about being typecast

as a ”Vietnam war writer" (Naparsteck, 4), much of his writing is dominated by the war,

 

lithe ar'trl
lithium
Tilt we
looking al‘.
miter retu.
his lislons'
commune.
innocence
Die m a (n
lhoughifirl
HmO-g. \\
Vietnam it
C‘Or'iflate u,
SOidiers‘ C‘
extend ‘0
“in Pyl.
me dimm:
insider?“
the demon

ii Jim] B

r“ .

and he acknowledges that the subject will likely remain thematically central to his works
(Johnson, 41).

The present inquiry consists of an examination of O'Brien's appeal for remembrance by
looking at how his work synthesizes memory and imagination, continually reworked as the
writer returns to and rewrites his material in an effort to "draw out as an artist draws out
his visions" (Going After Cacciato, 24), as part of a process to understand and
communicate his combat experience. I will analyze his work across a framework of
innocence, experience, and consideration by revealing how each of his principle works, If]
Die in a C ombai Zone, Going After Cacciato, and The Things They Carried, might be
thoughtfully examined using these three divisions. I adopt this approach from Tobey
Herzog, who in Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost, uses this strategy in his survey of
Vietnam literary works. Herzog includes an additional category, "aftermath," which I
conflate with "consideration." The theme of innocence focuses on narrative treatments of
soldiers' expectations and indoctrination prior to actual involvement in Vietnam, but also
extend to the persistence of naive conceptions of the war, such as that epitomized by
Alden Pyle in Graham Greene's The Quiet American. The theme of experience explores
the dimension of actual combat and the in country4 experience. The theme of
consideration evaluates the ways in which authors explore the post-war condition, fi'om
the depiction of the newly returned veteran as in Larry Heinemann's Paco's Story to
William Broyles Jr's account, Brothers in Arms: A Journey From War to Peace, which
recapitulates his return visit to Vietnam in 1984, fifteen years after he fought there as a
marine.

Finally, I will focus attention on the ways in which O'Brien exploits metafictional
techniques in the three works in order to stimulate his readers' reflection on how any
developed response to war is a constructed one, which requires the person remembering

to impose order and coherence on experience which may otherwise be disordered.

 

(em.
from trad
narrative
war to 1hr
the genes
hen-reneu
figumenl
aesziellc .

most recs

Ti

Central to this inquiry is O'Brien's conception of the "war story" and how it differs
from traditional war narrative strategies. In a deliberate attempt to establish new
narrative categories which might further his capacity to relate the character and lessons of
war to the uninitiated, he delirnits conventional approaches to depicting war and expands
the generic possibilities of telling war stories across the body of his writing. I provide a
hermeneutical framework for exploring the fulfillment of Thomas Myers' repeated
argument in Walking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam that each war demands new
aesthetic expressions to reconstitute the synthesis of cultural mythology of war with the

most recent war experience:

The self-conscious American war novel, however, does not merely stand in
opposition to the appropriation of lived history within popular mythic texts. Most
often, it enfolds the major components of popular myth within its own textual
strategies to do battle with it. The best of American war fiction invariably deals
specifically and deliberately with the linguistic strategies, both popular and official,
that are the fuel for collective memory and offers itself as a firlly realized
metalanguage of warfare. And it is for this reason that the finest examples of
American war writing seem so startlingly new in terms of form and style, that
historical and aesthetic shifts are invariably simultaneous operations (13).

Ultimately, O'Brien's intent is to explore the truth of combat experience through
fiction, even "telling lies" when necessary to evoke that truth (e. g., "'I'm a believer in the
power of stories, whether they're true, or embellished, or utterly made up'," [Lomperis,
53]), and confront the reader with the horror and reality of war. To meet this objective,
he insistently experiments with different literary genres to extend the range of his message:
thus, one finds If I Die to be relatively straightforward autobiographical memoir; Northern
Lights (1975) and The Nuclear Age (1985) to be conventional novels-- in the sense of
being chronological tales which conform to realistic practices with regard to developing
setting and plot and contain clearly delineated, developmental main characters; Going
After Cacciato to be an experiment in form which has been described as a foray into

magical realism (Freedman, l); and The Things They Carried, finally, a confluence of

generic possibilities, arguably an expansion into a new balance between short story and

5
DOVCi

“it Niitii
works in

Paul l
because 6
whose srl
character
tried to u
politician.
“Waffles
considera
literature
caregofie
311% Are 11
Within di‘.
Mime
industry;
decade ll
“Iii 500”
éMOSH
mithOiog
COHI‘CiQU
Dumbei (

:n‘ a

novel.5 Although I will not deal extensively with O'Brien's novels Northern Lights and
The Nuclear Age, I will demonstrate how the Vietnam experience is still central to those
works and how O'Brien incorporates themes from his other works into them.

Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, states that "[e]very war is ironic
because every war is worse than expected" (7).6 O'Brien's work belong to that of writers'
whose stories and novels confront the omnipresent absurdity and disconnectedness that
characterized America's longest war had for its participants, and for those at home who
tried to understand to what end the national leadership, across several generations of
politicians, plunged the country into its longest war. I will examine several of these
narratives using the same interpretive construct of innocence, experience, and
consideration, in order to place O'Brien's work within the sub-genre of Vietnam War
literature. Furthermore, the narratives I examine here belong to a number of generic
categories--conventional war novels, memoirs, experimental fiction of varying lengths--
and are meant to establish a basis for comparison with O'Brien's flexibility in operating
within different genres. I do not attempt exhaustive consideration of all the literary works
available. Although in the first decade following the end of the conflict the publishing
industry proved reluctant to underwrite literary interpretations of the war, in the past
decade the field has overflowed. It does not appear that the American public’s appetite

will soon wane.7

Each war in American history has developed its own set of
iconographical apparatus and appropriated unique symbols as its remembrance is
mythologized by the popular consciousness. The works I discuss collectively reflect this
conscious tendency toward reformulating a mythology of war and one will note the way a
number of emblematic images resonate throughout both fictional and non-fictional

accounts . 8

Hopefully my thesis might take understanding and recollection of the Vietnam War

into a new direction, particularly with regard to my evaluation of the emergence of the

 

lint sci“
simultaneon
new

intuit l“ 0

Tim 0'}
term Dim
Heinendec

l'pon a!
3rd DhiSit‘
Regiment. ‘
peninsula lr
refining 10
organllailo
nt'llarlne L
lietnam S

1
n the NM

highly self-conscious "war story" in Vietnam war literature and especially in O'Brien, and
simultaneously resurrect the experience which O'Brien cautions us to continually keep
alive in our awareness. In this way, we might begin to answer Paul Berlin's persistent

inquiry in Going After Cacciato, "What happened, and what might have happened?" (27).

l. Biographical Background

Tim O'Brien was born in Austin, Minnesota on 1 October, 1946, and raised in the
town of Worthington, several hundreds miles west, in the southwestern part of the state.
He attended college in St. Paul at Macalester College, graduating summa cum laud in the
spring of 1968, when he received his induction notice.

Upon arrival in Vietnam in February 1969 (Warga, 3),9 O'Brien was assigned to the
23rd Division "Americal" (3rd Platoon, A Company, 5th Battalion 46th Infantry
Regiment, 198th Infantry Brigade 'Light'), headquartered in Chu Lai near the Batangan
peninsula in the northernmost zone of military operations. "I Corps," a designation
referring to the geographical military zone of operations and not to a specific
organizational unit and the 23 rd Division's area of operations, was comprised principally
of Marine units which patrolled the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South
Vietnam. Significantly, it was a company from the 11th Infantry Brigade, a sister brigade
to the 198th Infantry, which was responsible for the My Lai massacre which had occurred
on March 16, 1968 (Boettcher, 390-92). O'Brien acknowledges the awareness of soldiers
throughout his platoon of the events surrounding the atrocity of My Lai in If I Die and
arguably sets his novel. Going After Cacciato, in 1968 in order to provide historical focus
on My Lai as well as Tet and concurrent actions (Griffith, l).

O'Brien was wounded by grenade fragments in the spring of 1969 near My Lai, was
awarded the Purple Heart and later assigned to coveted duty as an administrative clerk at
brigade headquarters for the duration of his tour. He returned to the United States in

March, 1970, and was discharged at Fort Lewis, Washington (Wilkie, 287).

One of the .
mine to Vietnz
resistance in til
character of hi:
explanation of
rationales. mi g

it is ce
concel
is a mi
Patrio‘
accide
SQTVC .

family
(\alh.

Thetangle
the Painfiil inrl
tinting. thou 3
ththel
1 an n
to UPS

0WD p
OPPOS

One of the central themes throughout his writing is intense scrutiny of his rationale in
going to Vietnam, given the alternatives of escape to Canada or even underground
resistance in the United States, a fate he ultimately invents for William Cowling, the main
character of his third novel, The Nuclear Age. It would appear that Stephen Nathanson's
explanation of young men willing to go to war, in the absence of compelling patriotic

rationales, might mesh with O'Brien's own explanations offered in If I Die:

It is certainly true that military service is one way that patriotic people can show
concern for their nation and willingness to sacrifice on its behalf. Nonetheless, it
is a mistake to think that military service establishes that someone is a patriot.
Patriotism is not the only motive that leads people to military service. It is no
accident that military conscription is backed up by legal penalties. Some may
serve to'simply avoid legal punishment, while others may fear the disapproval of
family or fiiends Patriotism is only one of many motivations for military service
(Nathanson, 135).

The tangled issue of O'Brien's decision to observe the dictates of his draft notice and
the painful internal debate he experienced are chronicled repeatedly throughout his
writing, though one must with deep caution assign biographical verity at each juncture10

In If I Die he informs us:

I did not want to be a soldier, not even an observer to war. But neither did I want
to upset a peculiar balance between the order I knew, the people I knew, and my
own private world. It was not just that I valued that order. I also feared its
opposite --inevitable chaos, censure, embarrassment, the end of everything that
had happened in my life, the end of it all (22).

Yet one must contrast his cements here with the ironic assertion by his narrator, Tim
O'Brien, in The Things They Carried that "I was a coward. I went to the war" (63). The
Nuclear Age consists of the recollections of a draft evader, whose chaotic and absurd
existence provides imaginative counterpoint to O'Brien's real life decision to capitulate to
the forces of "home town, friends, history, tradition, fear, confusion, exile" (If I Die, 66);
in Going After Cacciato he provides, through the voice of Paul Berlin across the round
imaginary negotiating table in Paris, perhaps the most eloquent expression available of the

complicated rationale to contradict his pacifist instincts and go to war. There, Berlin

 

speaks of fear of
hears in if I l he.

other eitemal re

linen it
promises
obligatio
a simple
the attilr
real issue
other pet

Holi'ei'er lie
memoir or indirl
regarding his illt
pa'adcliically pr
Speciale what i
or whether he ii
sufficiency of ti
inc lilo interi-
[Wouldn't have
all or dream .
hits the reasor
“ll ln anorhe
ECilOiilt’dgmer
55 an alliSI at 5(
if”: and Int

"‘5 and bi
L.
in: ‘

=1 me. loss

speaks of fear of exile and familial disenfranchisement in much the same language one
hears in If] Die; yet in this instance the rationale is given maturity by the recognition of

other external requirements:

I knew what I was getting into. I knew it might be unpleasant. And I made
promises with that full understanding. The promises were made freely My
obligation is to people, not to principle or politics or justice Peace of mind is not
a simple matter of pursuing one's own pleasure; rather, it is inextricably linked to
the attitudes of other human beings, to what they want, to what they expect. The
real issue is to find felicity within limits. Within the context of our obligations to
other people. We all want peace (285-86).

However we come to regard the comments made both directly by O'Brien in his
memoir or indirectly through the various personae of his more overtly fictional works
regarding his ultimate decision to go to Vietnam, what is inescapable is that his decision
paradoxically provided the impetus for his subsequent literary career. One might vainly
speculate what kind of writer O'Brien might have become in the absence of this grounding,
or whether he would have become a writer at all; it is perhaps safer to acknowledge the
sufficiency of that experience in shaping his artistic goals in the terms he himself provided
in a 1990 interview with Jeff Johnson in Minnesota Monthly: "Vietnam made me a writer;
I wouldn't have been a writer without it. The stories I remember before I go to bed at
night or dream about or recollect as I'm writing are in me, and I want to tell them, and
that's the reason [I return] to Vietnam. It's just that there are all these great stories to tell"
(4]). In another interview, with erstwhile biographer Steven Kaplan, O'Brien voices his
acknowledgment even more strongly: "My concerns as a human being and my concerns
as an artist at some point intersected in Vietnam-mot just in the physical place, but in the
spiritual and moral terrain of Vietnam" (101). The war became a locus of understanding,
and eventually a sieve for the writer's experiences; the grist of war and its attendant
miseries and joys provided the requisite tableaux for investigating the larger issues of
human nature which O'Brien engages throughout his work: courage, contending with

fear, love, loss, and the great healing powers of the imagination.

Alter retn
degree in pol
oertilalli a l
(luringy which
some leteran
endeaiors in
.lnrrhcm / lg
should remer
the inteniett
limiting of iT
Flo-Sitting" (I
{Ethel CVO‘I‘L
ll‘micillarl}
LWence's]
fitntnallt er
lite morning.
thinners ar
wmawt
niplclratmn '

5 . .
£733 attlx

EMWMS
5‘ Pdhelical

03%”!
i4»;

azihors

i

AQ‘ ‘3

After returning from Vietnam, O'Brien attended Harvard University as a graduate
degree in political science, interspersing course work with occasional internships and
eventually a leave of absence with the Washington Post as a national affairs reporter,
during which time he covered issues such as "a lot of Senate hearings, the first oil boycott,
some veterans'. affairs" (McCafl‘rey, 263-64). He abandoned his journalistic and academic
endeavors in the spring of 1976, having produced both If I Die and his first novel,
Northern Lights, in order to embark upon a full-time literary career (Wilkie, 287). One
should remember that originally O'Brien did not intend to become a writer. He notes in
the interview with McCaffrey regarding the conception of If I Die that "even then I wasn't
thinking of myself as a writer; I was writing in the sense that we all do it--in letters and
postcards" (264). Thus, his transformation mirrors, though in vital ways differently, his
parallel evolution into the role of a soldier: initially each self-definition was reluctant
(particularly the role of soldier), gradually accommodated ("With [the reading of TE.
Lawrence's] The Mint I became a soldier, knew I was a soldier," If I Die, 34), and
eventually embraced ("I've always wanted to write good books. When you face a page in
the morning, you don't think about awards. You just think about sentences and story and
characters and themes «the book itself" (McCafliey, 278). Yet with The Things They
Carried, published in 1990, his aesthetic vision expands to include a self-conscious
exploration of why and how one writes. Thus, by this point in his career, he has moved
fiom the unconscious stirrings of literary talent while in Vietnam to the fillly cognizant
literary activity of examining, in the format, for example, of a story entitled "How to Tell a
True War Story," the very specific gravities and essences which underpin his specific blend
of historical reimagining (memory) and artistic creation (imagination).

O'Brien's career as writer substantially overcame the traditional obstacles associated
with authorship with the critical acceptance of his novel Going After Cacciato, the

National Book Award winner for fiction in l979--an auspicious beginning considering the

competition of l
Stories To date

Other Milt. thou

 

increasing freqne
seminal study. Rt
0am. lolloned
about 'nhai ham
happened. lihat .
from happening.
reminiscent of P.
tori is the rece'
the New York ll
Bill”? ("Loon
tentatii'eh' titled
Summon; at
harm as prin-
‘i‘ell the appear.
O’Brien's Pattie
9311. attriburab‘
lllmien. iihe'.
W} that it W

lkipiam 1 ()9 1 ’

OHM“ c0lltir

Md find a m

M' '“OSI filn
i:‘.‘~ :,
hihkh the “'5

MfYH

competition of John Irving's novel The World According to Garp and John Cheever's
Stories. To date, Cacciato has elicited greater critical attention than any of O'Brien's
other work, though analyses of The Things They Carried are beginning to appear with
increasing frequency and constitute a substantial portion of Vietnam critic Philip Beidler's
seminal study, Re- Writing America: Vietnam Authors in Their Generation (28-38).11
O'Brien followed up Cacciato in 1985 with The Nuclear Age, which Beidler calls a book
about "what happened, but also in the same moment a book about what might have
happened, what could have happened, what should have happened, what may be kept
from happening, or what may yet be made to happen" (Lomperis, 87), in words highly
reminiscent of Paul Berlin's interrogation of fact in Going After Cacciato. His last major
work is the recent The Things They Carried, cited as one of the ten best books of 1990 by
the New York Time Book Review. Excerpts from a forthcoming novel have appeared in
Esquire ("Loon Point") and in Atlantic Monthly ("The People We Many"). The novel,
tentatively titled The Secrets of Marriage, is expected to appear in fall, 1994.12
' Superficially at least , these recent excerpts reflect a willingness to move away from
Vietnam as primary subject, yet the same themes of knowledge, weakness, and courage, as
well the appearance of the previously unexplored theme of magic, remain central. Perhaps
O'Brien's particularly respectful status vis-a-vis his fellow Vietnam writers is simply, in
part, attributable to his continuing productivity. He informed Steven Kaplan during an
interview, when originally asked about the timing of Kaplan's then projected full-length
study, that it was perhaps premature since O'Brien is still in the middle of his career
(Kaplan, 1991, 108). O'Brien is not yet finished with his own narrative. As Beidler notes,
"O'Brien continues to seek a fiction in which cultural memory and imaginative invention
would find a new domain of mythic alliance, a ground of original creation on which each
might most fillly partake of the shaping and transforming power of the other. It is a fiction

in which the vision of the merely plausible continues to trace out other and better visions

of the newly possible" (Re-Writing America, 12).

 

its much
as a significal
Society, lihil
as an ohiect l
Chanel of th
imhence on
[riled Stale
\‘otre Dame
Ohiectii'e ill
the conflicts
norelists as
articulation.
hith the les

m‘fitigaho

Wilflathes

4

M W Salter

r‘

2. Literary Suchenre: Narrative Expressions of Vietnam

As much as any other single event which marked the emergence of Vietnam literature
as a significant, discernible category in American fiction, the 1985 conference of The Asia
Society, which O'Brien attended, commemorates the emergence of Vietnam War literature
as an object of worthwhile scholarship in its own right. Timothy Lomperis described the
charter of this conference as taking stock of the "Vietnam War literature and to assess its
influence on present and future American perceptions of Vietnam and Asia" (vii). "The
United States and Viet Nam: From War to Peace," a conference held at the University of

3,13 reflected that same

Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana from 2-4 December 199
objective while expanding, as part of an ongoing process, the scope of these gatherings of
the conflict's participants and students--issues such as the writing of Vietnamese poets and
novelists as well as the cinematography which continues to emerge received prominent
articulation-- and reveal an abiding endurance of this subject in a culture still grappling
with the lessons of the war. While the conferences did not limit themselves to
investigations of literary value, they clearly provided a forum for discussing the divergent
approaches to recording the war. Session titles fiom the Asia Society conference testify

to the salience of literary concerns: "Combat Literature," "Fact and Fiction in the
Literature," and "The Role of Literature in Understanding the War. "

At the Notre Dame conference several papers reflected the sustained significance of
O'Brien's work. Under the suggestive session title "Truth-Telling: F act/F iction," there
was both a panel which explored the troubling fictive element in If 1 Die ("Writing and the
Viet Nam Experience: Where is the Line Between Non-Fiction and Fiction?" by Wilbur
Scott), as well as a paper which argued that "through his narratives, Tim O'Brien invites us

to consider the complex reality exposed by the stories we tell--the reality we must face as

individuals and as a nation if we ever hope to understand and reconcile this experience"

10

 

lBO\\l€. li.

fiction oi the
attempt to fl
in “A Stalin
possible tha
PESlnge-the
and nOl'els ;

consuming

dEinition,
by the Way
5‘1th in '
Reached ,-
COUrSeS 0!
that “the r
numbers C
materials r

11

(Bowie, 1). What, though, does this persistent attention to the lessons conveyed by the
fiction of the period suggest? Does it mark the continued relevance of American society's
attempt to finally come to terms with the experience, or contrarily, as Leon Muse argues
in "A Statute of Limitations: Recent American Writings on the Vietnam War," is it
possible that the salient consideration "about Vietnam War popular culture today is its _
passing-the TV shows are cancelled, alter a flood the movies have dried up, the memoirs
and novels are once again a trickle, and those interested in the War [constitute] a
consuming minority" (96)?

One premise of the present study is that the importance of Vietnam literary studies is
increasing, not declining, and its persistent relevance relates precisely to a cultural
preoccupation lingering unresolved issues still causing national discomfort; there is, in
other words, an ongoing implicit critique of the process of American mythic self-
definition. That yearning for self-definition achieves sharp focus in the narratives inspired
by the war and continues to emerge in the form of the enduring popularity of Vietnam as a
subject in university classrooms. In "Vietnam 10]: The Lessons of the War Have
Reached America's Classrooms," Karen Franklin reports that "Since 1980, some 350
courses on the history of the war have appeared on campuses around the country" and
that "the recent interest in Vietnam that has cut across popular culture indicates that those
numbers can only grow" (20). There are at least two major collections of Vietnam War
materials now in university libraries, the most acclaimed repository at Colorado State
University. Another, at La Salle University in Philadelphia, specifically showcases the
fiction which emerged from the war. In his assessment of the two collections, as well as
those which recently became accessible through the National Archives in Washington,
D.C.,"The History of the Vietnam War on Microfiche" (editor Douglas Pike) and the John
M. Nichols Collection at Cornell, John Baky recently singled out the La Salle collection as
"a resource that allows the researcher to discover in a vast literature .. certain persistent

images, recurring ideological perceptions, and [the source of] factual distortions" (l6).

 

Bah lesem
Vietnam \\'2
that rei‘eal l
land iice it
imaginatior
the present

Certain
CUSllllg an
genre of A
disserrario
Old Come;
handful Of
academic
define the
Slimed Cl‘l
hiStOrjca)
Vietnam“
and pal-Ill

Amen‘Car

12

Baky reserves special praise for the sub-collection "Imaginative Representations of the
Vietnam War Collection," part of the La Salle archives, which "provides hundreds of texts
that reveal by way of comparative readings how a 'non-fiction' narrative becomes fiction
(and vice versa) as the narrator refiacts the recalled 'event' through the lens of his
imagination and memory," a locus of analysis particularly germane to O'Brien's work and
the present study.

Certainly, what this critical acknowledgment indicates is the presence of an already
existing and fairly clearly defined domain which might be recognized as a distinct sub-
genre of American fiction. Furthermore, as Robert Butko elaborates in his 1992
dissertation, "Vietnam fiction may be Seen as a type of sub-genre due to the reshaping of
old conventions of war literature and the invention of new ones" (1). By reviewing a
handfiil of narratives which are rooted in the war, I hope to reveal that rather than the
academic preoccupation of a small group of literary aficionados, these works do in fact
define the boundaries of a distinctive "sub-genre," as Butko argues, in which the principal
shared characteristic is the self-conscious use of the "war story" as a rhetorical and even
historical methodology for retrieving war experience. In reading the narratives of
Vietnam, we too attempt to know our own selves, even risk guilt for the events described,
and participate directly in the ongoing historical engagement of reconstituting the war in
American consciousness.

Where one sets the origins of a distinctive Vietnam conflict literature by Americans
depends in large part on how one dates the evolution of American involvement in
Vietnam. Through the structural blueprint of innocence, experience, and consideration, I
will trace the way in which a variety of fictive and non-fictional accounts describe and
interpret our involvement and seek to address that delineation directly. Within this
framework, the category of "innocence" pertains to depictions of soldiers and others who
would become involved in a state prior to actual combat, or, as in the case of The Quiet

American, in a period of precipitant conflict. The category of "experience" relates to

COME
ftlio
l3 1. a

Ola lif:

L

13

those narratives dealing with the actuality of combat. "Aftermath," or "consideration,"
applies to narratives which focus on the experience of the soldier or participant following
his or her experience "in country," in the midst of the attempt to achieve some form of
reconciliation with the combat event. Thus, though these divisions might constitute
artificial delineations, they correspond quite aptly both to the trajectory of phases of
individual experience of'the war while they simultaneously mirror a larger discernible
context for studying the narratives. As Tobey Herzog suggests, "the best war stories,
fiction and nonfiction, contain important lessons about the war--if readers pay attention"
(2), and the thematic contexts of innocence, experience, and consideration provide means

of "facilitating, understanding and evaluating the Vietnam narratives" (58-59).

Narratives of "Innocence"

Wherever one begins chronologically, the reader should pay particular attention to
the problems of discriminating between attempts at "realistic" or "straight" historical
recapitulation and experimental works which privilege imaginative renderings; in other
words, one should keep intact an image of a continuum from direct historical
recapitulation to extreme forms of artistic interpretation by imaginative reshaping.
Graham Greene's The Quiet American, for example, embodies both the quality of fictional
abstraction and a nearly prophetic sensibility regarding the imminent escalation of
American military and political activity in South Vietnam during the winding down of
French activity following the ignominious capitulation of French forces at Dienbienphu on
7 May 1954 (Kamow, 198). Bill Ehrhart, a respected poet and essayist on Vietnam in his
own right, defines The Quiet American as "undoubtedly the most remarkable book ever
written about the war. That an English journalist could see so clearly and dispassionately
the whole terrible disaster into which the United States even then was so energetically and

blindly hurling itself is only slightly less amazing than the fact that no one who mattered

paid the
hint C
Americ
come it
uhlman
tragic l

lurling

Pie
ioumal
Citron
that ‘1}
title Pa.
lm'Olt-‘e

ElsEnh.

14

paid the slightest attention to Greene's warning" ("Teaching the Vietnam War," 145).
What Greene's work so tellingly depicts is the innocent and perhaps self-deceptive

"14 which would

American belief in the efficacy of the newly created the "Third Force,
come to vindicate western colonialist interest in the face of French defeat. Alden Pyle, the
ultimate representative of the presumably saving grace of American involvement, provides
tragic foil to the seasoned experience of a British journalist, Fowler, who early notes the

lurking dangers of naievte' with regard to the intemecine rivalries raging in Vietnam:

Why does one want to tease the innocent? Perhaps only ten days ago [Pyle] had
been walking across the Common in Boston, his arms fill] of the books he had
been reading in advance on the Far East and the problems of China. He didn't
even hear what I said; he was absorbed in the dilemmas of Democracy and the
responsibilities of the West; he was determined--I learnt that very soon--to do no
good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world (18).

Predictably, Pyle disregards the sage counsel of his wise and then-uncommitted
journalist counterpart, plunging pell-mell into the plots and intrigues which later would
characterize American covert activity. Despite Greene's seemingly innocuous disclaimer,
that "this is a story and not a piece of history about a few imaginary characters," (post
title page) it in fact provides a hauntingly prescient forecast of America's deepening
involvement. 15 Charles de Gaulle would almost contemporaneously warn Dwight
Eisenhower, to little avail, of the inextricability of involvement in Indochina (Boettcher,
219)

Pyle's enthusiastic innocence perhaps partially stimulated the characterization of Billy
Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, or Children 's Crusade. Pilgrim's
seemingly archetypal withdrawal from the mundane reality of immersion in war recall
Pyle's stubborn refusal to confront the reality of his experience. Like Greene, Vonnegut
teasingly resists the allure of presenting his work as straight historical fact, despite the
author's own presence in Dresden during the massive firebombing raids of February, 1945:

"All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true" (1 ). Yet

impon
lack of

ignora

innocel
llli The
PORIai

Ahans

15

important differences come to light. Pyle's self-confidence as The Quiet American belies a
lack of self-reflective insight, "impregnably armored by his good intentions and his
ignorance" (163). Ultimately these intentions disintegrate when faced with the reality of
failed objectives, which present the opportunist with new and ever more dangerous
objectives in order to prove the worth of the "third force" plan. Fowler becomes
infuriated, impotently, against the seeming impenetrability of Pyle's naive but implacable
dedication. Lack of historical perspective is precisely the locus of the American's
innocence, an innocence which provokes Fowler, already witness to decades of
interventionist folly, to an unproductive verbal ambush, wherein he ironically finds himself
portraying his own experience as that of the aborigine European with yet more child-like

Asians:

[Pylez] 'At least they won't hate us like they hate the French.‘

[Fowlerz] 'Are you sure? Sometimes we have a kind of love for our enemies and
sometimes we feel hate for our fiiends.‘

'You talk like a European, Thomas. These people aren't complicated ...'

'Find me an uncomplicated child, Pyle. When we are young we are a jungle of
complications. We simplify as we get older.‘ But what good was it to talk to him?
There was an unreality in both our arguments (176).

What lesson which finally arises from Pyle's involvement is acutely revealed to the
reader but equally acutely lost on Pyle. Though he views Fowler with the jaundiced eye of
romantic competition with regard toward their common love, Phuong, Pyle displaces
Fowler as the new representative of western interests in Vietnam. Certainly, Pyle is an
innocent wreaking havoc in a land uninnocent of the ravages of war. Perhaps the most
troubling legacy of Greene's book, in fact, is its premonitory quality and the degree to
which readers of fiction and optimistic implementers of foreign policy alike disregarded
the lessons it offered for non-intervention. As Peter McInemey noted, " The Quiet
American is a sort of history, a fiction of the actual past and the real future, a 'story in the

place of 'history'" (187). With so much of the history still to be written in 1955, let alone

nemec.

.1.
militia.“

By l
ground '
senes oi
(inlfof
Oiltnd
domesri.
iuséhrn
the \lar‘.
a‘ler, thl
‘Mmml
units A

“When

aI*‘i‘ibhlof‘
on: also
(8’32"

1‘4th (

leaders 0

\l

D’ C n ‘~¢" r-r-

16

created, when The Quiet American first appeared, the irony of the American impetus for

military involvement proves that much more poignant.

By 1965, the momentum of American activity had launched a dramatic increase of
ground troop commitments in response to what was construed as a tightly orchestrated
series of North Vietnamese aggressions. The most significant American response was the
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the "blunt instrument" of diplomacy which William Bundy, one
of Lyndon Johnson's national security advisors, formulated as a means to both quell
domestic anxiety toward mounting southeast Asian turmoil and providential linchpin for
justifying the introduction of American ground forces (Kamow, 360-63). In March, 1965,
the Marines landed the greater part of a regiment on beachheads around Danang. Shortly
after, the First Infantry Division, First Air Cavalry Division (Air Assault), and 173 rd
Airborne Brigade of the Army arrived in country, followed by a succession of US. ground
units. Among those present, and certainly innocent to the fit“ meaning of his impending
experience, Philip Caputo arrived on 8 March, part of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Force.
His primary work dealing with this early period, A Rumor of War, typically described as a
straightforward memoir, occasionally suggests a more overtly literary intent. Caputo's
justification for going to Vietnam epitomizes the expression of idealistic, innocent
ambition which characterized not only the attitude of soldiers committed early to the war,
but also the early experiences of soldiers once committed, such as the internalization by
Caputo of a more mature ideological conception of the war as articulated by the national

leaders of the time:

War is always attractive to young men who know nothing about it, but we had also
been seduced into uniform by Kennedy's challenge to 'ask what you can do for
your country' and the military idealism he had awakened in us. America seemed
omnipotent then: the country could still claim it never lost a war, and we believed
we were ordained to play cop to the Communists' robber and spread our own faith
around the world We kept the packs and rifles; the convictions, we lost (xii).

C:
plOVh
meme.

the .tl

l7

Caputo's early presence and ensuing disillusionment, as swift as it was profound,
provides a unique testament to the cost of failed intentions. Like Ron Kovic, whose
memoir of the same period reflects the simultaneous absorption in and demystification of
the American warrior mystique, Born on the Fourth of July, Caputo's remembrance
signifies a painfill confiontation with the meaninglessness and directionlessness of the
American effort from its ill—fated inception. Schooled in the hard lessons of military
lifestyle, he informs us: "At the age of twenty-four, I was more prepared for death than I
was for life. My first experience of the world outside the classroom had been war" (3);
perhaps most notable was Caputo's insistence to return and witness firsthand the final
outcome of the American misadventure. As he notes at memoir’s end, standing shoulder
to shoulder a month beyond ten year's personal involvement there, he recounts his
realization that for all its participants the war engendered a sense of dislocative awareness:
" .. the men who belonged [to the 9th Expeditionary Brigade] seemed a good deal more
cynical than we who had belonged to it ten years before. The marine looked at the faint
blue line marking the Vietnamese coast and said, 'Well, that's one country we don't have to
give billions of dollars to anymore'" (345).

What Caputo's memoir most tellingly commemorates, however, is the undiluted
expectation, forged in an innocence of war, of national interest and self-preservation.
After all, his idealism falls hard and heavy afier landfall. Most ironic, perhaps, was his
assignment as "The Officer in Charge of the Dead." Then, as a staff officer routinely
processing the unit's body counts, Caputo confronted the immediacy of personal danger--

the ubiquity of personal vulnerability:

I saw [the American soldier] as Lemmon had described him, lying on his back with
the big bloody hole in his side. I imagined that his face must have looked like the
faces of the dead Viet Cong I had seen the month before That is when I felt for
the first time the slimy, hollow-cold fear that is the fear of death; the image of
Sullivan's dead face had suddenly changed into an image of my own. That could
be me someday, I thought. I might look like him. If it happened to him, there's no
reason it can't happen to me (161-62).

 

queszlr
groin."
idealist
that in:
Work 5

does tr

18

As we come to see him here, and in the convoluted aftermath of his involvement in the
death of innocent Vietnamese, Caputo can no longer be perceived as the innocent victim-
warrior, pursuing the greater good of national defense. Instead, his actions and his image
are tainted, his sense of purpose increasingly diluted if not in fact subverted by the
questionable legitimacy of his own role, and his commitment inevitably poisoned by the
growing conflict he experiences. Though the memoir so poignantly depicts the form of
idealistic embrace early acceptance of the war took, it as clearly delineates the collapse of
that innocent belief in the inherent superiority of American intentions. In that sense, this
work speaks as eloquently to the corrosive effects of participation and experience as it

does to the failing ideal vision, perhaps the war's earliest casualty.

If A Rumor of War evokes the unbridled confidence of the soldier uninitiated in the
rituals of combat, the novel In Country provides a contrasting example of the relative
innocence of hometown Americans, particularly as revealed through the character
Samantha, the niece of Emmett, a troubled veteran grappling with the likelihood that he
suffers from exposure to Agent Orange. Part of what makes the exploration of In Country

16 and as such must- herself be

so compelling is that the author never served in Vietnam,
considered a permanent innocent to the war, like Samantha, who seeks to understand the
war and connect emotionally with her father who died in combat there. The question
Mason confronts the reader and veteran alike with is whether we are not all in some sense
direct veterans of the war. Like Samantha, as the American public's awareness of the war
grew from a numb generalized consciousness into the full and intense awareness of its
devastation, even the noncombatants must somehow make order out of the experience and
mediate the pain and anomie of those veterans in our lives who continue to suffer from the
war. Though the novel serves as an exemplary platform for examining the expression of

an uninitiated, or innocent, stance to the war, I will later deal with it from the perspective

of afiermath, focusing on the characterization of Emmett. Just as O'Brien's works do not

 

meal
sou‘

shit

the p

more

l9

neatly conform to any preconceived critical structure, the best novels of Vietnam, and I
would include In Country among them, similarly profit by suggesting multiple angles from
which to explore the themes of the war.

In "Men, Women, and Vietnam," Milton Bates determines that by electing to adopt
the perspective of a teenage girl, Sam, Bobbie Ann Mason "cannot realistically venture a
more mature critique of the War or sexual roles. Why inflict such a handicap on one's
narrative? Very likely, Mason was simply respecting the limits of her experience" (29).
The underlying question Bates raises, perhaps inadvertently, is whether any non-
combatant's experience can serve as a legitimate funnel for coming to terms with the
horrors witnessed by those "in Country." Mason goes a long way in answering this
question, however, and I would argue that her use of a teenage narrative perspective
encourages rather than inhibits the pursuit of an answer . At one point, Sam confronts her
uncle, with whom she shares a house while trying to sort out the direction she wants to
take with her life as her high school years conclude. She is bewildered by Emmett's
eccentric behavior: his refusal to seriously seek long-term employment, his lack of female
companionship, his growing preoccupation with digging a trench around the base of the
house (a theme which appears in other post-Vietnam novels, as well--in Caputo's Indian
Country, Chris Starkman constructs a self-contained fortress in his self-imposed exile from
society. In O'Brien's 77w Nuclear Age, the main character William Cowling, though not a
veteran, exhibits a similarly irrepressible need to dig, in this case a bomb shelter, arguably
to protect him fiom the social censure of refusal to participate in Vietnam), and most
importantly, his persistent denial of the possible health consequences of his exposure to
Agent Orange. Borne of her drive to understand his inscrutable posture of indifference,
Sam commits herself to uncovering the nature of that combat experience in order to better
assist Emmett on his own road to recovery. In response to her probing, at one point
Emmett closes off her inquiry by pointing out her own lack of participation,

encompassing in his indictment of her inexperience the lack of participation of females

20

generally: "'Women weren't over there So they can't really understand”; Sam refuses to
submit to his emotional evasion, however, retorting that Emmett's old girlfriend, Anita,
"knows a nurse at the hospital who was over there. Anita could understand what you‘re
talking about" (107).

Later, during a dance put together by the veterans to finally commemorate the
contribution made by veterans of the war, Anita explains her own "Vietnam story" to Sam,
a story Milton Bates claims closely matches Mason's own personal experiences. She

describes being on a bus traveling to Bowling Green, Kentucky:

"... some boys got on at Fort Campbell. They were in soldiers' uniforms, with
those baggy green pants and black boots like Pete's got on. One of them sat
across from me and talked with me. I was reading a book of poetry. This boy
tried to read it over my shoulder, and he told me he liked poetry. Well, that really
impressed me, because how many guys will read a poem? And then he told me
that he was shipping out to Vietnam the next day. All of them were. And that
really got me. I thought-—why, he could go over there and die! It just really
bothered me. I never knew who he was or if he came back alive for years I
thought-~that was my Vietnam experience" (115-16, Mason's emphasis).

Anita's description of her encounter on the bus not only provides a moving
counterpoint to Emmett's assertion that women can’t understand the war, but illustrates
the way in which the war's effect became gradually universalized. Certainly, there is a
considerable gap between the recognition by Anita that strangers on a bus might soon be
exposed to unimaginable dangers and Emmett's own lived experience of those dangers;
but in order to eventually effect a reconciliation both with himself and with those around
him who can only guess at his traumas, Sam realizes that he in turn must become aware of
the way the war's effect was not reserved for the combatants-~everyone experienced
Vietnam to some degree.

Ultimately, Sam tries harder and harder to see into Emmett's troubled world, even
attempting to replicate the experience of being in the bush so that he will finally share the
inner turmoil with her, and thus put it to rest. Mason employs language which reveals the

ways in which Sam's world increasingly resembles the dangerous mine-laced footpaths and

 

33
C

Uni

21

enemy-infested jUngles of Vietnam; this language reaches a cathartic crescendo when she
moves into the swamp for her self-imposed initiation: "The jungle was closing in [on
Sam], and even the maple trees on Maple Street seemed as though they might be hiding
snipers Sam had been feeling that if she didn't watch her step, her whole life could be
ruined by some mischance, some stupid surprise, like sniper fire" (184). She deeply senses
her lack of combat experience, and in a moment of anger tells Emmett, anticipating her
later foray into the woods, "'That's [watching television] not the same as seeing something
for yourself," in saying so placing a premium on the importance of being there. Finally,
alone amid the sounds and smells of the forest, the closest approximation she can achieve
in her quest for experience, she confionts the elusive issue of her own relationship to
Emmett, to her dead father, and to Tom, a veteran with whom she nearly has a romance
but whose combat experiences distance him too much to permit the delicate dangers of
intimacy:
That rotting corpse her dad had found invaded her mind «those banana leaves,
reeking sweetly. She knew that whenever she had tried to imagine Vietnam she
had her facts all wrong Rice paddies weren't real to her. She thought of tanks
knocking the jungle and tigers sitting under bushes. Her notions came from the
movies. Some vets blamed what they did on the horror of the jungle. What did

the jungle do to them? Humping the boonies. Here I am, she thought. In country
(210).

Despite her brave attempt, however, Sam recognizes the limits of her own experience,
and the degree to whichshe can imagine being in Vietnam. She briefly reflects on the
immediate threat of being vulnerable to rape while alone in the woods, "It would be like
that scene in Apocalypse Now where the soldiers met a tiger, the last thing they expected
in a guerilla-infested jungle" (217). Emmett tracks her down, scolds her for the lunacy of
her actions, and then engages in an emotion-charged confrontation in which he finally
seems to open his pain to her, but with one last desperate retreat of hope that she might
ever truly learn the nature of his experience: "'You can't leami from the past. The main

thing you learn from history is that you can't learn from history. That's what history is

 

There
stole:
arger.
EH} lt‘:
07 l lt’r
Paul E
lien.2
difhcu
mite 2

.\l
Which

lien:

22

There are some things you can never figure out'" (226). Emmett's closing remarks, though
spoken in a moment when he at last allows Sam to realize the depth of his sorrow and
anger, simultaneously acts to exclude her finally from the lessons that experience offers, if
any lesson at all. Still, as Thomas Myers argues in Walking Point: American Narratives
of Vietnam, though "Sam's mission does not firlly replicate the lost war she seeks like
Paul Berlin, she discovers the limits of the imagination," her attempt to live the reality of
Vietnam "does produce an emotional catharsis for Emmett," thus beginning the slow and
difficult self-recovery which "engenders expiation and understanding [and] begins to
write a meaningful peace" for both Sam and Emmett (224).

Mason concludes In Country by establishing a frame with the novel's opening scene, in
which Sam, Emmett, and her grandmother are driving to Washington, DC. to visit the
Vietnam Veterans‘ Memorial. Just as the bus ride with Vietnam-bound G.I.s is rooted in
the author's private experience, the passages surrounding the pilgrimage to the Wall also
grew out of Mason's personal encounter. In an interview she explained that alter her~visit,

"'I knew then that Vietnam was my story too, and it Was every American's story (quoted

)17 What never becomes conclusively articulated within

in Herzog, Innocence Lost, 200
the book itself is the author's own ironic position toward the accessibility of the experience
she permits Sam to pursue so obsessively. Her indeterminacy provides a more
compassionate response than one which might neatly, painlessly, sweep up the remains of
a vet's uneasy memory. Instead, Mason engages the reader in an ultimately unresolved
dialogue; she does so, however, in a way which extends the dialogue to non-participants
and combatants alike. In the end, Mason successfully deconstructs the way in which "in
country" typically refers to Vietnam, demonstrating how it applies equally well to the
persistence of the war on Main Street. The core of ambiguity in In Country signals the
complexity of reintegrating veterans, particularly those from Vietnam, back into society.

It is an issue still awaiting satisfactory resolution.

Narratives of Experience

I use innocence here to describe a state in which soldiers' attitudes toward their
impending or ongoing experience consist of complex expectations rooted in the hope of
ratifying in Vietnam the tenets of the American warrior myth; in this sense, innocence
takes many forms, from the anticipation of acting out the "John Wayne syndrome" to
Caputo's desire to answer John F. Kennedy's call to stop communist aggression at
whatever cost. Between innocence and experience lies a formidable gap, characterized by
the shattering of illusions and an attempt to understand and derive order from the burden
of the true, lived experience which veterans encountered. It is, in another sense, the gap
between Alden Pyle's naive belief that he could justify the death of innocents in order to
impose a transcendent American peace, and the deeper realization suggested by Paul
Fussell that "every war is worse than [originally] expected" (F ussell, 7). Yet because the
war lasted so long, and because the reality of life in country differed so dramatically
among soldiers and journalists, narrative expressions of those experiences predictably
reflect that diversity. Arguably, the most extreme exposure to the war, in which soldiers
engaged in the extreme intensity of close fighting, proved to be the reality for a minority of
participants; for all the line soldiers walking search and destroy missions (later search and
clear missions, an unconvincing euphemistic improvement directed by General William
Westmoreland),18 the vast majority of American troops in country saw the war from the
relative safety of firebases situated amid vast defensive networks or from the urban
comfort of Saigon, Bien Hoa, Vung Tau, and other rear echelon encampments. In
Working Class Army, Christian Appy claims that in "1967-68, when US. ground
oflensives were at a peak, less than 1 percent of American combat patrols resulted in
contact with the enemy," ostensibly reducing the significance of even those who were
most in harm's way (163).19 None of this necessarily invalidates the way in which

GXperience in country still undermined the expectations of soldiers arriving there for duty;

23'

 

Ol‘it'

COT

24

one need only be in one mortar attack or close firefight to begin asking difficult questions
concerning one's existence in a combat zone. As the years wore on, more and more
participants began asking these questions, and the novels, memoirs, and other non-fictional
accounts are replete with the detailed consideration given to trying to reconcile lofiy
government statements justifying American involvement with the seemingly gratuitous
violence, often imposed without discernible military objectives, which increasingly
characterized the tempo of operations (Appy, 226-27). As Appy reports, " soldiers drew
together around the shared assumption that the war itself had no meaningful purpose, that
the only meaning was located in the collective unity necessary to survive" (242).

Perhaps the most striking feature evident from accounts of time spent in Vietnam, in
whatever medium they are expressed, is the unique language which developed, in what
seems a collective attempt to wrest the absurdity of the war away by forcing it to conform
to a speech which reflected the chaos and violence. Writers consistently seem to contest
Yon Yonson's decree in Slaughterhouse-Five that "there is nothing intelligent to say about
a massacre. Everyone is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever
again" (19). Yet they are not immune, any more than Vonnegut and his surrogate
Yonson, from a Trafalmadorian observation: "Earthlings are the great explainers,
explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved or
avoided" (85). Michael Herr's Dispatches speaks fluently the soldier's argot of
disenchantment, its rhythms modulating the alternating ebb and flow of battle, intense
boredom punctuated by the inexpressible thrill of a sudden firefight in the bush.
Meditations in Green, by Stephen Wright, taps into the same frenetic vernacular unique to
Vietnam, language in which the enemy are gooks, zipperheads, slopes, or in moments of
charitable respect, Uncle H0 or Mister Charlie. It is a language which bristles with the
jargon of a newfound technological prowess: all the new and ever more efficient ways of
killing require their own peculiar linguistic proficiency. Similarly, there emerges a dark

and convoluted humor, a pathos of disturbing revelation, which desperately attempts to

COill

impe

"Part

{ECQUI

25

convey the depth of experiential carnage. In The Short- Timers, by Gustav Hasford,
language disintegrates step by step with the gradual dehumanization of the soldiers to
refract a world in which only evil and death return clear, intelligible images. These works
from in country parallel stateside trends toward the adoption of a new, "hip" vernacular to
convey the credo of a society increasingly at odds with its political leadership and the
imperatives of an unpopular war. Rock and roll music provides one idiom in which
America's young and disillusioned might congregate, subvert the establishment through
hidden motifs in lyrics, and envision some kind of society beyond the war and pursue
ethical redemption. Expression of distaste for the war's direction explodes across a
number of social registers: clothing, hairstyle, and counter-cultural activities such as
increasing drug use all denote persistent attempts to define an alternative reality to the
war's reductive Cold War logic. The war spawns new forms of expression to match the
growing incompatibility in the public mind of the statement of the war's aims with the
unvalorous representations of the life in Vietnam voiced increasingly by veterans and the
media. Each writer struggles to reconcile the inevitability of war; like Billy Pilgrim, they
wonder "'How the inhabitants of a whole planet can live in peace! As you know, I am
from a planet that has been engaged in senseless slaughter since the beginning of time
So tell me [Billy asks the Trafalmadorians,] the secret so I can take it back to earth and
save us all: How can a planet live at peace?” (116). Contrary to the advice Billy's hosts
give him about wars, that "'[t]here isn't anything we can do about them, so we simply don't
look at them. We ignore them'" (117), these writers choose to scrutinize their
experiences, flilfilling what O'Brien in If] Die suggests is the foot soldier's only real

recourse:

Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken and analyze
them and live our lives and advise others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach
anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can
tell war stories (23).

 

P5?

in}?

darl
mom
exil'

boo:

r;
r! _. _

26

If the state of innocence with respect to war can be characterized by the apprehension
of a warrior mythology in which Americans arrived in Vietnam with sometimes vague
expectations of establishing democracy,20 Hasford's fire Short- Timers provides one of the
clearest demarcations of how that innocence runs aground against the shattering
dismembennent combat experience exerts, and details how Marines were prepared
psychologically for the experience of combat and trained to become America's ultimate

mythic warrior-heroes:

I was defining myself with bullets [Joker explains]; blood had blemished my
Yankee Doodle dream that everything would have a happy ending, and that I,
when the war was over, would return to hometown America in a white silk
unifomr, a rainbow of campaign ribbons across my chest, brave beyond belief, the
military Jesus (Hasford, 113).

Thomas Myers describes fire Short- Timers as "the most unrelenting of Vietnam War
dark jokes a first person narrative told entirely in the present tense, the novel is a
moment-to moment study in cultural overload, a spare but minutely rendered poetics of
evil" (112). The novel's setting is divided between the first third, which takes place in
boot camp at Parris Island, the "Crotch," and the majority of the work, set in the
northernmost part of Vietnam, I Corps, where the majority of Marines operated. Seen
through the eyes of Joker, who, like Hasford himself, serves as a combat photographer,
we are witness to the transformation of young men into killing machines from their
original innocence as "ladies," the term applied to them by Gunnery Sergeant Gerheim,
their boot camp instructor. Joker, who is clever at imitating John Wayne, records the vital

lesson which each recruit must internalize:

Sergeant Gerheim explains that it is important for us to understand that it is our
killer instinct which must be harnessed if we expect to survive in combat. Our rifle
is only a tool; it is a hard heart that kills If our killer instincts are not clean and
strong, we will hesitate at the moment of truth. We will not kill. We will become
dead Marines. And then we will be in a world of shit because Marines are not
allowed to die without permission (12).

Ides

Prod

27

Though Joker and the majority of his platoon gradually respond to the "Marine Corp's
[desire] to build indestructible men, men without fear" (17), Private Leonard Pratt, whom
Gerheim calls "Gomer Pyle," fails to assimilate the finer points of boot camp training and
becomes the focal point of the drill instructor's determination to forge killing machines out
of young men. Initially, Pratt personifies unsullied and uncomprehending innocence, after
incessant harassment, however, he responds too perfectly to the training. After a proleptic
period of silence, he chants in his bunk of "Charlene," the name he gives to his rifle: "My
rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus I will learn it as a brother. I will learn
its accessories, its sights, its barrel. Iwill keep my rifle clean and ready, even as I am
clean and ready. We will become part of each other" (20). Gerheim receives the newly
inspired recruit enthusiastically into the fold of the enlightened, who see the intensely
"white guiding light": "'You are becoming one sharp recruit, private Pyle. Most
motivated prive in my herd. Why, I may even allow you to serve as a rifleman in my
beloved Corps. I had you figured for a shitbird, but you'll make a good grunt'" (20). Pratt
too perfectly fiilfills his aspiration to become one with his weapon. After graduation
ceremonies, threatened with separation from his only love, Charlene, he murders Gerheim
and then shoots himself. As Myers notes, "Pratt is not to be understood as an aberrant
product of the mythic machinery [of military indoctrination], but merely as a more
advanced student" (115). Chillingly, Joker's reflection on the incident is not disgust or
disavowal of his own growing complicity in the conversion of Pratt from his early state as
ineducable "maggot" into a "lean green fighting machine." Instead, he chooses to embrace
his identity as Marine, in an incantatory and erotic fixation on his marriage to his own

private weapon:

I hold my weapon at port arms, gently, as though she were a holy relic, a magic
wand wrought with interlocking pieces of silver and iron, with a teakwood stock,
golden bullets, a crystal bolt, jewels to sight with. My weapon obeys me. I'll hold
Vanessa, my rifle. I'll hold her. I'll hold her for just a little while. I will hide in this
dark dream for as long as I can (28).

proxi

l?
“l:

28

For Joker, the transformation is nearly complete, requiring only the final accentuation
provided by combat. Though he actively resists leadership roles, he never seriously
challenges his role as participant; his resistance, in the face of an increasing discomfort
with the escalating malignance of his experiences, pivots on symbolic acts «such as
wearing a peace button on his fatigues or the vague disobedience of wearing his hair just
long enough to receive the inevitable gentle reprimand from officers. Hasford
intentionally obfiiscates Joker's role as unwilling participant, carefully depicting him as a
reluctant but efficient killer. His ability to mimic John Wayne underscores the progressive
disillusionment of the warrior myth; his adoption of the full panoply of grunt instincts
undermines our sympathy for any misgivings he has, and problematizes his representation
as (absurdly) objective corespondent. He mistakenly prizes his detachment.

"Correspondents are more effective than grunts. Grunts merely kill the enemy. All
that matters is what we write, what we photograph. History may be written with blood
but it's printed with ink" (52). Joker firlly recognizes the incongruity of the Wayne
mythology. Relating a moment of relaxation in country in which he and fellow Marines

watch The Green Berets, he sardonically muses:

John Wayne is a beautiful soldier, clean-shaven, wearing boots that shine like black
glass, sharply attired in tailored tiger-stripe jungle utilities. Inspired by John
Wayne, the fighting soldiers from the sky go hand-to—hand with all the Victor
Charlies in Southeast Asia The audience of Marines roars with laughter. This

is the funniest movie we have seen in a long time (32). "

Joker recognizes the incompatibility of the film legend with the sordidness of his own
experience; despite the struggle of his imagination to provide a means of escape, a
struggle as intense as Paul Berlin's mental peregrinations on an observation post along the
South China Sea in Going After Cacciato, Joker entertains "erect-nipple wet dreams about
Mary Jane Rottencrotch and the Great Homecoming Fuck Fantasy, back into blinking
technicolor home movies of events that did not happen quite the way we choose to

remember them" (132) He finally acknowledges the terrific personal damage his

err

Sp;
1

29

experience imposes: "Those of us who survive to be short-timers will fly the Great
Speckled Bird back home to hometown America. But home won't be there anymore
Upon each of our brains the war has lodged itself, a black crab feeding" (151). In an

earlier epiphany, all remaining tenuous allegiance to the warrior mythology is shattered:

After my first confirmed kill I began to understand that it was not necessary to
understand. What you do, you become. The insights of one moment are blotted
out by the events of the next I was caught up in a constricting web of darkness
and, like the ancient farmer [Joker had just senselessly killed], I was suddenly very
calm, just as I had been calm when the mine detonated, because there was nothing
I could do. I was defining myself with bullets; blood had blemished my Yankee
Doodle dream that everything would have a happy ending (113).

Joker comes to personify the dehumanized grunt who too perfectly intemalizes the
Marine Corps "white guiding light;" his language, the rhythmic staccato of journalistic
jargon, magnifies to the reader the depth of evil he experiences while simultaneously
denuding his own distancing techniques from his actions. As O'Brien warns in "How to
Tell a True War Story," "If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth
Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty" (TIT C , 77); by this measurement,
Joker's vernacular is one of unrelenting obscenity and violence from which neither he nor
the reader can effect even momentary respite. Linguistically, the work funnels entropically
toward silence-Joker abandons his role as correspondent and adopts the straightforward
mission of grunt, merely killing like his brothers in arms--and Hasford's language reflects
the way remorse and remembrance are smothered under the weight of cliche' and
platitudes. When asked by his commanding officer, Captain January, on what grounds he
refuses a promotion (the full measure of complicity), Joker responds with a string of

laconic assertions which reverberate age-worn aphorisms:

"We bomb these people, then we photograph them. My stories are paper bullets
fired into the fat black heart of Communism. I've fought to make the world safe
for hypocrisy. We have met the enemy and it is us. War is good business-- invest
your son. Viet Nam means never having to say you're sorry. Arbeit macht Frei—"
(50).

 

WA
;‘

30

Yet Hasford's treatment is ultimately anything but trite. The strident black humor of
the "Hardass Squad" mirrors the grim predicament of the foot soldier. As Myers instructs
in approaching the novel, the "key to understanding Hasford's reading of the war is the
recognition that for him and his narrator, the 'arch-jokes' of grunt society are a protective
device for the historically trapped, a buttressed historical pose that by novel's end crumbles
before the power of human feeling and vulnerability" (117). Furthermore, what proves
doubly significant to the present study is the way in which Hasford's account anticipates
and resonates O'Brien's; though we are told as readers we are holding fiction, in which the
"characters in this book are fictitious and any similarity to persons living or dead is
coincidental" (post-dedicatory page), one quickly recognizes a web of correspondences
with O'Brien's work, and across the genre of Vietnam writing, which tends to validate
rootedness in history rather than the result of a fictional detour. My point is that one
begins to identify a set array of experiences which prove common to the majority of
Vietnam narratives, which one might untechnically categorize as archetypal Vietnam
experiences: the unproductive encounter with the chaplain (Hasford, 87); the repeated
depictions of sheer will needed to sustain the incessant marches (84); the ironic
importance of playing "games" (48-49); the preoccupation with the nicknames grunts use
to mask or minimize feelings of intimacy with their comrades ("Rafter Man," "Animal
Mother," "Crazy Earl"); and the inevitable moment in which death and destruction and the

instruments of their imposition are perceived as objects of aesthetic beauty and wonder:

It's a beautiful tank. Painted on the long barrel: BLACK DRAGON-- We
Exterminate Household Pests Military vehicles are beautiful because they are
built from fiinctional designs which make them real, solid, without artifice. The
tank possesses the beauty of hard lines; it is fifiy tons of rolling armor on tracks
like steel watchbands. The tank is our protection, rolling on and on forever,
clanking out the dark mechanical poetry of iron and guns (65).

All these events have specific and recurring correspondences in O'Brien's work , as

well as the work of other Vietnam writers, fictional and non-fictional alike. Most

31

importantly, perhaps, are the motifs of fratricide (the pursuit of Cacciato his resultant,
though ambiguous, death) and fragging (in Hasford, Animal Mother frags, or uses a
grenade [a weapon without fingerprints] to intentionally murder Lieutenant Shortround; in
O'Brien, Berlin's squad agrees to frag Lieutenant Sidney Martin). The definitive
Correspondence is the adoption of the war story narrative technique, an attempt to
recreate the events of experience through a blend of fiction and fact. In Hasford's work,
the principal subject is, ultimately, the language itself--the clipped and brittle "ditty-bop"
of gruntspeak--and the unquenchable need to not ignore the lessons of modem massacre.
Like O'Brien and his other veteran contemporaries, Hasford resists the Trafalmadorian call
to "ignore the awfirl times, and concentrate on the good ones" (Vonnegut, 117), and in

doing so permits the slow process of reconciliation to begin its work.

Unlike Hasford The Short- Timers, Michael Herr's Dispatches does not assume a
fictional framework.21 Like Hasford, Herr was a journalist, though not a military one; he
wrote for Esquire and proved one of the founding members of New Journalism. For him,
"[c]onventiona1 journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower
could win it, all it could do was take the most profound event of the American decade
and turn it into a communications pudding " (218).22 For Herr, the war required a new
vocabulary, a new linguistic format for coming to terms with war experience.

Near the end of Dispatches, Herr wistfiilly muses that "Vietnam was what we had
instead of happy childhoods" (261). His comment completes the final atrophy of his
earlier claim that "Day one, if anything could have penetrated that first innocence I might
have taken the first plane out" (22). Here, in one of the most celebrated works of the war
and, according to Philip Beidler, "one of the most fiilly wrought and authoritative works
to emerge from all the literature of Vietnam" (1982, 141), the high-charged idiom of the
grunt finds sympathetic expression by a non-combatant participant. With the exception of

Bobbie Ann Mason, the other interpreters presented here were foot soldiers caught up

O’Br
“The

NO '

32

personally in the moral and physical quagmire of Vietnam; Herr, on the other hand,
unequivocally dissociates himself from the soldiers' sometimes reluctant mission: "I was
there to watch" (20). Yet watching entails responsibility, and what fiiels his work is
precisely the way his responsibility as a journalist, to present experience objectively and

dispassionately, becomes overwhelmed by the discordant reality:

I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course
you've never heard it. I went there behind the crude serious belief that you had to
be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I
didn't know, it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything
you saw as you were for everything you did (20).

Herr, of course, does not fiilfill the traditional dictates of detached journalism.
Instead, he searches for a new, more radically charged vernacular which might reveal a
more authentic witness; in doing so, Dispatches transcends the strict category of objective
reporting and in its place achieves a certain generic indeterminacy:23 "It is not history
exactly; it is not exactly fiction either" (Jones, 309). In this way, Herr elicits a critical
response among Vietnam scholars comparable only to that accorded to Tim O'Brien. In
fact, this work evokes frequent comparisons to Going After Cacciato. Dale Jones notes,
for example, that "Two of the most important books that have emerged thus far from the
American involvement in Vietnam are Michael Herr's 'journal' Dispatches and Tim
O'Brien's novel Going After Cacciato" in one of two critical articles comparing the two
writers (309).24 In Walking Point, Thomas Myers explains the natural affiliation of the

two works in claiming that

Michael Herr's Dispatches and Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato-~assume not
only the primacy of the imagination, but also the necessity of inventing new
aesthetic strategies for the rendering of new history. In the presence of intractable
official truth and ill-equipped traditional reportage, both writers have explored
varieties of self-conscious Vietnam War romanticism. They assert that the only
history worth recording entails the stripping away of abstractions and
preestablished categories and the working outward from the individual creating
imagination's encounter with new cultural data. Both writers incorporate in their
aesthetic structures the official master narrative of the war in order to subject it to

.Vu

33

a process of textual alchemy in which it is pressurized, tested, and, finally,
transmuted within the laboratory of personal sensibility (146).

Finally, in attempting to categorize the most effective writings of the war, Lorrie
Smith, in "Disarming the War Story," reveals the thread of continuity between both these

works and others treated substantially in this study:

The most provocative and subversive narratives of the war succeed precisely
because they capitalize on war's contradictions and do not labor to resolve them
through narrative coherence or by turning 'scraps of tnrth' into grandiose heroic
myths. Instead of glossing over the space between myths and realities,
experimental narratives like O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, Michael Herr's
Dispatches, Stephen Wright's Meditations in Green, Larry Heinemann's Paco 's
Story, Gustav Hasford's The Short- Timers and its film version, Full Metal Jacket,
bring those gaps to the foreground. These non-linear books are often hailed as the
most profoundly realistic [Smith's emphasis] treatments of the war's craziness,
chaos, and illogic. Though they may be truly mimetic, their deeper value lies, I
believe, in their destabilization of the social order as it is perceived and understood
by popular consensus. It is important to note that none of these narratives breaks
completely free of the male fascination with battle. But each acknowledges its grip
and at least implicitly interrogates that fascination and critiques the values which
support traditional war stories (94).

Yet O'Brien and Herr implement significantly different strategies in their respective
moves to capture and reconcile the war experience. Although part of their difference
certainly rests in their unequal roles as correspondent and soldier, they also seek
essentially different objectives in their works. While O'Brien's oeuvre conveniently fulfills
the criteria of innocence, experience, and consideration, at different periods in his writings,
I will examine Herr's work strictly as an embodiment of the experience phase only--as
"illumination rounds" which in their unrestricted self-absorption into the lunacy and chaos
of life in country necessarily adopt a linguistic strategy which reveals the doublespeak of
MACV jargon and provide the "necessary coUnter-language to that which would cloak the
undeniable personal realities, the new data" (Myers, Walking Point, 4), an intense
exploration of the emergent language of the grunts and journalist colleagues until "what
seems on the surface tangential confessions is most often a short discourse on method"

(Myers, 157).

-/
rum

til

it}
if

34

Part of what complicates any reading of Dispatches is its inherently problematic stance
as authoritative witness. In dispensing with traditional journalistic claims to objectivity
through the persona of an intensely involved and thus entirely subjective first person
narratOr, Herr imposes on the reader the same dislocating relationship to historical fact
that participants in war so frequently report. He unapologetically records the elusiveness
of achieving verisimilitude in his account: "In war more than in other life you don't really
know what you're doing most of the time, you're just behaving, and afterwards you can
make up any kind of bullshit you want about it, say you felt good or bad, loved it or hated
it, did this or that, the right thing or the wrong thing; still, what happened " (20). What
"happened," however, the details of the essential combat experience, disappears in the
miasma of the contradictory or disturbingly laconic recapitulation. Herr's audience, in
listening to his restatement of a hauntingly inexpressive account, "'Patrol went up the
mountain. One man came back. He died before he could us what happened'," experiences
the same helplessness in the absence of explanation as Herr himself does: "' When I asked
him what had happened he just looked like he felt sorry for me, fucked if he'd waste time
telling stories to anyone dumb as I was" (4-5). Instead, we are compelled to acknowledge
that the root experience is in fact inaccessible, too terrible for the crude limits of
conventional expression, "a shock so massive that the body cannot possibly absorb it"
(Jakaitis, 195).

Like Hasford's The Short- Timers, Herr's pseudo-memoir adopts the unique jargon of
the combat participants. What Thomas Myers calls the "Vietnam shorthand the
soldier's linguistic invention and transmission from the war's dark center" (4), becomes in
Dispatches the modus operandi for reconfiguring absurdity. John Jakaitis explains how
the adoption of a unique vernacular operates both as a distancing mechanism from the
"heavy heart of darkness" experience but also as a means of distinguishing the foot
soldier's reality from the alien reality back in the United States, as a form of symbiotic

experiential mediation and survival adaptation:

He

(titrat-

Ea:
m1 t1}

(“Thy

fireun
[WEQf

"i "4Ǥ
r2 tug“.

35

The soldiers' language firrther evidences their distance from the values of their own
culture. By creating a war jargon, they effectively increased the distance between
themselves and their home culture. The 'language of fire'--'discrete burst,‘ 'probe,’
prime selection'--would have no relevance in conversation at home. Their
language would isolate returning veterans from the masses at home, create
alienated small groups of veterans able to relate their experiences only to each
other (206).

Herr seems to revel in the dialect of warfare. Like O'Brien, he marvels at the variety

of ways for describing the killing that occurs in combat:

Nothing [was] like it ever [had been] when we caught a bunch of them out in the
open and close together, we really ripped it then, volatile piss-off, crazed
expenditure, Godzilla never drew that kind of fire but I never saw it as various,
just compulsive eruption, the Mad Minute for an hour (65).

Earlier, he notes "the jargon thinning and trickling out: Frontier sealing, census
grievance, black operations (pretty good, for jargon), revolutionary development, armed
propaganda" [Herr's italics] (54).

Herr's willingness to use the language of grunts as his primary narrative voice in
recounting his experience suggests to Philip Beidler a "conscious choice to assume the
role of public artificer, his desire to give personal sense-making a representative cultural
validity" (1982, 142). His linguistic immersion and the disconnected language it exposes
reflects a genuine struggle to expand the terrain of understood experience, and reveals
what Beidler suggests is Herr's real subject, "finally, of writing itself in the largest degree,
event" (1991, 265-66). To this degree, Beidler views Herr's experiment as eminently
successfirl, properly not located in the mundane cloak of a realistic or disingenuously
mimetic record but as vertiginously rooted and bound "in or at the place of historical-
mythic intersection itself, somewhere between fact and fiction, experiential memory and
imaginative art" (Beidler, 1991, 266, Beidler's emphasis). Not all critics prove charitable
in their assessments of Herr's endeavor.

For Dale Jones, for example, "Herr's sometimes solipsistic approach to reporting and

his confusion of roles—-he is by turns both witness and hero of his own story--erode his

36

ability to attain the necessary distance from the war that would enable him to view his
experiences from some kind of tempered perspective" (315), suggesting, in effect, that
Herr's narrative credibility is fundamentally undermined. Jones ultimately regards
O'Brien's narrative strategies in "Going After Cacciato more compassionate, more
profound, than Dispatches" (3 20). In Vietnam in American Literature, Philip Melling
posits a similar discomfort with Herr's narrative decision: "Dispatches can best be
understood in terms of a modernist strategy of unreliable narration where histoire and
discours become discrepant. The book tells a different tale from the text it proclaims"

(69); Melling finds that what Herr:

appears to discover, therefore, is a living metafiction, a state of mind and a place of
action, a war and a landscape that constantly question their own identity, country
where the search for meaning constantly extends beyond the meager resources of
conventional journalism. In turning away from the notion of a verifiable reality...
Herr's narrator claims to have avoided the fate of the redundant journalist: he

who wanders aimlessly in an obscure world (71).

Probably the most scathing review of Dispatches to date is from Bill Ehrhart, the
Vietnam war poet, in his brief essay "On Michael Herr's Dispatches." For Ehrhart, the
book provides a seductively appealing interpretation of the war, "sensitive, painfirlly
accurate, and deftly recorded" (4). Yet he warns that once "you put the book down, let it
sit for awhile, and find yourself coming back repeatedly to a strange uneasiness inside, a
feeling that something is very wrong with what you've just read" (5). Ehrhart then
critiques, in a choleric burst, a whole string of what he views as crippling oversights and

distortions, at least fiom the combat infantryman's perspective:

Most appalling, however, is Herr's delighted fascination with combat, with the
exhilarating perpetually right-on-the-edge—of-death adrenalin life. It matters little
that be readily admits that fascination: 'All right, yes, it had been a groove being a
war correspondent, hanging out with the grunts and getting close to the war,
touching it, losing yourself in it and trying yourself against it. I had always wanted
that, never mind why ...'

Never 3
interim"I
people to

 

Ehrhart brist't
majority of gmnb
tihh horror. and 2
than] oius. Micha-
iithrr he thinks htl
paean to men-at-ii
tagic injustice to t

mrtrayal of war. it

 

body-baa

gs waiting 1
llhar Ehrhart's .

it in fact consistei

the lived experience

larger as ideologic.
Ehhan's and other:

the “31.26

These assessme
isificance OWNS;
iorl feeling uneasr

memory of the sol

37‘

Never mind why?! Yet that "why" lies at the very bottom of all those dead
Americans stacked in huge green baggies he professes to urge the American
people to weep for Never mind why? (7)

Ehrhart bristles at Herr's claims of sharing the grunt experience, pointing out that the
majority of grunts couldn't board the disconnecting helicopter to simply "transcend" the
. filth, horror, and fear of their daily experience. Finally, Ehrhart angrily argues, "Like so
many of us, Michael Herr went to Vietnam in search of his manhood. The really sad part
is that he thinks he found it. For all the superficial differences, Dispatches is just another
paean to men-at-war, a glorious-grisly-romantic tribute to the ultimate insanity. It is a
tragic injustice to the men he so obviously loved and admired and pitied, for in its stock
portrayal of war, it does its part to ensure that there will always be young men stacked in
body-bags waiting to come home" (7).

What Ehrhart's enraged response reveals, among other things, is the concept that the
war in fact consisted of many wars. While Herr's commentary might accurately portray
the lived experience of many veterans, clearly for Ehrhart it constitutes a clear and present
danger as ideological pabulum but also as untrue witness.25 Still, Dispatches outlives
Ehrhart's and others' criticisms, and continues to be taught repeatedly in college classes on
the war.26

These assessments may ultimately, and ironically, strengthen the measure of
significance of Dispatches in the corpus of works on Vietnam. If the reader completes the
work feeling uneasy and unknowing, is it in fact radically different from Paul Berlin's
inventory of the soldier's vacuum of understanding and knowledge in "The Things They
Didn't Know" in Going After Cacciato? As noted earlier, the two writers' written
interpretations of the in country experience invite comparison. The difference between the
works lies principally, I suggest, in their respective attitudes toward courage. As we see
later in my analysis of O'Brien's work, courage for the latter is not only possible but even

desirable if rendered as "wise endurance." For Herr, however, the sheer ineluctable

madness of the war seems to withhold this conclusion:

38

So you learned about fear, it was hard to know what you really learned about
courage. How many times did somebody have to run in front of a machine gun
before it became an act of cowardice? What about these acts that didn't require
courage to perform, but made you a coward if you didn't? A lot of what people
called courage was undifferentiated energy cut loose by the intensity of the
moment, mind loss that sent the actor on an incredible run; if he survived it he had
the chance later to decide whether he'd really been brave or just overcome with
life, even ecstasy. A lot of people found the guts to just call it all off and refirse to
ever go out anymore, they submitted to the penalty end of the system or they just
split (69).

For Herr, finally, though the Witness must inevitably resort to telling war stories as a
means of finding reconciliation with experience, he posits the efficacy of those stories in
unambiguously diminutive terms: "War stories aren't really anything more than stories
1 about people anyway" (262), a line one would have great difficulty imagining coming from
Tim O'Brien}27 Still, at least Herr pays respectful deference to the centrality of the war
story itself; that he cannot ultimately'find within its powers the healing effects that O'Brien
discovers, in the face of such a carefully woven war story as Dispatches finally proves,

does little to disarm the force and originality of his words.

Stephen Wright's novel, Meditations in Green, the last work I will discuss under the
rubric of experience, shares much with its counterparts, The Short-Timers and Dispatches.
Wright captures a language uniquely the soldier's possession, deftly deploying it to reveal
the ways it bound the grunts together in a community of shared sets of linguistic
symbolism. This novel, as experimental as the other two, provides a glimpse into the
mindset and experience of the rear echelon soldier, the REMF,28 the largest contingent of
soldiers in Vietnam. It also closely parallels Going After Cacciato structurally, though not
thematically: both works contain three identifiable narrative strands, in which their
respective protagonists, Paul Berlin in Cacciato and James I. Griffin in Meditations,
undertake a reordering and imaginative reconstruction of experience which has resulted in

their identification as metafictional enterprises. Both O'Brien and Wright record also the

‘

hill Llilll
extreme:
this 6191

and tile

39

pervasiveness of drug use in country, a theme which dominates the latter's work and
infuses the novel's ending with a backdrop of accumulative entropy in Griffin's life.
Though Meditations has not achieved the same critical status as either Dispatches or
Cacciato, it suggests yet another opportunity to view the fragmentary nature of the
experience there, and in the haunting closing lines of the eleventh meditation, "None of

"29

this ever really happened, one is provoked to ask with Paul Berlin, "What happened,

and what might have happened" then? (Going After Cacciato, 27).

Meditations in Green, like both Dispatches by Herr and Cacciato by O'Brien, violates
readers' expectations by refirsing to conform to a narrative structure in which events
unfold chronologically. Wright, like O'Brien, believes strongly that the approach which
offers the truest insights into the war is that of imaginative reformulation. If Meditations
in Green seems at times to almost persistently violate our expectations of what Vietnam
was "really like," Wright suggests that is precisely his method for getting to the heart of ~

the matter in a roundabout way:

I believe deep down that imagination is the very instrument of [this] reality.
Finally, when you pursue this topic long enough, this whole thing of fact-fiction, it
finally does blur to the point where imagination is just as real as a rock. For
human beings I think in many ways it's more real than a rock. Because we live in
our heads all the time (Lomperis, 48). -

Matthew Stewart, in "Stephen Wright's Style in Meditations in Green," aptly

summarizes the dissonant framework the author uses to launch his tale:

[The novel] is divided into two readily identifiable story-lines; these appear
alternately in lengths of several pages and are punctuated at irregular intervals

by the fifteen short "meditations," which form the narrative's third part and give the
book its title The first of these story-lines follows the doings (and undoings) in
Vietnam of Griffin's unit, the 1069th Military Intelligence Group [and provide]
an extensive exposure to the details of army life in the rear Griffin narrate[s] the
second story-line, which follows his squalid and aimless life nearly seven years
after his return from Vietnam [and finally there are the meditations themselves,
which] call attention to the drug-influenced quality of the narrative (126-27).

(Ir)

40

The narrative strands of the book progress chronologically within themselves. Still, by
superimposing a relatively complex formula for developing his theme of individual and
collective disintegration, Wright adopts a framework which appropriately reflects and
refracts the reader's perception of the war simultaneously with the disintegration of Griffin
as he devolves in his weakening capacity to make sense out of experience.

Stewart notes how Wright "skillfully conveys the boredom and dispiritedness of life in
the rear, the life experienced by the vast majority of American servicemen in Vietnam"
(129). Their distance from the main combat action leads Trips, one of Griffin's colorful
friends, to declare, "'It's all a grotesque hoax concocted for economic purposes. There
is no war, there is no Vietnam. We're sitting inside a secret sound stage somewhere in
southern Arizona'" (31). The reality of routine duties in country belie a company
commander's dire warnings during basic training, interwoven with overtly sexual innuendo
suggesting that the real threat for rear soldiers lies more in the omnipresent prostitutes

than in the lurking threat of combat actions:

The Republic of Vietnam occupies the area roughly equivalent to the foreskin,
from the DMZ at the seventeenth parallel down along the coast of the South China
Sea to the Mekong River in the delta. Today this tiny nation suffers from a bad '
case of VD or, if you will, VC. (Smiles wanly.) What we are witnessing, of
course, is a flagrant attempt on the part of the communist dictatorship of Hanoi to
overthrow, by means of armed aggression, the democratic regime in Saigon
...Consider the human body. What happens if an infection is allowed to go
untreated? The bacteria spread, feeding on healthy tissue, until finally the
individual dies. Physicians are bound by a moral oath which forbids them to ignore
the presence of disease. They cannot callously turn their backs on illness and
suffering and neither can we. A sore on the skin of even a single democracy
threatens the health of all (9-10).

Faced with the surreal life in country, Griffin initiates his attempt to reconcile the lofty
political ambitions of the United States with the mundane day to day grind of eking out
the short-timer‘s calendar: "His literary activity had begun as a search into the structure of
a moment" (50). H e exercises both the role of photographic interpreter and later decoder

of the "scrambled communications" of the footsoldier's life, and increasingly comes up

against
ofeorrtt
ahsurdit
relatft'el
holes in
canpaig
extend i
infest:
lags I
he chart:
ift-des i
Welling
Thus, G:

11111

"5
1ii‘GIrtte

41

against a metafictional paradox as the words collapse and deteriorate beneath the weight
of comrades killed or wounded during choreographed Viet Cong attacks and the inherent
absurdity of calm camp life in the midst of a violent landscape. Originally his duties are
relatively straightforward, "Wherever he put on the film there the air force would make
holes in the ground" (43), but later, his complicity in what he realizes is an unlimited
campaign of destruction complicates his relationship to his work, and compels him to
extend his interpretive skills both to the self-assigned literary task but also to pursuing an
understanding of the war's dark epicenter through an escalating experimentation with
drugs. In Walking Point, Thomas Myers explains how "Griflin's distance from the effects
he charts and interprets begins to produce uneasiness, fragmentation, dark intuition. The
images he studies inch by inch, he senses, are dead signifiers of the deeper history lessons
dwelling behind them, a play of light and shadow that offers surface without depth" (202).
Thus, Griffin complies with the "Old Man's" or commander's encouragement to "start
compiling material, in a semiofficial capacity, on a life of the 1069th." In his newly
appointed role as historian and archivist he discovers how "the moment swelled and
deepened. Facts, events, objects, and people, himself included scribbling away, descended
daily, whirling about the hole, debris down the drain of history" (51). It is the allure of
drugs, however, which proves to be the mainstay of his literary inspiration. Wright never
conclusively clarifies Griffin's drug of choice, "DOUBLEOGLOBE," but suggests strongly
it might be opium.30 During one "session" Griflin describes the process of intoxication:
"It's dropped in the pipe at one end, goes round and round, comes out here. The
omniscient communist conspiracy wastes no opportunity to undermine our will. Our
minds may no longer be in control" (88).

Griffin eventually participates in combat. He witnesses a helicopter shoot-down, and
joins a search team to locate survivors. In doing so, he again engages in his metafictional
enterprise, coming to terms with the intense fear and the edge of excitement characteristic

of combat experience:

42

Accustomed now to the muscular aches, the tightening of the nerves, the
suffocating air, the claustrophobic botany, the sweat slick as slime on his face, he
realized at first with a shock, then with a curious mix of pride and embarrassment,
that he could actually take this torture, that despite his intentions he truly was a
soldier [my italics], a fact he had never before been able to imagine. For a moment
he saw himself through other eyes, the thin fatigued body in a wet wrinkled
uniform, scratched rifle clutched in grimy hand Yes, all the details were correct.
He had become a photograph, a new image to interpret (278-79).

In fact, as the narrative progresses, the reader is called to perform the primary role of
interpreter, called to disassemble what might be real from the increasingly "hallucinatory
haze," as Myers describes it, of Griffin's existence. The final fifly pages of the novel, in
which the main character becomes fully subsumed beneath the suffocating self-
destructiveness of his habitual drug use, particularly reflect what Philip Beidler, in the
article "Re-Writing America: Literature as Cultural Revision in the New Vietnam
Fiction," characterizes as "an equally nightmarish mix-up of fact and phantasmagoric.
Literally and literarily, [the conflation of Griffin's drug haze and the indeterminacy
authority of his self-generated history] blend across a whole stoned, echolalic spectrum"
(7). The reader is called upon to voyeuristically engage with Griffin in his self-immolation:
"Silver needles tumbled through cold space, the glitter of tooled precision. Wanna ride?
He could never pick his way through a scab with straight pin and eyedropper Shooting
up was nothing more or less than flicking yourself, in a single act combining penetration
and penetrated, roles united into one entity, the circle of desire completed, the mandala of
technology" (301). There is no respite as Wright subjects us to a barrage of debilitating
exposures, undermining our credulity, until finally conventional expectation is shattered
and we are faced with the wreckage of Griffin's postwar existence, realizing we, like him,
have been cheated out of any meaningfirl, conclusive reconciliation of war experience.
Griflin's last perceptions of his Vietnam compound deteriorate into metaphors of a game
which will not only recall O’Brien's comparison of the in country environment with game

motifs but also Michael Herr's: "The compound looked so neat it reminded Griffin of a

him;
metal 5
hope 0:
least its

obsessi-

43

Monopoly game. The hootches were the little houses lined up on Boardwalk and he was a
metal shoe stuck on Chance" (321). As he states immediately thereafter, "There was no
hope of escape now" (322). Ultimately, we are provoked to distrust the narrative, or at
least its final contours, as Wright confronts us, in the final meditation, with Griffin's

obsessive drug use, suggested by his "recipe":

1. Remove the latex from the capsules with a flat blunt metallic blade, taking care
not to scrape the epicarp. .

Place coagulated gum in bowl, cover with rice paper.

Set bowl in sun for period of two weeks.

Roll into balls.

Insert ball into pipe.

Ignite.

7. Who has a question for Mr. Memory? (340).

99:59.”

Finally, in Wright's final transformational scene, he invites us to dispel the myth he has
fabricated. The novel's closing remarks evoke both the primary imagery of botanical
activity but also echo the underlying uncertainty of Griffin's role as war witness, and
inevitably, suggest the caution with which the entire narrative must be approached:
"Everywhere the green firses are burning and look now, snipping rapidly ahead of your
leaping eye, the forged blades cutting through the page, the transformation of this printed
sheet twisted about a metal stem for your lapel your hat your antenna, a paper emblem of
the widow's hope, the doctor's apothecary, the veteran's fiiend: a modest flower" (341-
42).

We are reminded of here Griffin's earlier comment: "None of this ever really
happened" (260). How are we to sift between the lived experience of the veteran and the
cacophonous drug-induced recollection? How does Wright's decentered narrative evoke
the closer approximation of realism which Lorrie Smith accords it, describing Meditations
in Green as one of "the most profoundly realistic treatments of the war's craziness, chaos,
and illogic" ("Disamring the War Story," 94, Smith's emphasis). What Wright attains by

his narrative indeterminacy is perhaps, arguably, a closer approximation of the average

44

grunt experience in Vietnam than other, more overtly realistic narrative attempts. As
Matthew Stewart maintains, "verisimilitude may need to be achieved outside the bounds of
a narrowly conceived realism delivered in conventional language" ("Meditations, "131).
Wright's novel adumbrates a looming sense of discontinuity which echoes, though
stylistically it does not mirror, techniques employed by authors in attempts to recapture
the lived experience of Vietnam, and in doing so renders a closer approximation of what
O'Brien describes as honest efforts to depict truth-telling as elaborated in his short story,

"How to Tell a True War Story" in The Things They Carried.

In moving from experience to consideration, it is worth noting the numerous texts I do
not examine which attempt to portray the war using less equivocal schematics. John Del
Vecchio's The Thirteenth Valley, William Turner Huggett's Body Count, and Larry
Heinemann's Close Quarters all approach the war from more starkly conventional modes
of representation, for instance. Barry Kroll, a seasoned professor of Vietnam War
courses, argues convincingly that use should be made of books such as James Webb's
Fields of F ire precisely because of their attempts to dutifirlly record the war experience in
mimetic terminology, despite the disappointment of students at their apparent lack of

artistic design:

Although many of the students responded negatively to Fields of Fire--and some
even recommended that in 'the next Vietnam class you instruct do not include
Fields--by the end of the unit I was convinced that the novel had provided
students with an important opportunity to exercise literary judgment, and that it
had been useful for them to examine a flawed book after reading Dispatches, a
brilliant one (Teaching Hearts and Minds, 66-67).

Despite such convictions, I trust the above considerations of Vietnam experience will
prove resourceful once we examine O'Brien's writing. Their emphasis on the elusiveness
of the real and firlly-qualified, authentic combat experience, assumes a stance quite close

to O'Brien's distrustfirl attitude toward narratives overly mimetic in their attempt to evoke

45

the reality of war experience. What is important to acknowledge at this stage is the
variety of expressions of the combat experience, the plethora of inroads into consideration

of time spent in country.
Narratives of Aftermath: Inevitable Reconciliations

In Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost, Tobey Herzog distinguishes the phase of
consideration as one in which "the specific theme is a soldier's contemplation of fear,
courage, and cowardice on the battlefield" (139); it is not necessarily conducted in the
actual aftermath of battle, but is characterized by the deep and reflective inventory of the
meaning and outcome of one's experience. Following his definition, Herzog conducts an
exhaustive explication of the works of Tim O'Brien, which he finds "lead to particularly
important insights about the self and fundamental truths about human nature and
responsibilities" as they are realized fictionally from "multiple perspectives" (140). The
third element of my own discussion centers not so exclusively on the actual contemplation
of the soldier in the aftermath of his experience, but on fictional and non-fictional
depictions of veterans in the years following their involvement. I will briefly reconsider
Mason's In Country, emphasizing the point of view of Emmett, the troubled vet, rather
than Sam, the teenage female attempting to understand Emmett's failed adjustment back
into society. Secondly, I will examine Larry Heinemann's Paco's Story, the National Book
Award winner in 1987, a novel which provides chilling scenes of in country experience as
well as a grim example of the postwar veteran adrift in America, unwelcome,
unacknowledged, and unable to reconcile his troubled memory. Finally, I will conclude
my discussion of the sub-genre of Vietnam literature by looking into William Broyles'
Brothers in Arms, a memoir of a combat Marine officer's return visit to Vietnam in 1984, a
work of nonfiction which ostensibly focuses only on the encounters he makes during his

(re)visit. Broyles gradually expands the scope of his reflection to include a careful

46

reexamination of his combat experience; the result is an amazingly detailed catalogue of
life there under the worst conditions. Appropriately, as the final work to be investigated,
it constitutes the most overt attempt at reconciliation: the individual soldier literally
embarking on a journey to see again the battlefield, engage haunting memory face to face,
but most importantly, to meet with former enemies until he discovers that "I had more in
common with my old enemies than anyone except the men who had fought at my side
We had tried to kill each other, but we were brothers now" (275). What Broyles' work
additionally contributes is further testimony that engagement with Vietnam through the
written record is not bound by generic conventions. His account, like Caputo's A Rumor
of War, O'Brien's If I Die in a Combat Zone, Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July,
Lynn Van Devanter's Home Before Morning, and Gloria Emerson's Winners and Losers,
all provide compelling evidence for the profound lessons to be extended through the use
of memoir and relatively straightforward autobiographical writings. At the other extreme
are works such as Going After Cacciato, The Short- Timers, Dispatches, and Paco '3 Story,
works which challenge generic considerations through experimental forays which dispense
with the aim (or hope) of recapturing the war in concise, historically faithfirl depictions.
Between these extremes lies a growing body of work too lengthy to enumerate here,
constituting ultimately a mature and distinct sub-genre in American literature, one which
continues to provide some of the most powerful writing of our time. Writing which
always seeks to locate itself against the backdrop of real experience, to define itself in
terms (and counter-terms) of the inherited cultural history which has emerged in the wake
of the war's aftermath, and suggests an undeniable challenge to the lingering last traces of
the John Wayne myth, a fiction of heroism which emerged in the seductive warrior

mythology and enticed so many into the unglamorous reality of war in this century.

Thomas Myers, in his 1988 article "Dispatches from Ghost Country: the Vietnam

Veteran in Recent American Fiction," discriminates between the first generation of

47

Vietnam literature, which he describes as "spare, surreal slices of reality--the tour of duty
as concentrated and shaped explosive charge," and a second generation of books which
"move to a different rhythm--they are the dark ruminations, the whispered, haunted
monologues of the homeless warrior floating unseen through a transformed American
landscape, one whose real threat resides in its illusory harmony, itsdeadly everydayness"
(417). Within this general and ever-understated lurking danger of the society to which the
uncelebrated war heroes return, there is Emmett Smith of Mason's In Country, "the
would-be avenger another prisoner of the war, a drifter whose only true personal
movement is a painfirl running in place within memory" (423). Though the novel is at one
level an account of Sam's coming to terms with the loss of her father and the persistent
absence of meaning Vietnam imposes on her, as Matthew C. Stewart argues in "Realism,
Verisimilitude, and the Depiction of Vietnam Veterans in In Country," "since the subject
of In Country is the aftereffects of Vietnam on individuals and communities, Emmett's
story becomes inseparable from Sam's and is coequal in importance" (167). Emmett's
potential volatility is smothered in the face of his niece's persistent but compassionate
struggle to uncover his failure to adapt to the "World" as he finds it upon return. Sam
wants desperately to probe her uncle's cycle of depression and help him begin the road to
recovery but lacks the historical insight, as Emmett in an attempt to sideline her inquiry
instructs her, "'Women [and Sam as well] weren't over there So they can't really
understand" (107), a challenge which, as discussed above, she takes on as her focal
mission. Other veterans issue the same prohibition to her; Pete, another Vietnam vet in
Hopewell, tells Sam "'Stop thinking about Vietnam, Sambo. You don't know how it was,
and you never will. There is no way you can understand. So just forget it. Unless you've
been humping the boonies, you don't know'" (194).

The novel's most poignant symbolic depiction of Emmett is in his work underneath the
foundation of the house he shares with Sam. Initially his work evolves out of a real

suspicion that "the floor was rotting," but in light of a growing realization that he might be

48

suffering the effects of Agent Orange, he considers a recent newspaper account of a "man
with a tipped heart" (92), an accurate description of his emotional condition. Later,
inspecting the outside of the house after a particularly heavy rainfall, he notes how "'Water
seeping under a house spawns all sorts of life Mosquitoes, tadpoles, water bugs, dry

rot, funguses, all kinds of worms and snakes (152), a description which is highly
evocative of being in the jungle in Vietnam. Increasingly, Emmett's campaign to make
minor repairs serves as an entire analogue to his experience in country, a way in which he
can physically express the sense of alienation he feels. Over time, his work more closely
resembles the deliberate construction of a bunker or trench than the mundane act of ‘
domestic preservation. Sam acutely senses the way his activity translates into an act of
retreat, a denial of his place in the social matrix of the small Kentucky town; when
Emmett, in response to another direct question about the "reality" of life in country,
shrugs her aside by saying "'It was too miserable to tell. It's something you just want to
forget'," Sam responds with a finely attuned assessment of his condition: "'8me to me
like you don't want to forget it at all You know what you're doing? You're just digging
yourself a foxhole to hide in. Like the enemy was all around us" (271).

Emmett actually suffers from a combination of ailments. His psychological trench
warfare indicates the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He avoids
relationships with women due to a supposed impotence, a problem pervasive among the
vets: "Emmett didn't want a job because men had jobs to support families, and if they
couldn't have families, then why bother? Women wanted jobs to prove a point, but men
had jobs because of women" (186). His unemployment and shiftlessness produces
continual dissension in the lives of those around him--Lonnie, Sam's boyfriend, for
example, worries about his darker side: "'I like Emmett just fine, but what if be snapped
and did something crazy?” (125). Finally there is the very real likelihood of Agent Orange

contamination, which even he gradually has to acknowledge.

49

After Sam spends a night out in the local "bush," a park near Paducah called Cawood
Pond, Emmett confronts her and experiences a cathartic unleashing. The initiation of
healing for him begins in the inevitable war story, the recapitulation to Sam of a traumatic

encounter:

"There was this patrol I was on and we didn't have enough guys? And we were
too close together and this land mine blew us sky—high. We was too close. We
had already lost a bunch and we freaked out and huddled together, which you
should never do, so we was scrambling to the LZ to meet the chopper. And first
we hit this mine and then this grenade comes out of nowhere, and I played like I
was dead, and I was underneath this big guy about to smother me Four hours,
then, until the next day, I was all by myself, except for dead bodies. The smell of
warm blood in the jungle heat, like soup coming to a boil. Oh, that was awfirll"
(320)

Emmett's strategy, his daily routine of memory avoidance, finally unravels, : "'This is
what I do. I work on staying together, one day at a time. There's no room for anything
else. It takes all my energy" (225). Now, however, he is able to perform the journey east
to Washington, DC. and fully confront the effects of his involvement. The novel ends
with a searing scene in which Emmett performs the ritual hand-touching ceremony on the
Vietnam Veterans' Memorial: "Silently, Sam points to the place where Emmett is studying
the names low on a panel. He is sitting there cross-legged in front of the wall, and slowly
his face bursts into a smile like flames" (352). Ironically, the healing effect of the
experience shared at the wall stands as a quiet refutation of the earlier critiques that
women could not understand the war experience, not having been there. The monument
itself was designed by a female non—combatant, Maya Ying Lin, then a 21-year old Yale '
University architecture student. Furthermore, as Tobey Herzog suggests, "An important
message emerging from Mason's In Country is that Americans did not have to experience
firstth the Vietnam War nor even to have lived during the historical period for it to be
their war. All Americans are affected by the ambiguous legacies of the Vietnam
experience" (Innocence Last, 213). Perhaps Mason's novel too tidily resolves the wounds

of the war; in yearning for a satisfying eradication of the turbulent and unabated problems

 

 

 

 

50

of veterans some have found her work only a cosmetic repair of the nation's psyche at
best, yet finally, as Thomas Myers states in Walking Point, it serves us all as "a peace

offering of the most significant kind" (224).

In 1979, in an article in Esquire titled "The Violent Vet," Tim O'Brien captured the
contemporary stereotype of the anguished Vietnam vet prior to the emergence of Post-

Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) as a clinically diagnosed postwar reality:

The typical Vietnam veteran is bonkers. Outright dangerous: a shell-shocked,
frazzle-brained, doped-out psycho. In late-night reruns of Baretta or Kojak, you'll
recognize the Vietnam veteran by his demented eyes and twitching trigger finger,
the robber in a whole decade of cops and robbers shows, the kidnapper and
hijacker and rapist. No, he's not exactly a villain, not exactly a heavy, he's just
well, wacko, deeply disturbed. Haunted by his complicity in an evil war, the
combat veteran is given to fits of violence, succeeded by periods of almost
catatonic depression, succeeded by more violence. His own children fear him.
Neighbors lock their windows. His wife, tired of being mistaken for a VC
sympathizer, sleeps on the sofa. And his nation, which failed to support him in

' time of war, has now deserted him in time of peace--no parades, no ticker tape, no
honor (96, O'Brien's emphasis).

Though O'Brien goes on to explode the caricature, strengthening a similar argument
he makes in "We've Adjusted Too Well" that "Contrary to popular stereotypes, most
Vietnam veterans have made the adjustment to peace the vast majority are not hooked
on drugs, not unemployed, are not suicidal, are not beating up wives and children, are not
robbing banks, are not knee-deep in grief or self-pity or despair" (205, O'Brien's
emphasis), the war certainly left in its wake a sea of human wreckage conforming to the
stereotype. Paco's Story,“ by Larry Heinemann, provides an alternative assessment to
O'Brien's. Paco, the lone survivor of Firebase Henriette, a secluded outpost oven'un by
North Vietnamese soldiers, pursues an empty and ultimately unfiilfilled quest for peace on
the highways of mid-America. Through flashbacks conducted in the voices of his dead

comrades, or "ghosts," we learn of atrocities in which Paco was an accomplice,

51

complicating whatever feelings of sympathy we have for his condition, and we are
gradually drawn to participate in his initiation into the increasingly hostile world of a
veteran drifter never at home in his native land, an initiation which Thomas Myers
describes as a "death-in-life drifting from one small town to another, an aimless postwar
trek that becomes a dark picaresque of visible and hidden wounds, cycle of bus tickets,
odd jobs, crumbling hotel rooms, and bad dreams" (1988, 223).

The question which lingers throughout Paco's narrative is the inevitable "Why me?"
Paco represents what Myers calls the "postwar grunt Everyman" (223), an archetypal
Emmett Smith searching as much for an elusive acceptance back into an inscrutable
society --a combat veteran seeking to nurse the wounds of memory and an imagination
which freewheels through episodes of ever more grisly nightmares. Unlike some of his
contemporaries, Heinemann avoids a direct search for new narrative techniques to convey
the depressing reality of his tale. Instead, Paco 's Story offers an immersion in the
mundane horrors of failed recognition in a landscape characterized by boredom, routine,
and predictable rejection. What Paco discovers, upon his initial arrival in Boone, the
mythic town in Iowa he settles in which resembles so many nondescript American towns,
is a village unswervingly dedicated to the ethic of comfortable repetition. The most
hopefirl response he receives after inquiring for work at the town bar is a diagnosis of the
town's ills and the unlikely hopes it offers, an assessment which only thinly veils its
suspicious demeanor towards the newly anived vet:

"Ain't no work around this neck of the woods but good, is what I'm saying. Ain't
that right?" [a bar regular] says, and looks around at the rest of the rednecks on his
crew. "Sure a shit. Fuckin'-A. Fuckin' foundry mill's gonna close any day now.
Railroad, which used to hire any goddamned gimpy deadbeat that come up the
pike"--the guy has seen Paco's cane, just like everybody else in the place--"even
they gettin' picky and pissy and don't hardly hire nobody no more ..." (65).

Paco's exclusion from work establishes a rhythm of dismissal and lack of acceptance.
He perseveres despite an apparent unwillingness to accommodate him by the townspeople,

finally settling for a menial position as a dishwasher after a series of negative job inquiries.

52

He obtains a position at the "Texas Lunch," a greasyspoon across the street from the
"Geronimo Hotel," establishments whose names are familiar enough to suggest any
American locale. There he concocts a sexual fantasy in which he figures as the object of
desire of a young unattached female, Cathy. Through the distanced third-person narrative
voice of one of F irebase Henriette's ghosts addressing James, a detached figure observing

Paco's tragedy, we witness Cathy's actual reflections on Paco's masculine allure: she
imagines the swirl-around scars up and down his back, and how they disappear over his
shoulder and up into his hairline She sees herself drawing on his scars as if they were
Braille, as if each scar had its own story" (101). The reader learns that each scar does in
fact tell its own story.

What strengthens Heinemann's narrative are the counterpoint remembrances of
combat, associations with the "real" world which haunt Paco's memory more strongly than
the strongest impressions of his present environment. Interspersed throughout the novel
are "lapses," flashbacks to the overrunning of Henriette. In contrast to the yawning
captivity of Boone's predictability these flashbacks suggest more than merely other-
worldly incomprehension. Ironically, despite the despicable glare of ugly war, one is led
to wish Paco could gain access back into this more reasonable, paradoxically less deadly
world. The few instances of tenderness in the novel, after all, occur either in the
immediate environs of Paco's traumatic recovery or shortly thereafter: in the medevac
room where he awaits treatment with all the other mass casualties of his operatiOn, he
receives the compassionate sexual attentions of a nurse (55-56). Just as we hear so much-
of the story through the voices of ghosts, we are led to understand that the ghosts were
Paco's last meaningfirl human relations, and their death signifies a living death for him.

The novel reaches a crescendo of revulsion and sadness during Paco's dream-

remembrance of the only sexual consummation he experienced while in country, a lurid

gang rape of a fourteen year old Vietnamese girl:

53

Gallagher and Paco held the girl down firmly while Jonesy tied her wrists together
behind her back, then hauled on that wire the same as if they were hoisting the
morning colors, just as crisp and snappy as the book says-- The Manual of Arms,
James, the twenty-two-dash-five, we called it. The girl had to bend over some or
dislocate both arms, so she bent down over this raw wood thing about the size of a
kitchen table. The girl was scared shitless, chilly and shuddering, glossy and
greasy with sweat, and was all but tempted to ask them as one human being to
another not to rape her, not to kill her, but she didn't speak English (178-79).

The language barrier proves little obstacle to the participants, just as the familiarity of
English little shields Paco from the difficult nightmare of his present circumstances in
Boone. Memory intrudes both as relief and garish remembrance, and in the face of such
horrific knowledge, the reader's possible sympathy is mitigated by disgust and thus we too
become like one of Boone's townspeople: reticent, wanting to look away, hoping Paco
will leave us in peace. Yet as Renee Epstein argues in "Talking Dirty: Memories of War
and the Vietnam Novel," "Heinemann wants no white-washing, no 'war is hell' excuses;
instead he swaggers the narrative patter in front of us, inviting both revulsion and
seduction" (475).

Despite the horror of such recollections of combat experience, most critics of Paco's
Story comment on its adherence to conventional storytelling techniques. In Vietnam in
American Literature, for example, Philip Melling notes how Heinemann takes issue with
"the idea that contemporary life demands from the writer a postmodern narrative, and he
rejects, in particular, the need to invest 'new aesthetic strategies for the new history' of
Vietnam" (114). Heinemann's willingness to rely on the familiar evil effectively ensures
that the audience cannot even temporarily dissociate its own responsibility from the
personal tragedy, and suggests that rapprochement with veterans is a collective
responsibility, just as the guilt of atrocities committed by soldiers is a collective guilt.
Melling's misreading of Paco 's Story, however, lies in his insistence that "the personal
narrative of the soldiers brings intimacy to the war, an intimacy that reduces (through the
heightened realism of everyday speech) the exceptional status of those who were killed"

(114). In fact, the unnamed ghost-narrators' vernacular is anything but "everyday" speech,

 

54

and rather than minimizing or absorbing the novel's pervasive sense of atrocity, it
underscores the potential lethality of the young American soldier. In revealing his story
through such voices, Heinemann explodes the mythology of the inherent goodness of the
boy down the street who goes overseas and performs innumerable small acts of kindness
to the deprived victims of a foreign land. Instead, we are forced to witness rapacious
creatures devoid of law, living out the grim fulfillment of their ugliest fantasies on a
population ill-coped for self-defense. Heinemann offers us no heroes worthy of emulation
in Paco 's Story.

What Heinemann self-consciously exploits is the need to explore the war's meaning (or
absence of meaning) through the framework of a war story. Ultimately, he does not
intend to "instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior,
nor refi'ain men from doing the things men have always done" (O'Brien, TTTC, 76). We
do not judge Paco in the end, nor do we judge Jesse, a veteran of the 173rd "Airborneski"
who envisions the commemoration of a veterans' memorial which captures the true nature

of the war for its participants:

"Get yourself a couple of acres of prime Washington, DC, property, see,
somewhere in line with the Reflecting Pool Chop a couple of acres off some
grassy knoll. Cover it with Carrara marble, bub, the whitest stone God makes.
Engrave the marble with the names of all the Vietnam War Dead--every swinging
dick, as the fella says Then in the middle of all that marble put a big granite
bowl, a big mortar-looking thing about the size of a three-yard dump truck.
Collect thousands of hundred dollar bills, funded by an amply endowed trust fund,
say, to keep the money a-coming. Then gather every sort of 'egregious' excretion
that can be transported across state lines from far and wide--chickenshit, bullshit,
bloody fecal grop, radioactive dioxin sludge, kepone paste, tubercular spit,
abortions murdered at very stage of fetal development--I don't know what and all.
Shovel all that shit into that granite bowl and mix in the money by tens of
thousands of dollars" (159).

What Heinemann so artfiilly establishes from the novel's opening pages is the centrality
of war story and its problematic operation in revealing the nature of combat experience.

He carefully confiJses reader expectations by first warning us that "This ain't no war story.

55

War stories are out--one two, three, and a heave-ho, into the lake you go with all the
other alewife scuz and foamy harbor scum," he then follows by lamenting the possible loss
of "some prize-winning, leg-pulling daisies--some real pop-in-the-oven muffins, some real
softly lobbed, easy out line drives" (3). Then, in a deft inversion, he elevates the war story

as narrative transmission by identifying its detractors:

"The people with the purse strings and apron strings gripped in their hot and soft
little hands denounce war stories-~with perfect diction and practiced gestures--as a
geek-monster species of evil-ugly rumor These people who denounce war
stories stand bolt upright and proclaim with broad and timely sweeps of the arm
that war stories put other folks to sleep where they sit. (When the contrary is
more to the truth, James. Any carny worth his cashbox--not dead or in jail or
squirreled away in some county nuthouse—-will tell you that most folks shell out
hard-eamed greenback cash, every time, to see artfiilly performed, urgently
fascinating, grisly and gruesome carnage" (3 -4)

Precisely the carnage which Heinemann makes us see. There is no reconciliation, no
hint of redemption, no promise of healing only the unswerving allegiance to obscenity

and truth which O'Brien instructs us marks the true war story.

The final work dealing with the consideration phase of the veteran experience provides
a carefully measured counterbalance to Heinemann's bleak vision. William Broyles Jr's
Brothers in Arms: A Journey From War to Peace, suggests that reconciliation can be
achieved by the veteran in the aftermath of his combat experience, however brutal. At the
most basic level, Broyles' book is a non-fiction memoir recounting his return trip to
Vietnam in 1984, approximately fifteen years after serving from 1969-70 as a Marine
Corps officer in the heavily-contested I Corps region which straddled the demilitarized
zone (DMZ). Broyles was among the first of many veterans who would eventually return
to confront their memories and walk the battlefields of their youth: Heinemann, for
example, has made several return trips to the region around Cu Chi and the Iron Triangle,

near Saigon, where he fought as a cavalry scout. Tim O'Brien returned to Vietnam in

56

February 1994 to research an article for New York Times Magazine,32 finally fulfilling an
earlier ambition which was cancelled due to the stress of his speaking tour after the
publication of The Things They Carried (Blades, 2). Though Brothers in Arms is
professedly a nonfiction account, Broyles compellingly investigates the nature of war
stories and the demands imagination makes on retrieving and reconstructing memory. He
frequently slips into reminiscence, but not for any maudlin effect; Broyles seeks to bury
the bitterness of his wartime experience by directly confronting his previous enemies as
humans and as fellow soldiers, embracing them in an invitation to reconciliation. His work
provides a poignant exploration of the capacity for forgiveness despite unspeakable
combat viciousness, an incisive analysis of the character of the American military in
Vietnam in 1969-70, and a no-holds barred engagement with the possibilities and
limitations of the war story as a tool for confronting the truth of combat experience.
Ultimately, Broyles suggests that all examination of combat, whether fictional or non-
fictional, distills into the war story, and his discussion of the components and
characteristics of war stories illuminates Herr's reductive vision and anticipates that of
O'Brien, in which the war story is the only medium available for the negotiation of
memory.

During the Asia Society conference in 1985, in which he moderated a session called
"The Role of Literature in Understanding the War," Broyles outlined the need to explore

suffering as a starting point for achieving a lasting peace:

So much great art is rooted in human suffering and intense human experience. That
is, I think, one of the basic foundations for the knowledge we get as human beings:
it's suffering. But I‘m not sure what a guide it is to our politics Whether it is
what Ron Kovic is suffering personally or whether it is the suffering of the
Vietnamese that Al Santoli writes about, both these sufferings are real. But I don't
think either really tells us where we should go as a people necessarily. Somehow
we have to be able to engage other parts of our being and transcend that suffering-
and figure out what to do next (Lomperis, 85).

57

Perhaps the most grating reality of Broyles' reminiscence is his insistence on the ethical

dimension of war; he speaks of morality, spiritual obligation, and the officer's

responsibility to one's soldiers nearly interchangeably. The crux of his memoir is his

conception of the war story, a hybrid tale of personal involvement and larger, historical

understanding, as well as a personal testimonial to the peculiar seduction of war for young

men:

Men have always loved war, even as they hated it. But to admit such feelings
about Vietnam seems inappropriate. The war was brutal and morally complex,
fought by Americans who canied the terrible burden of knowing that the country
which sent them didn't believe in what they were doing. We were fighting an
enemy whose entire society was organized for war, and who would do anything to
win But nothing about the life we Americans knew and cherished w0uld be
affected whether we won or lost. When the horrors of war seem without purpose,
it is natural to hate them (198).

Broyles felt sufficient anxiety over the apparent tension between his ambivalent

feelings of love and hate toward war to develop them more fully shortly after the

publication of Brothers in A rms into an article in Esquire, "Why Men Love War." In this

essay, he more clearly articulates the deep-seated internal conflict he mentions above:

Ask me, ask any man who has been to war about his experience, and chances are
we'll say we don't want to talk about it--implying that we hated it so much, it was
so terrible, that we would rather leave it buried. And it is no mystery why men
hate war. War is ugly, horrible, evil, and it is reasonable for men to hate all that.
But I believe most men who have been to war would have to admit, if they are
honest, that somewhere inside themselves they loved it too, loved it as much as
anything that has happened to them before or since. And how do you explain that
to your wife, your children, your parents, or your friends? (5 5)

In his memoir, he explores this paradoxical attitude. After recently walking one of the

battlefields on which he fought, Broyles nostalgically recalls how "After I returned from

the war I did my best not to talk about it, and on the rare occasions when I did I would

always begin by saying of course that war was a great evil, and that I hated it. It was the

proper thing to say. And it was true, but it wasn't the whole truth" (197-98). He

proceeds to dissect his uncomfortably positive feelings: "The best reason we loved war is

58

also its most enduring memory--comradeship. A comrade in a war is a man you can trust
with your life It is, unlike marriage, a bond that cannot be broken by a word or by
boredom or divorce, or by anything other than death" (199); he continues, "Men also love
war because it is a game, a brutal, deadly game, the only game that counts. War is the
thrill of a great challenge, to your courage and to your endurance and, yes, to your
intellect. Nothing I had ever studied was as complex or as creative as the small-unit
tactics of Vietnam" (200). And finally: "war was an initiation into the power of life and
death. Women touch that power at the moment of birth; men on the edge of death. It is
like lifting off the comer of the universe and peeking at what's underneath" (201). I quote
Broyles at length here in part to place what might seem a deeply troubling position he
takes into a more fiilly developed context. His response, always ambivalent, echoes one
made by numerous Vietnam War writers: Michael Herr, for example, describes combat as
"the feeling you'd had when you were much, much younger and undressing a girl for the
first time" (Dispatches, 144). In Innocence Lost: Vietnam War Stories, critic Tobey
Herzog, commenting on the pervasiveness of this divided attitude toward combat
experience in war narratives, describes it as the "fascination of the abomination," a phrase
he adopts from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (27). This love of war in Broyles'
work, always providing a foil to one's revulsion at how unremittingly vicious combat can
become, underpins his conception of the war story and suggests a valuable analogue to
O'Brien's blueprint for what makes a war story "true."

Although Broyles adopts a memoir format in order to convey his personal experience
and record the process of reconciliation with his former enemies, he acknowledges the
power of telling war stories and reshaping experience in fictional terms as a means of
coming at the truth of that experience. He recognizes while the war story can never
achieve the luster of the original event, it does not necessarily seek to retrieve the memory
intact, anyhow. He concedes that the final objective of telling war stories is not to

faithfully record the facts as they existed in historical reality, but to attempt to place

59

oneself, whether veteran or not, inside the feeling of the combat event. . In the chapter "My
Enemy, My Self," Broyles explicates the interior workings of the soldier's natural narrative

format:

At Duy Xuyen, when we began to share war stories, the children were cleared out
and the beer was poured. The old saying among soldiers is that the difference
between a fairy tale and a war story is that the fairytale begins 'Once upon a time'
and the war story begins 'This is no shit.’ It's meant as a joke, but it makes a
deeper point. War stories, in fact, are like fairy tales. There is something primal
about them. They have a moral, even a mythic tnith, more than a literal one
War stories reach out and remind their audience of their place in the world. They
are primitive stories told around the fire in smoky tipis after the pipe has been
passed. They are all, at bottom, the same Its purpose is not to enlighten but to
exclude. Its message is not its content but to put the listener in his place. I
suffered. I was there. You were not. Only those facts matter. Everything else is
beyond words to tell (195-96).

A war story can be imbedded in any narrative format: memoir, conventional combat
fiction, or experimental work like Herr's, Hasford's, and O'Brien's, which strain against
traditional generic classification. What all these works have in common is that they place
the reader in the shoes of the teller, which often requires the listener to dispense with the
pursuit of literal truth or objectivity and submit to subjective authority.

Broyles does not idealize his own experiences, either as a youthfiil combatant or as an
observer of postwar Vietnam. He remains troubled throughout his visit by the manner in
which his Vietnamese hosts, loyal communist party members, whitewash incidents
committed by their forces yet relentlessly underline Americans' morally uncertain actions:
"The Communists' massacre of civilians at Hue and at places like Thanh My are now
inconvenient, so they have been airbrushed out of history; they no longer exist. The
Communists stand in the flood of history and pluck from the water only what serves the
State If history falls short of the ideal, it can be transformed into myth" (168).
Ultimately, however, and appropriately as a final examination of Vietnam narratives other

than O'Brien's, Broyles returns to Vietnam in search of a lasting inner peace, and to put

60

"the ghosts of Vietnam" behind him.33 On the memoir's final page he poignantly salutes

his former enemy, and buries his personal sword:

I did find the grave of an enemy I never knew--the man I could have been. And I
discovered that I had more in common with my old enemies than with anyone
except the men who had fought at my side. My enemies and I had shared
something almost beyond words. We had been through war, and by accepting our
memories of it honestly we w were able to greet each other in trust and fiiendship,
hoping that we would never see war again We had tried to kill each other, but
were brothers now (275).

Broyles' journey back to Vietnam concludes a lengthy pursuit of reconciliation. Like
O'Brien, his agreement to enter the war had been made with extreme reluctance. He too
bent beneath the pressures of conscience only with considerable reflection. He debated, in
language similar to O'Brien's reflections in If I Die in a Combat Zone, on his stake in
going to Vietnam: "I thought the war was wrong but my going was right. It was a
contradiction. Since I was against the war, why should I participate in it? .I had decided it
was worse to manipulate the system so that another man would fill my shoes" (78). Once
in country and captive to the war's grinding routine of violence, he can only muse sadly on
the war's vacuous rationale: "There was no single goal in Vietnam; there were 2.8 million
goals, one for every American who served there. And in the end the nation's goal became

what each soldier's goal had been all along: to get out of Vietnam" (96).

Summary
What most narratives of Vietnam share in common is their engagement with
experience through the war story, in an attempt to draw the reader/listener into the deeper
realities of combat experience in order to test and resolve the conflicting emotions which

arise out of such involvement. Whether explorations operating at the level of innocence of

61

the war's impending catastrophe (as in In Country or The Quiet American), the trauma of
direct experience (as in Dispatches or The Short- Timers), or, finally, in the phase of
consideration or aftermath (as in, again, In Country or Brothers in Arms), there is no
requirement that the works, in order to evoke the meaning of such involvement at either
the personal level or at the level of collective myth-making, arise directly out of accounts
set geographically within the war's physical occurrence. Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, for
example, takes place almost entirely outside of Vietnam, as does Heinemann's Paco's
Story, yet both stories are as much about seeking resolution to the Vietnam experience as
those works which operate solely in country. Tim O'Brien struggles between his twin
objectives of rendering the war in new and ever-reshaped terminology and the process of
obtaining a therapeutic benefit in telling the war stories in his fiction.34 The two
processes intertwine within the act of engaging the Vietnam war within these examined
narratives. To that degree, they all share a common purpose and work to establish a
distinct identification of Vietnam as a separate sub-genre in American literature and
contribute to the body of earlier war narratives which arose out of this nation's previous
wars. In the case of Vietnam narratives, however, it is a body of writing still taking shape,
as these and other writers persist in bringing the war's meaning into the light and establish
the parameters of what Thomas Myers calls the "second battlefield" of wars, which has
"no geopolitical reference points, for its only map coordinates are those of collective

memory and imagination" (Walking Point, 5).

3. "Responsibly Inventing History": The Work of Tim O'Brien

In the years following the conclusion of America's involvement in the Vietnam War,
critics and observers of the emerging literature as it seemed to unanimously note the
absence of any "master narrative," as Thomas Myers calls it, in any one writer or novel.
At the Asia Society conference in 1985, Timothy Lomperis recorded the participants'
general consensus that no work, whether fictional or otherwise, had yet come out of the
war which might be considered representative of the Vietnam experience, and that such a

possibility was not only unlikely but perhaps undesirable:

From a literary perspective , one question that was addressed repeatedly
throughout the conference was whether anyone was ready to, or capable of,
writing the definitive work on Vietnam. Everyone who spoke on this question said
they weren't nor did they suspect anyone else to try for some time What this
conference revealed in the nearly universal rejection of any grand or transcendent
vision above the fragmentary is that, even if such a definitive work has been
written or is being written, America is not ready to read it (Lomperis, 8-

9).

Tim O'Brien, also a participant at the conference, had already received the National
Book Award for his 1978 novel, Going After Cacciato.

In Walking Point, Thomas Myers suggests that Vietnam might be incapable of
producing any finally satisfying "master narrative" of the war: "Much of the trouble
concerning both official truth and journalistic clarity resulted from the war's not being a
single narrative but a number of successive and simultaneous wars within a war, a loose
collection of political, ideological, and military vignettes that would not conform easily to
the form of the collective mythic novel in which previous American wars resided (24).
Indeed, though Myers sees the literature of the war elaborating certain recurring themes
present in the writing on this country's previous wars, at the same time he notes the
specific strains and tensions which make any coherent artistic program unlikely among. this

generation's "point men":

62

63

The war would simply not support the weight of the competing readings placed on
it, and the cracks and fissures in the immediate tension-ridden narrative spoke to a
great number of writers of deep cultural rending, the visible separation of the
indigenous impulses of idealism and pragmatism that in previous wars had seemed
one balanced organism and the most typically American unitary response to
national crisis (24).

For Philip Beidler, in Re- Writing America: Vietnam Authors in Their Generation, an
update and reassessment of his earlier and still valuable critical study, American Literature
and the Experience of Vietnam, critical analysis has become easier to perform as the
literature assumes more discernible contours. He sees the literature as nearly an historical
analogue to that of World War I and emphasizes the ways that the newer generation has
strived to establish new mythic patterns and destroy older, more idealized conceptions of
America's lasting infatuation with war: "if there now appears to have been a single
distinguishing feature of the most significant American writing about the experience of
Vietnam from the earliest days [to] the present, it has been the attempt to forge myriad
forms of new and creative alliance between literature and the work of cultural revision"
(xiii), to write what Thomas Myers calls "compensatory history" (Walking Point, 9)..
Within his reevaluation of the state of Vietnam literature, he explores the work of O'Brien,
elevating him to the status of literary statesman based on his ability to encompass a variety
of generic forms but also, principally, on the strength of his most recent complete work,
The Things They Carried. Whether Beidler would define O'Brien's overall achievement in
terms of "master narrative," or recommend any single work by him as the definitive
expression of the war experience has come to seem almost irrelevant. There is no
apparent urgency or need to ascribe a strict hierarchical relationship across the body of
Vietnam literature, especially since most students of the sub-genre recognize, as Myers

noted, the notably fragmented form of the war itself: even a single author would. need to
incorporate an array of particularized experiences in order to adequately reflect the

splintered nature of the American experience over its decade-long involvement.

 

Ol'

CO‘

\I
at!

the

C671

64

Still, as N. Bradley Christie noted in his presentation at the conference at Notre Dame

in December 1993:3 5

the present moment for Viet Nam studies in this country is critical this
relatively new academic field is already shaping itself along lines established and
perpetuated by familiar institutional practices, which means that certain individual
texts like Dispatches, A Rumor of War, Going After Cacciato, Apocalypse Now,
Platoon, and both versions of Born on the Fourth of July form part of a relatively
recent canon--like all canons in flux and subject to constant reconstruction, but a
canon as shapely and powerflJl as such a construct can be (1).

Clearly, as Christie notes here and in more detail in a forthcoming critical study to
accompany Robert Slabey's full-length MLA volume on teaching the Vietnam War, the
trend is toward the consolidating effect of privileging some texts above others in the
evaluative process of determining which works, if any, constitute artistic enterprises which
most invite sustained critical discussion. Of course, any long term trend toward
"canonization" must be approached with a degree of jaundice, and represents the contest
over the value of combat experience as determined by literary theorists as opposed to
combat veterans, or. even the general public. In "Teaching the Literature of the Vietnam
War," Arthur Casciato argues that "No canon of the literature of the Vietnam War has yet
been established (or, put another way, no comprehensive anthology of the literature of the
Vietnam War has been published). We should not mourn this fact" (127), though he
acknowledges that as teachers of the war privilege certain texts over others, a form of
inevitable canon formation occurs, however regretfully. In such a reformulation (though
perhaps an unfortunate one, admittedly, for inevitably this sifting process excludes as many
incisive works as it seeks to exalt), O'Brien, as Christie notes above and elsewhere, will
likely fare well.

Following is a close examination of Tim O'Brien's five principal literary works within
the construct of innocence, experience, and consideration. Though a strictly chronological
treatment which evaluates each work separately within this framework might provide

certain organizational advantages, I have decided rather to conduct my analysis using each

65

of the three categories as the inroad into discussions of narrative content. Thus, for
example, in my discussion of innocence, I treat If I Die, Going After Cacciato, and The
Things They Carried.

During my previous analysis of what I consider a representative sampling of Vietnam
narratives, I note thematic analogues to O'Brien's work, whether in the details of a specific
incident or in the less narrow evocation of archetypal Vietnam experience. I will
periodically return to such associations, for I believe they underscore that despite the
chaotic disunity of the general conditions in Vietnam, the essential encounter of the soldier
in there, like the soldier in any military conflict, is not so different as to render it
incomprehensible to non-participants. O'Brien operates on an implicit assumption that the
war's truth can be experienced even by the non-veteran, and, as I develop here, part of that
assumption is rootted in the conviction that recuning motifs in war literature confirm the
reality of its nature: one doesn't need to witness the horror of war, in other words, to
appreciate the human potential to do evil.

There are three other aspects of O'Brien's work I examine to highlight what I consider
keys to his aesthetic vision. First, I evaluate the manner in which O'Brien's relentless use
of revision constitutes a discrete practice which reveals his belief in the dynamic nature of '
textual creation rather than the counter belief that literary works achieve final, unalterable
form. No work of O'Brien's seems to achieve the status of final reification in its author's
hands, and attention to how the act of constant revision has shaped and reshaped
particular stories and even subsequent editions of specific works (such as the 1989
‘ "edition" of Going After Cacciato) helps inform the reader of O'Brien's attitude toward
handling literary material but also tellingly reveals his conception of the process of
writing/telling war stories. As Steven Kaplan informs us in 'The Undying Uncertainty of
the Narrator in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried," "the facts about what actually
happened, or whether anything happened at all, are not important" for O'Brien (49);

instead, what is vital is that the truth connects within the listener, and every retelling of the

66

story, even though different in its details, constitutes a fresh effort to convey the essential
confrontation with the elusiveness of experience.

Secondly, I consider metafictional elements in O'Brien's work. Numerous critics have
remarked on the metafictional quality of O'Brien's writings, particularly in The Things
They Carried, but others as well--even, in at least one case, If I Die in a Combat Zone.36
To a degree, imbedded in the act of telling war stories is an unavoidable self-
consciousness on the part of the teller: an awareness of how details are manufactured
during each retelling (a metaphorical analogy to O'Brien's dedication to getting every story
"just right" through revision), and how narrative point-of-view controls the listener's
perspective. If one accepts Patricia Waugh's definition of metafiction, "a term given to
fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as
an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality,"
(Metafiction, 2), then it becomes relatively easy to recognize the attention O'Brien devotes
to this technique within his work. For him, as for Paul Berlin, metafiction is not merely a
solipsistic form of immersion in self-consciousness, but a means of providing conscious
contours to the way the disordered, chaotic realities of combat are assembled into patterns
of meaning. In O'Brien's work, metafictional strategies mirror the same strategies
deployed by narrators of any war story and constitutes a formalization of the way in which
combat veterans reconcile experience through a self-conscious reformulation of memory.

Finally, I examine the delicate balance between memory and imagination, or what I
alternatively describe as an alchemical interplay between historical reality both personal
and collective (memory), and the creative faculties which continually reshape memory into
new, more meaningful patterns (imagination). Imagination implies the ability to look
forward and envision the fiiture as much as it constitutes a deliberate, and "real,"

confrontation of the past:

"Now imagination, this act of imagination isn't "Hobbity" or "Alice in
Wonderland." It's a real thing and I think influences in a major way the kind of

67

real-life decisions we made, both to go to the war or not to go to the war. Either
way, we imagine our fistures and then try to step into our own imaginations For
me, most of my service in Vietnam was spent in my head. I was aware of the
things going on around me. I pulled the trigger when I had to and ducked most of
the time. But I lived in my head a great deal (Tim O'Brien, quoted in Lomperis,
48).

O'Brien, in interviews and in his fiction, consistently underscores the vital role, both
liberatory and in fixing "truth," of the role of imagination. Any final measure of the
specific ways or degree to which he imaginatively reshapes actual experience is ultimately
elusive; objective events which actually occurred corrode over time in memory, so they
can best be verified through carefiil identification of instances in his work which clearly
point to historical reality. O'Brien frequently grafts inventories of historical events into his
work, such as the numerous interspersed "catalogues" in The Nuclear Age, but also in the
way Cacciato plays on contemporaneous events during the setting of the novel (such as
the Tet Offensive and the Paris Peace Talks, historical events which are "remembered" and
then imaginatively reshaped to provided new significance, at a dramatically personal level
for Paul Berlin). I explore critical treatments of his work which emphasize the straight
historical experience, but I also examine unit records from O'Brien's battalion from 1969-
70, his period of service in Vietnam, in order to clarify the depth of correspondence
between the "fictional" representation of combat and the surprisingly faithfiil rendition of
that experience which appears in his fiction and in If I Die.37 I approach O'Brien's work
through a close comparison of the unit duty journals, including analysis of acronyms,
slang, and military jargon, and show how these archival documents at times reveal a
suggestive correspondence with details from the author's works. I do not, however, wish
to suggest that O'Brien's fidelity to historical minutiae outweighs his emphasis on
imaginative exploration. I consider examination of historical correlations merely one of
several means for exploring his material. O'Brien's literary objective is not merely the
recording of historical detail. As he stated at the Asia Society conference in New York in

1985:

68

For me, the purpose of writing fiction is to explore moral quandaries. The best
fiction is almost always the fiction which has a character having to make a difficult
moral choice What I'm interested in as a human being, not just as a novelist, is
the interaction between memory and imagination, that is between fact and what we
imagine. I think we operate as people, and in making moral choices, on the

basis of those two big things" (Lomperis, 52).

At the same conference, he warned that excessive allegiance to realistic portrayals of
the war constrained narratives in debilitating ways and precluded alternative methods of
grappling with the combat experience: "At times, it seems to me, it is as if the writers are
being held prisoner by the facts of their own experiences. The result is a closure of the
imagination, predictability and melodrama, a narrowness of theme, and an unwillingness to
stretch the fictive possibilities" (46). Throughout his work, whether the ostensibly non-
fiction If I Die or undeniably fictional Going After Cacciato, O'Brien resists any closure of
the imagination and embarks on a journey into what Joseph Conrad, in Heart of Dar/mess,
described as the "hard kernel of experience." His literary mission parallels what Ernest
Hemingway defined as "the job to tell the truth;" as Hemingway detailed the requisites to

any authentic depiction of war experience:

[The writer's] standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention,

out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.
For facts can be observed badly; but when a good writer is creating something, he
has time and scope to make of it an absolute truth (Men at War, 7-8).

O'Brien echoes his forebear in "How to Tell a True War Story":

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor
suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men fiom 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 some small bit of rectitude has been
salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of an old and
terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of
thumb, therefore, you can tell a war story by its absolute and uncompromising
allegiance to obscenity and evil 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 (TIT C, 76-77).

O'Brien's Elusive Innocence

In If I Die in a Combat Zone O'Brien poses a question which nearly all his subsequent
writing seeks to directly or indirectly realize: "Can the foot soldier teach anything
important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories"
(23). Much of his writing is the telling of war stories, accompanied by an increasingly
sophisticated definition of the war story. Central to his pursuit of telling the truth of
combat experience rests a fimdamental acknowledgment by O'Brien of the tension
between fact and fiction, and of the inadequacy of traditional story-telling methods in
presenting the specifically elusive nature of the Vietnam war experience. Peter
McInemey, in "'Straight' and 'Secret' History in Vietnam War Literature," refers to a
"peculiar difference" in the narratives of Vietnam, and suggests that part of that difference
potentially arises out of "the whole complex of discontinuities between the Asian war and
American attitudes toward it and any previous war" (203). McInemey notes, for example,
the ways in which memoirs of Vietnam, which we expect to be "autobiographies of real
people" and "historical in the sense that the record of the self in each is also a narrative of
the Vietnam War" somehow incongruously evade this expectation. Instead, in Ron
Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July and Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War, and more
importantly here in If I Die, there is a lapse of reliable exposition: "The text is and is not
the life. Actual experience is re-presented in each, not 'presented.’ Each text recalls,
selects, and orders details of actual experience and thus changes them. In this sense, an
autobiography is never factual, but always somewhat fictional" (McInemey, 196-97). In
the case of O'Brien's memoir, the publication history of If I Die testifies to the uneasy
classification of the work as non-fiction. "Stitched" together from a series of "vignettes"
which he wrote while in Vietnam, generic descriptions of the final product have shifted
between fiction and non-fiction: "though O'Brien regards the book as nonfiction, many

reviewers--indeed, at one point his own publisher--have referred to it as fiction"

69

70

(Schroeder, 1988, 117). The work at times self-consciously, through a pervasive
reference to epic accounts of war, assumes a literary voice which urges the reader to
question the verisimilitude of the individual accounts within it. As O'Brien informed Eric
Schroeder in an interview, "I tried to cast the scenes in fictional form. Dialogue, for
example. Often I couldn't remember the exact words people said, and yet to give it
dramatic intensity and immediacy I'd make up dialogue that seemed true to the spirit of
what was said" (Schroeder, 1984, 136, my emphasis). As O'Brien fiirther reveals his
narrative strategy, he underlines the problematic tension between the nonfictional and
fictional forms: "This [reshaping experience] creates the illusion of 'happeningness' which
usually isn't there in nonfiction. Nonfiction is usually cast in the language of political
science or history or sociology or whatever. And this is not. It's cast in an entirely
different language" (1984, 137). Elsewhere, in a 1991 interview with Debra Shostak and
Daniel Boume for Ary‘ul Dodge, O'Brien notes how "parts of the book, although it's
technically nonfiction, are utterly invented, in the same sort of ways as in The Things They

Carried" and, elaborating yet fiirther on his technique in If I Die:

I took a scrap of event and put it together with another scrap, or I took something
from an account, when I wasn't personally present to witness it, or sometimes I
would take a conflicting account and choose it over my own, blending everything
together to make what seems to be a convincing and coherent story about

things I hadn't born witness to in their entirety I had to do things that weren't
strictly nonfiction to make the account possible (Shostak, 75, earlier emphasis
mine).

Still, O'Brien marvels that "a book which ll published and intended to be straight
autobiography or war memoir is now called a novel by everyone, and everyone writes
about it as a novel," though allowing that at least subconsciously "the book was written as
a novel; that is, the form of the book is fictional" (136). In either case, O'Brien, within the

framework of the memoir itself, suggests at least one approach to reading the work:

71

I would wish this book could take the form of a plea for everlasting peace‘, a plea
from one who knows, from one who's been there and returned, an old soldier
looking back at a dying war (22).

The soldier who looks back recalls the events which anticipated his personal
involvement, and painstakingly records the way in which his upbringing prepared him for
the eventual decision to abide by his draft notice despite strong personal reservations. For
O'Brien, the period of "innocence" which preceded his combat experience was marked by
competing moral codes. He describes his Midwest origins as the son of a distinctively
military family:

I grew out of one war and into another. My father came from leaden ships of sea,
from the Pacific theater; my mother was a WAVE. I was the offspring of the great
campaign against the tyrants of the 1940's, one explosion in the Baby Boom, one '

of millions come to replace those who had just died. My bawling came with the
first throaty note of a new army in spawning (If I Die, 11).

O'Brien grew up respecting the experiences of his parents, inwardly awed by the

mementos of his father's service: "I rubbed my fingers across my father's war decorations,
stole a tiny battle star off one of them and carried it in my pocket" (12). He recalls the
morally unambiguous lessons proffered by the town elders: "The talk was tough. Nothing
to do with causes or reason; the war was right, they muttered, and it had to be fought"
(l 3). Yet he simultaneously acknowledges that in the case of Vietnam, the old sure
knowledge seemed lacking, and reflection produced uncertainty rather than the conviction
the old men expressed: "The war, I thought, was wrongly conceived and poorly justified.
But perhaps I was mistaken, and who really knew, anyway?" (18).

O'Brien had taken a clear stand on the war while acquiring a bachelor's degree at

Macalester College in St. Paul, becoming involved in the anti-war movement in the sense
in which activism existed then'." He also submitted editorials against the war in the
college periodical, Mac Weekly (Kaplan, Understanding Tim O'Brien, ms. 3).

In his 1985 novel, The Nuclear Age, the main character William Cowling appears to

experience the same apprenhensions felt by the author. Attending college, Cowling, who

72

O'Brien described as the only "hero" created in his novels (Naparsteck, 5), develops a
nagging sense of a war going increasingly awry, much as the author did. Despite the
lackadaisical detachment of the campus, more like a "health resort" than a "distinguished
institution," where "no one cared. No one tried" (67), Cowling finds he does care and
cannot suppress his growing alarm. He counters his fiiends‘ skepticism toward his excited
responses to "visions" he experiences which depict the escalating events in Vietnam that
"'It is fact The war, it's a fact'." O'Brien's character then recounts the succession of

events in a disarmingly non-fictional inventory of historical incidents:

By the autumn of my junior year, October 1966, the American troop level in
Vietnam exceeded 325,000. Operation Rolling Thunder closed in on Hanoi. The
dead were hopelessly dead. The bodies were bagged and boxed. In Saigon,
General Westmoreland called for fresh manpower, and at the State Department,
Dean Rusk assured us that rectitude would soon prevail, a matter of attrition. Yet
the dead remained dead. For the dead there was no rectitude. For the dead there
was nothing more to die for. The dead were silent on the matter of attrition. So
what does one do?

Although most of the action in If I Die takes place in Vietnam, it might be argued that
the principal activity of the memoir is to reveal the agonizing process of deciding what to
do prior to shipping out from the United States. For the young, newly graduated and
newly drafted O'Brien, the contest between the sage advice of the town elders to obey the
social command to defend one's country strained against his sense of the war's essential
wrongness. Ultimately, his inner conflict is not so much conclusively resolved as decided
by the force of social obligations. It becomes an issue of courage and cowardice, and a

disparaging surrender to the forces arrayed against his conscience:

I did not want to be a soldier, not even an observer to war. But neither did I want
to upset a peculiar balance between the order I knew, the people I knew, and my
own private world. It was not just that I valued that order. I also feared its
opposite--inevitable chaos, censure, embarrassment, the end of everything that had
happened in my life, the end of it all (If I Die, 22).

Later, he contemplates fleeing to Sweden while he is in basic training at Fort Lewis,

Washington. He is appalled by the ignorance and apathy of the fellow soldiers with which

73

he undergoes initial military training, "I did not like them, and there was no reason to like
them I hated them all I was superior. I made no apologies for believing it I
shunned the herd" (33).

William Broyles, in Brothers in Arms, records the way in which he experienced a
tortuous internal debate remarkably similar to O'Brien's during the final hours before his

scheduled departure for Vietnam in 1969:

As I flew to California, I began to find my own moral scales oscillating. I thought
the war was wrong but my going was right. It was a contradiction. Since I was
against the war, why should I participate in it? I had decided that it was worse to
manipulate the system so that another man would fill my shoes. But the higher
their price, the harder moral decisions are to make. The price of this particular
moral decision was, quite possibly, my life. Was it worth that? (78)

Also like O'Brien, Broyles capitulates to the formidable internal demands of
conscience: "I was afraid. Worse, I had tried to hide my fear behind morality and
principle. If I were going to take a stand against the war, I should have done it long
before. And I knew what i had to do now" (80). Yet for O'Brien, the capitulation is not
so clearly one of unambiguous moral rectitude. When he finally abandons his plans to
escape to Sweden, he experiences capitulation to the forces of "gravity" while

simultaneously considering himself a coward for not escaping:

It was over. I simply couldn't bring myself to flee. Family, the home town,
friends, history, tradition, fear, confusion, exile: I could not run I was a coward.
I was sick (If I Die, 66).

In 1990, in The Things They Carried, a work even more noted for its resistance to
categorization than If I Die, O'Brien returns to an examination of his decision not to flee in
the story "On the Rainy River." In recounting a flirtation with escape during a trip to the
Canadian border, the narrator Tim O'Brien speaks of the anguish over whether to flee or
submit to "fiiends, history, tradition" in language undiluted by the passage of nearly

twenty-five years from the historical O'Brien's decision:

74

My conscience told me to run, but some irrational and powerful force was
resisting, like a weight pushing me toward the war. What it came down to,
stupidly, was a sense of shame. Hot, stupid shame. I did not want people to think
badly of me. Not my parents, not my brother and sister, not even the folks down
at the Gobbler Café I was ashamed of my conscience, ashamed to be doing the
right thing (54-55).

The decision of the fictional "Tim O'Brien" of this story proves the same as the
autobiographical subject of If I Die, though perhaps more unabashedly self-condemning:
"I would go to the war--I would kill and maybe die-because I was embarrassed not to I
survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war" (62-63).

In Men at War, Ernest Hemingway provides a definition of cowardice which proves
poignantly apropos given O'Brien's carefully wrought aesthetic framework in which
imagination and memory interact to permit him to get at the truth of his experience.
Hemingway wrote: "Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a
lack of ability to suspend the fiinctioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your
imagination and live completely in the very second of the present minute with no before
and no after is the greatest gift the soldier acquire" (17). Broyles, reflecting on the terrible
struggle to choose between a decisive refusal to participate and what became for him
submission to conscience, noted that "All that link the two worlds are memory and
imagination, but even they can't really bridge the chasm" (Brothers in Arms, 56). For
O'Brien, the pursuit of conscience and discovery of cowardice similarly constitutes a
delicate balance between memory and imagination, not only in the precarious moments
before his final decision not to flee, but as a dialectic which would sustain Paul Berlin, in
Going After Cacciato, during his constant struggle to weigh the duties of staying in
country guarding his observation post along the South China Sea against the competing
impulse to flee in the imaginary pursuit of Cacciato. In this novel, O'Brien articulates his
most sophisticated explanation of the decision to go to war rather than avoid the ironic

stain of cowardice which abstaining might have permitted.

75

Paul Berlin chooses to join his platoon during a surreal pursuit across Asia and Europe
to Paris, the setting for the ongoing Paris Peace Talks, to capture the deserter Cacciato.
From the novel's beginning Cacciato's motivations are blurred in a frenzy of indistinct
conjectures which plague Berlin as he considers whether to join the platoon: "Why had
Cacciato left the war? Was it courage or ignorance, or both? Was it even possible to
combine courage and ignorance?" (25). The locus of Berlin's sustaining internal strength,
at least at the beginning of his contemplation of pursuit, rests in the powers of his
imagination. Ironically, Berlin's willingness to flee (importantly depicted as a simultaneous
decision to pursue) is predicated upon an ability to imagine the possibilities of action and

conceive of different possible courses of action:

Paul Berlin, whose only goal was to live long enough to establish goals worth
living for still longer stood high in the tower by the sea, the night soft all around
him, and wondered, not for the first time, about the immense powers of his
imagination. A truly awesome notion. Not a dream, an idea. An idea to develop,
to tinker with and build and sustain, to draw out as an artist draws out his visions
(25).

One readily recognizes how categorically O'Brien deprives his character of the
potential for slippage into a "closure of the imagination, predictability and melodrama, a
narrowness of theme, and an unwillingness to stretch the fictive possibilities" (Lomperis,
46). Berlin pursues his elusive quarry, and picks up a refiigee Vietnamese family along the
way. He falls in love with an alter ego, Sarkin Aung Wan, who accompanies the platoon
across the world and encourages Berlin to continue toward Paris and the eventual hope
for peace that city symbolically represents. Once there, however, the two undergo a crisis
of irreconcilable positions; for Paul, loyalty to the platoon and the mission of capturing
Cacciato and returning to Vietnam, to duty, becomes the paramount concern. For Sarkin,
conversely, the point of the pursuit lies in the arrival at the destination. They meet over a
round table which implicitly corresponds to the real world negotiating tables over which

American and Vietnamese diplomats laboriously pursued a compromise to the real war.

76

Sarkin pleads with Paul to observe the dictates of his conscience and surrender his sense

of obligation to continue the war:

"Spec Four Paul Berlin: I am asking for a break from violence. But I am also
asking for a positive commitment. You yearn for normality--an average house in
an average town, a garden, perhaps a wife, the chance to grow old. Realize these
things. Give up this fruitless pursuit of Cacciato For just as happiness is more
than the absence of sadness, so is peace infinitely more than the absence of war.
Even the refugee must do more than flee. He must arrive" (284).

In Berlin's response to Sarkin, O'Brien posits much more than merely a fictional
character's rationalized counterargument. By inventorying his reasons for continuing the
pursuit, Berlin simultaneously itemizes alternative explanations for going to the war in the
first place as explained by O'Brien in his memoir and the fictional narrator Timmy O'Brien
in "On the Rainy River." Taken together, the three examinations of decision constitute a
complex and bittersweet confrontation with consequences which, whether out of

cowardice or its paradoxical cousin courage, will last a lifetime. Berlin explains:

"I don't pretend to be an expert on matters of obligation, either moral or
contractual, but I do know when I feel obliged. Obligation is more than a claim
imposed on us; it is a personal sense of indebtedness. It is a feeling, an i
acknowledgment, that through many prior acts of consent we have agreed to
perform certain fiiture acts. I have that feeling. I make that acknowledgment.

By my prior acts--acts of consent-~I have bound myself to performing subsequent
acts. I put on a uniform. I boarded a plane. I accepted a promotion and the
responsibilities that went with it. I joined in the pursuit of Cacciato These were
explicit consents. But beyond them were many tacit promises: to my family, my
fiiends, my town, my country, my fellow soldiers" (285).

'O'Brien's language at this point is practically a verbatim echo of the explanation of
failing to flee to Sweden expressed in If I Die and the similar language in "On the Rainy
River," in which embarrassment, not social obligation, prevails. In Going After Cacciato,
however, in the words of Paul Berlin, a distinctively superior moral decision is expressed,
which suggests the transforrnative capacity of not only the imagination, but the

retrospective powers of memory as an "old soldier reflects on a dying war":

77

"I believe I feel that I am being asked to perform a final service that is entirely
compatible with what I promised earlier. A debt, a legitimate debt, is being called
in. No trickery, no change in terms. I knew what I was getting into. I knew it
might be unpleasant. And I made promises with that full understanding. The
promises were made freely. True, the moral climate was imperfect; there were
pressures, constraints, but nonetheless I made binding choices. Again, this has
nothing whatever to do with politics or principles or matters of justice. My
obligation is to people, not to principle or politics or justice" (285).

In the final justification for his decision, Berlin inventories the negative aspects of the
pressures he feels to continue the pursuit. Yet here, and perhaps no where else so clearly
in O'Brien's writing, there is an amplification of that purpose, one sufficiently powerfiil
that it might be an adequate rationale, though a tragically sad one as well, for a young man

who does finally submit to the force of social obligations.

"I confess that what dominates is the fear of abandoning all that I hold dear. I am
afraid of running away. I am afraid of exile. I fear what might be thought of me
by those I love. I fear the loss of their respect. I fear the loss of my own
reputation I fear being thought of as a coward. I fear that even more than
cowardice itself [my emphasis]. .

"Are these fears wrong? Are they stupid? Or are they healthy and right? I have
been told to ignore my fear of censure and embarrassment and loss of reputation.
But would it not be better to accept those fears? To yield to them? If inner peace
is the tnie objective, would I win it in exile?

"Perhaps now you can see why I stress the importance of viewing obligations as a
relationship between people, not one between one person and some impersonal
idea or principle. An idea, when violated, cannot make reprisals. A principle
cannot refiise to shake my hand. Only people can do that. And it is this social
power, the threat of social consequences, that stops me from making a fill] and
complete break. Peace of mind is not a simply matter of pursuing one's own
pleasure; rather, it is inextricable linked to the attitudesof the other human beings,
to what they want, to what they expect We all want peace. We all want dignity
and domestic tranquillity. But we want these to be honorable and lasting. We
want a peace that endures. We want a peace we can be proud of. Even in
imagination we must obey the logic of what we started. Even in imagination we
must be true to our obligations, for even in imagination, obligation cannot be
outrun. Imagination, like reality, has its limits" (286).

What O'Brien achieves in Berlin's defense of his decision is an astoundingly complex
articulation of the moral and psychological struggle any young man (or woman) undergoes

when faced with the prospect of going to war. O'Brien confesses to acquiring what

78

Hemingway describes as the soldier's ideal gift, "[l]earning to suspend [the] imagination
and live completely in the very second of the very minute." As O'Brien noted in an

interview with Larry McCaffrey:

There are two essential answers that Paul gives there. One has to do with this
issue of emotional baggage--that constellation of emotional pressures But of
equal importance is his argumentuand my own--that he can't mold his imagination
to fit what ought to be there. The decision to run or not run is based on that
process of the imagination (265, my emphasis).

Yet what Berlin does here is a willing embrace, though perhaps a wistfiilly reluctant
one, to the web of human relations, relations which will stubbornly outlive the war.

Some critics find the conclusion to Going After Cacciato a thoroughly disappointing
rejection of the hope suggested at the novel's beginning as Berlin muses over the powers
of the imagination. Arthur Saltzman, in "The Betrayal of the Imagination: Paul Brodeur's
The Stunt Man and Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato," argues that throughout the
platoon's pursuit "the dubious capacity of art to redeem falters more radically as the
journey continues," finally, pessimistically concluding that "the sad irony of Going After
Cacciato is that Berlin has unwittingly assured the disqualification of imagination as a 1
means of salvation" (36, Saltzman's emphasis). Other critics emphasize the novel's break
with combat narrative tradition in achieving "the end of vision" in which Paul Berlin,
unlike his literary predecessors Nick Adams and Frederic Henry, "makes no separate
peace" because he "never learns to see clearly the absurdity in which he is caught" (Busby,
63-64); and even, in a specious denunciation and misreading which seeks to reduce the
level of moral debate within the novel to the simplicities of polarized political positions on

Vietnam:

Anti-war sentiment is by now as much the routine business of combat novels or
memoirs as keeping the sides straight and the slang accurate. It is not, however,
always as convincing. Tim O'Brien's Vietnam novel, Going After Cacciato,
borrows, for reasons not entirely clear to me, from the conventions of anti-war
fiction as they are laid down in such books as A Farewell to Arms and Catch-22
(Pochoda, 344).

1r:

79

Saltzman mistakenly overlooks the manner in which Berlin's resolution at the end of
the novel, rather than constituting the defeat of imagination, bravely recognizes its
practical limits. Since Berlin's decision is arrived at only after the journey west and the
fruition of the possibilities which originated within the imagination, it in fact represents the
culmination of imaginative activity, tested by the experience not only of the fictional
journey to Paris but the experience of the physical Berlin's wakefiil guard duty in his
observation post throughout the interminable night in one strand of the novel's several
narrative strands--the one most closely associated with the actual actions of a soldier
resembling the historical O'Brien in Vietnam.3 8

Busby's suggestion that the determination to press forward with the platoon signals the
"end of vision," in an article which otherwise strongly praises O'Brien's skills as a writer
and ability to forge new literary enterprises in order to reconcile the peculiar experience of
Vietnam, is accurate in interpreting the end of a vision of conventional combat narratives
rooted in realistic depictions of war. Michael Raymond, in "Imagined Responses to
Vietnam: Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato," notes how "the narrative is not realistic in
the mimetic tradition Even if one ignores the interruptions of Berlin's narrative by the
other two narratives, one notes quickly that his story is not fiilly rendered, is not
chronological, and is not cohesive" (98). Certainly, as a number of critics have concluded,
the result of exploding those conventional narrative patterns is the inscribing of new
methods of discussing war and the war experience, and until The Things They Carried,
Going After Cacciato represented the most revolutionary expression of that emerging
form.39

What is clear is that If I Die presented several thematic concerns early on which
O'Brien would take up with increasing diligence throughout his literary career. The
inadequacy of conventional narrative options convinced him that new experimental

techniques would ultimately provide more satisfying alternatives in describing his own war

experience. Critical to his realization of the restrictions of the memoir format was its

8O

overreliance on supposedly accessible history. Thus, in If I Die, he notes that "only to say
another truth will I let another half-truth stand," for example (124); the soldier, in the face
of experience which is continually altered in the repository of memory, "can only do his
walking, laughing along the way and taking a fiinny crooked step" ( 125). What O'Brien
realized early in his writing career was that the opportunities of conventional storytelling
would not suffice in penetrating the war experience, in arresting the "truth" of lived
combat. It is not only excusable, but a requisite strategy of arriving at truthfiil
representation that he resorts, therefore, to manipulation of detail in If I Die. When
O'Brien records the letters of his collaborator Erik Hansen but suppresses his responses,
for instance, one must recognize that it is solely "for dramatic purposes [that he shapes]
his material by the principles of fiction rather than those of memoir" (Kaplan, ms. 22).
What he discovers, in recording the tormenting experience of a young man faced with the
seemingly unredeeming assignment to Vietnam, is the opportunity of displaying how
cowardice, in whatever form it occurs in retrospect-~as either lost chance or fiiture
possibility--provides a natural contrast with courage. There are, after all, lessons to be
learned from the detested self-involvement. At the conclusion of If I Die O'Brien recounts

the lessons learned:

You add things up. You lost a fiiend to the war, and you gained a fiiend. You
compromised one principle and fulfilled another. You learned, as old men tell it in
front of the courthouse, that war is not all bad; it may not make a man of you, but
it teaches that manhood is not something to scoff at; some stories of valor are true;
dead bodies are heavy you have to pick the times not to be afraid, but when you
are afraid you must hide it to save respect and reputation. You learned that the old
men had lives of their own and that they valued them enough to try not to lose
them; anyone can die in a war if he tries (202).

O'Brien experimented with traditional narrative technique in If I Die and found it
wanting. His sense of needing to tell the remaining truths of combat led him to experiment
with alternative forms of expression in order to arrive at more satisfactory accounts. By

discovering his own complicitous cowardice in his willingness to submit to societal

81

pressures by going to Vietnam in the first instance, in other words, O'Brien would
discover the natural environment for an examination of cowardice's corollary, courage, a
theme which dominates his work. As his work progresses into increasingly fictive
representations, however, it is necessary to remain sensitive to the ways in which personal
and collective history tamper with imaginative reconstruction, and to the specific manner
in which O'Brien, while always aware that "[g]ood stories can be true or untrue It
doesn‘t really matter too much, provided that the story does to the spirits what stories
should do" (Kaplan, interview, 106), recollects and reshapes experience in ways which
quite deliberately draw upon historical events. Innocence is rooted in anticipation, and as
such constitutes a type of diagnosis of the future: what will combat be like?; Will I show
courage under fire? The assessment of experience, alternatively, arises precisely out of the
elimination of uncertainty, and anticipates the eventual reconciliation of factual events with
the fictions of expectation. In his work which centers on the experience of the combat
soldier in country, O'Brien uncovers the moral issues which extend from the problems
explored concerning the debate about whether to go to Vietnam in the first place, without
moralizing. He pursues the most overt metafictional strategies, and inquires into the

meaning of his experience.

O'Brien's Experiences in Vietnam (Part 1)

In "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," Hayden White asks:

What is involved, then, in that finding of the "true story," that discovery of the
"real story" within or behind the events that come to us in the chaotic form of
"historical records"? What wish is enacted, what desire is gratified, by the fantasy
that real events are properly represented when they can be shown to display the
formal coherency of a story? (8).

White's questions about the tenuous relationship between factual events and the ways
in which they are "narratized" into stories, though principally concerned with formal

historiography in his essay, address issues which assume great importance in the works of

82

O'Brien. Certainly, any reading which attempts to isolate the historical basis in his work
must first contend with O'Brien's own problematic statements concerning how he
transposes lived reality into fictional form. For example, while most critics note the
surreality of Going After Cacciato, or as Richard Freedman described the novel, "magical
realism" (1), O'Brien himself suggests that "Cacciato is the most realistic thing I've
written" (McCaffrey, 272).‘40 In the same essay with Larry McCaffrey he stresses what he
considers the vital role substance must play in the creation of fiction, and part of substance
consists of the need for real, lived experience out of which to imagine alternatives: "1
want to stress here that I'm a believer in substance-that is, I feel the fiction writer should
have something to say. I mean this in all sorts of ways--in terms of a body‘of witnessed
experience, the physical things that are seen and felt" (268, my emphasis). O'Brien's
comments concerning The Things They Carried prove even more disconcerting, and
confront the reader With a nearly insoluble paradox concerning the relationship between
reality and invention in the hands of O'Brien.

During an interview in 1989 with O'Brien, Martin Naparsteck asked the author "Is the
Tim character [in The Things They Carried] Tim O'Brien? in "The Lives of the Dead"
there's a Timmy O'Brien" (7). O'Brien's answer evades while it confirms, and provides

considerable insight into how he views his work in terms of its generic indeterminacy:

Yeah, it is, in part. It's made up, but I use my own name. The Things They
Carried is sort of half novel, half group of stories. It's part nonfiction, too; some
of the stuff is commentary on the stories, talking about where a particular one
came from. "Speaking of Courage," for example, came from a letter I received
from a guy named Norman Bowker, a real guy, who committed suicide after I
received his letter about how he just couldn't adjust to coming home All he
could do was drive around and around in his hometown in Iowa, around this lake.
In the letter he asked me to write a story about it, and I did. This was after I
published If I Die (7, my emphasis).

Naparsteck then asks, "Was this somebody you knew?" and O'Brien seems to confirte
reality with invention, by both affirming Bowker's real existence and simultaneously

denying its actuality:

83

Yeah, in Vietnam. I sent him the story after it was published, and he said he liked
it. Then, I didn't hear from him for a long time. His mother finally wrote me. I
wrote her and she wrote back saying he committed suicide .. [contrast with] The
story about Norman Bowker is made up. There was no Norman Bowker. The
point, among others, that in fiction we not only transform reality, we sort of invent
our own lives, invent our histories, our autobiographies (8, my emphasis).

Later, speaking about "How to Tell a True War Story," O'Brien confesses that "even
' with that nonfiction-sounding element in the story, everything in the story is fiction,

beginning to end" (9), claims he makes elsewhere, further blurring the apparent "fact"
fi'om the nearly indistinguishable invention. Certainly, there is a deliberate strategy in
doing this, as Steven Kaplan notes in his essay "The Undying Uncertainty of the Narrator
in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried":i "O'Brien demonstrates nothing new about
trying to tell war stories--that the 'truths' they contain 'are contradictory,’ elusive, and thus
indeterminate what is new in O'Brien's approach in The Things They Carried is that he
makes the axiom that in war 'almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true' the basis
for the act of telling a war story" (50, 1993). In a similar vein, Catherine Calloway, in her
forthcoming article "'How to Tell a True War Story': Metafiction in The Things They
Carried," discusses the "Notes" section following the story named in her title, emphasizing

the complicating effect produced by circulation of different versions of the story:

Which version of the story, if either, is accurate? The inclusion of a metafictional
chapter presenting the background behind the tale provides no definite answers or
resolutions. While we learn that Norman Bowker, who eventually commits
suicide, asks the narrator to compose the story and that the author has revised the
tale for inclusion in The Things They Carried because a postwar story is more
appropriate for the later book than for Going After Cacciato, O'Brien's admission
that much of the story is still invention compels the reader to wonder about the
truth Even more significantly, the reader is led to question the reality of many,
if not all, of the stories in the book (7).

Part of the way O'Brien communicates this indeterminacy of fact is by pursuing
narratives strategies which elude conventional assignment. For example, in a review of the

Work by Dan Chow, it is noted that "Although [The Things They Carried] is presented as

84

a work of fiction, one cannot escape the conviction that there is more truth here than in a
score of documentary works" (35). In one interview O'Brien informed Steven Kaplan that
"it wOuld be unfair for me to say that's it's a collection of stories; clearly all of the stories
are related and the characters reappear and themes recur, and some of the stories refer
back to others, and others refer forwards. I've thought of it as a work of fiction that is
neither one nor the other" (96, 1993). Elsewhere, O'Brien calls it a "hybrid, blending the
nonfiction or essay form with fiction" (Johnson, 40). Philip Beidler describes his work as
the need to "extend relationships of factual and fictive meaning into new dimensions of
creative reciprocity" (Re- Writing, 6). In "The Author Reinvents Himself--The Fiction of
Tim O'Brien," Philip Gerard incisively notes how "The reader may feel he has fallen into
an endless identity crisis: authorial personalities bouncing back and forth between mirrors.
Each layer unpeeled reveals the reader not closer but further from the 'actual truth,‘
though closer to the 'story truth'uwhat he can use, what he can take away fiom the story,
what will matter long after the literal truth of events ceases to matter" (542-43, Gerard's
emphasis).

In part, what contributes to the generic instability of his writing is O'Brien's insistent

refiisal to ever definitively complete a work. In the hands of a writer who views himself as '

an inveterate reviser, always returning to his material to resurrect a "truer" account, the
very notion of categorizing his work proves enormously risky. O'Brien's story "Speaking
of Courage," for example, was originally intended for Going After Cacciato, but was
reworked (such as changing the main character from Paul Berlin to Norman Bowker) and
instead incorporated later into The Things They Carried. Of course, that alone does not
constitute a major artistic strategy of revision-cum-creation. In an interview with David
Streitfeld for The Washington Post's Book World O'Brien confessed he quietly slipped
textual alterations in between the hardback editions of UT C, such as a scene in "Field
Trip," in which O'Brien exchanges Kiowa's buried hatchet of the earlier version for the

moccasins of the later: "'When I was writing the novel, the phrase 'bury the hatchet' didn't

(I '

85

occur to me. But when I read it in the hardcover version, I thought "Ohmigod. That's
kind of heavyhanded symbolism." It hadn't been intended that way, so I changed it to
moccasins'" (15). Streitfeld observes that O'Brien also incorporated textual changes, in
some instances major, into recent reprintings of If I Die and Going After Cacciato.
O'Brien informed him also that "he'll do a substantial rewrite [of The Things They
Carried] a decade or so from now" (15). In Martin Naparsteck's interview with O'Brien
in 1989, the author noted that "I think that if at some point I were to run out of ideas I
might go back to Northern Lights and rewrite it. I've done that with Cacciato over the
last year or so; I've rewritten substantial portions thatareappearing in the latest edition"
(2).

Later, .I will discuss specific ways in which O'Brien alters key passages of If I Die and
Going After Cacciato. At least one major study has already examined the evolution of
passages from the latter; in "Pluralities of Vision: Going After Cacciato and Tim O'Brien's
Short Fiction" Catherine Calloway provides a key toward excavating textual changes and
how they coerce the reader to "attempt to distinguish between illusion and reality and in so
doing [how O'Brien] creates a continuous dialogue between himself and the world around
him" (213). First, however, I wish to put in context the-fictional elements he manipulates
against a backdrop of historical events which underpin all his work by consulting unit
records which depict in starkly nonfictional ways the reality that feeds O'Brien's work. In
doing so, I do not intend to necessarily create one to one correspondences between
specific scenes, rather, I intend to demonstrate that the "story truth" we encounter in
"How to Tell a True War Story" and his other work conforms to his demand for physical

Substance. In the process, one might recognize resonances of specific scenes, of course;

One might even recognize occasional characters and events which resurface from time to

time throughout O'Brien's writing. These factual events might then become a benchmark
f0r measuring the precise power of the artist as he responsibly reinvents the personal

hi story of a year in Vietnam and the more important lessons he wishes to impart through

86

continually revisiting the memory of those events. As Paul Berlin asks in Going After

Cacciato: "What happened, and what might have happened?" (27) persistently remains

the questions lingering throughout O'Brien's writing.
War Stories/War Records (Experience, Part 2)

Tim O'Brien arrived in Vietnam in February, 1969, and was assigned to 3rd Squad, lst
Platoon, A[lpha] Company, 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry (Regiment), 198th Infantry
Brigade (Light), 23rd Infantry Division ("Americal"--the only modern US. Army division
denoted by a nickname rather than its numerical identification). Nearly a year before his
arrival, a sister brigade in the northernmost I Corps area of operations had experienced an
atrocity which was coming to light at the time of O'Brien's arrival in country: the My Lai
massacre, in which 300-500 civilian Vietnamese were slaughtered, had takenplace in

"Pinkville," an area which O'Brien recalls visiting on a routine search and destroy mission:

In the next few days it took little provocation for us to flick the flint of our Zippo
lighters. Thatched roofs take the flame quickly, and on bad days the hamlets of
Pinkville burned, taking our revenge in fire. It was good to walk through Pinkville
and to see fire behind Alpha Company. It was good, just as pure hate is good (If I

Die, 117).

This routine search and clear mission took place in May, 1969, when O'Brien's
company "learned some hard lessons about Pinkville" (If I Die, 114). O'Brien pointedly
acknowledges the lingering discomfort divisional soldiers felt about association by
iInplication with the massacre when he states that "I was not at My Lai when the massacre
Occurred. I was in the paddies and sleeping in the clay, with Johansen and Arizona and
Alpha Company, a year and more later. But if a man can squirm in a meadow, he can
Shoot children. Neither is an example of courage" (If I Die, 132-33). One immediately
WOnders what combat was therefore like; how vicious was the fighting; how transparently

does O'Brien transmit the details of unit activity to us, given the already acknowledged

87

straightforward history we encounter in If I Die in a Combat Zone? What was, therefore,
the daily grind of the experience O'Brien so succinctly describes in Going After Cacciato
when he tells us "It was a bad time" (1)?

On 13 July, 1969, A Company began to experience an increase in the tempo of
operations. The adjutant at the time, First Lieutenant Stuart Shelk, notes in the Daily Staff
Joumai: "A Co called D/O [dustoff] at 0715 grid 772838 for amputation of both legs &
frag wounds of face. D/O completed 0740, taken to 312th" (N AR, 13 Jul 69, No. 14, 2).
Later that morning Alpha would locate tunnels, described as "fresh," in which "a 6 ft man
could stand without bending & that there were 3 additional small tunnels. Request an air
strike" (NAR, 13 Jul 69, No. 14, 3). These are metaphorically the same tunnels in which
Frenchie Tucker dies in Going After Cacciato: "They heard the shot that got F renchie
Tucker, just as Bernie Lynn, a minute later, heard the shot that got himself" (GA C, 79).
After Bernie's unsuccessfiil attempt to rescue Tucker, "[his] feet were still showing when
he was shot" (81), O'Brien tells us. He provides the additional grueling details of the

aftermath of the tunnel clearing operation:

Frenchie lay uncovered at the mouth of the tunnel. He was dead and nobody
looked at him. He was dirty. His T-shirt was pulled up under the armpits, which
was how they'd finally dragged him out. His belly was fat and unsucked in. Black

clumps of hair were matted flat against the white skin. He had been shot through
the nose. His face was turned aside, the way they'd left him" (59).

Several days later, however, O'Brien's company is struck again, with one American
killed in action (KIA) and five wounded: "FW [fragmentation wound] left side of face
Traumatic ampt [amputation] of rt. [right] foot Fractured right foot Possible frac
[fi'actured] ribs, laceration left side, sprained left knee PFC Roger D. M-- Co A KIA
Blevins Co A Abrasion & conusion [sic] left arm & buttock FW rt. hand & left leg
Condition-Good" (NAIL 16 Jul 69, No. 4, 1). A single incident produces five soldiers

Wounded or dead on one hot day out of a company of 250 men. The singular

88

"ordinariness" of reportage in the casualty report undermines the brutal reality, a
phenomenon which O'Brien perceives and expands upon. Unfortunately, as the day wears
on, casualties mount.

By July, as O'Brien states in If I Die, Captain Smith had taken command of A
Company. Replacing Captain Johansen, "the best man around it was sad he wore his
bars" (101), Smith finds himself in the midst of a dire situation in which he has allowed
armored vehicles to roll backwards, crushing the bodies of American soldiers: "Captain
Smith tried to regain his leadership, but the lieutenants gracefully avoided him. He was
openly ridiculed by the men" (153). Later in the afternoon on July 16th, A Company

(platoon unspecified) encounters increasingly bad luck:

(U) Casualty Reports: (Called to Brigade)

PFC Thomas J. T-- Co A Lt. [Light] FW left thigh Treated in field

PFC Benjamin C. B-- Co A Lt. FW rt. [right] foot Treated in field

PFC James H. T-- Co A Contusion & laceration on rt. leg Treated in field
1LT Frederick H. L-- Co A Lt. FW back of head Treated in field

CPT Billy R. C-- Co A Lt. FW in rt. calf Treated in field.

PFC Charles L. R-- Co A Blast wound to head

PFC Allen A. S-- Co A FW in back

PFC Leo l. A-- Co A FW in thigh

PFC Joseph V. P-- Co A FW in chest

PFC Scott S- Co A FW left leg

PFC Richard J. H-- Co A FW in left side Condition--Good" (NAR 16 Jul 69,

No. 6, 2).

Indeed, "It was a bad time." On 23 July, in one incident, six more A Company soldiers
were wounded. The company's combat encounters were on the increase that summer and
predictably the soldiers' morale steadily deteriorated. In other words, the actual events
which O'Brien fictionalizes were if anything worse or as bad as fiction might render them.

A Company's history parallels, in fact, the experiences of O'Brien's characters throughout
his works.
What is the relationship of the characters O'Brien invents and the real personnel

in his unit? In If I Die he writes, "The people were boors But I hated them all.

89

Passionate, sad, desperate hate. I learned to march, but I learned alone" (32-33). Still, he
learns to bear his isolation more easily with the help of his friend Erik Hansen, to whom he
dedicated Cacciato. He formed strong opinions about his fellow platoon members once in
Vietnam, feelings which surface in If I Die, Cacciato, and The Things They Carried. In
Cacciato, for example, he devotes an entire chapter, "Who They Were, or Claimed to Be,"
to exploring his comrades' personalities. Eddie Lazzuti enjoys the calm strains of classical
music, which he listens to devotedly on Saturday evenings. Oscar Johnson possesses a
hard-boiled no-nonsense attitude toward their/ar and toward life: "Diplomacy, he was
fond of saying, is the art of persuasion; and war--never citing his sources-~is simply
diplomacy continued through other means" ( 127). Jim Pederson ,' "While he was not a
Catholic, .considered it his duty to reinforce Christianity in any of its forms. .Once he
stopped the Third squad from burning down a village in Pinkville" 128). Pederson's
religiosity suggests the later incarnation of Kiowa in The Things They Carried, "a devoted
Baptist, [he] carried an illustrated New Testamentithat had been preSented to him by his
father, who taught Sunday School in Oklahoma City" (777C, 4- 5) Likewise, if one might
infer Kiowa' s character as a distillation, or reinvention, of Pederson, Sidney Martin in
Going After Cacciato rrright be interpreted as a fictionalization of Captain Smith of If I
Die, who effortlessly evokes the contempt of the soldiers in O'Brien's platoon. Smith, a
Tennessean, a Southerner "Like seventy percent of the officers around" "wanted a good,
tough fighting unit He wanted to sound authoritative, but it did not work. No one
trusts a green officer, and if he's short and fat and thinks he's a good soldier, he had better
be Patton himself" (If I Die, 144-45). When O'Brien, the radio-telephone Operator (RTO)
for the company, advises Smith to abandon his dutifiil search and destroy operatiOn on a
Village, the inexperienced ROTC graduate responds with a sense of unthinking
Commitment to mission: "'Well, Timmy boy, that's why I'm an officer. We've got our
Orders'" (If I Die, 150). When the unit incurs casualties from mines and small arms fire,

Smith himself receives a minor abrasion. His assessment of the situation, after some of his

90

men die in the confiising staccato of events, tellingly captures the disgust O'Brien and

predictably his fellow soldiers feel toward Johansen's replacement:

Captain Smith ambled over and sat down on the dike. "Got me a little scratch
from that mine. Here, take a look. Got myself a Purple Heart." He showed me a
small hole in his shirt. It looked like a moth had done it, that small. "My first big
operation, and I get a Purple Heart. Gonna be along year, Timmy. But wow, I've
lost a lot of men today." (151)

On 31 July, 1969, the Battalion Adjutant, still Lieutenant Stuart Shelk, recorded the

day's casualties; it was only six—thirty am. when he submitted his report:

(U) Casualty Reports: Called to Bde
SP4 Joel R S-- Co A Minor FW rt. arm & rt. hand

SSG Maurice W. J-- Co A 'Minor FW rt. side of face

PFC Charles L. R-- Co A Minor FW neck

PFC Wayne C-- Co A Minor FW in left arm & left leg

(U) Summary: Daily office routine carried on as usual. All required reports
submitted, on time as required. (NAR 31 Jul 69,,No. 2/4, 1).

In Going After Cacciato, the soldiers of Paul Berlin's squad develop an abiding respect
for Lieutenant Corson, who accompanies them on their trip in pursuit. of Cacciato.
Corson, unlike Sidney Martin, "did not believe [in the war] as an intellectual imperative, or
even as a professional standard Lieutenant Corson did not order his men into the
tunnels The men loved him" (129). Lieutenant Sidney Martin, on the other hand, like
Captain Smith, represents the dreariest aspects of failed military leadership. As much as
anything else, the novel revolves around the decision among the platoon to murder, or
"frag," kill through the use of a fragmentation grenade, Martin. Cacciato's refirsal to
signify his own complicity, through the simple act of touching a grenade which will be
used to take revenge against Martin for the unnecessary deaths of fellow platoon members
Tucker and Lynn (and others), represents the central stniggle in the novel which
precipitates the flight westward to Paris, towards which Cacciato flees as an act of
disavowal. Berlin is tasked with obtaining Cacciato's acceptance of the planned act, and

has to track him down to a "lake," actually a bomb crater, where Cacciato is fishing.

91

Cacciato repeatedly seeks to deny Berlin the simple symbolic act of ratifying the intended

murder:

"I won't do it." [Cacciato says].

"You think that'll stop them?" [Berlin]

Cacciato shrugged. "He's not all that bad. Once he let me carry the radio.
Remember that? Along the river. Martin let me carry the radio. He's not all that
bad."

"They want you to touch it, [Berlin] said.

Cacciato was silent. His head turned, and he looked for a moment at the grenade,
then he looked away Bringing up the grenade, Paul Berlin pressed it firmly into
the boy's hand (213).

Clearly, at best Cacciato's acquiescence is unconscious or forced, not a willful
endorsement of the mission to kill Sidney Martin. It is also never entirely clear whether
Lieutenant Sidney Martin dies of fragmentary wounds or not. What is clear is the degree
to which he, like Captain Smith in If I Die, represents the dangers American leadership
impose on the soldiers of Berlin's platoon. Martin, a name as casually nondescript as
Smith, is depicted as methodically detached from the results of his obedience to orders.
After F renchie Tucker and Bernie Lynn are killed in the tunnels, he sets out to organize
the next mission: "The lieutenant still worked with a pencil, using his map and compass
and code book to work up the coded coordinates. He worked calmly and without hurry"
(60). Oscar Johnson, methodical student of war, caustically notes the lieutenant's apparent
unconcem with the death of his platoon members: "'Codes,‘ Oscar said 'Man messes
with codes an' Codes.‘ He looked at Lieutenant Sidney Martin and spat. 'Codesl'" (63).
The contempt is undisguised. In the chapter "The Way It Mostly Was," we learn that
although Martin "did not enjoy fighting battles" and "knew something was wrong with his
war. The absence of a common purpose" (148) he also "prided himself on his knowledge
of tactics and strategy and history his ability to maximize a unit's potential. He believed
in mission. He believed in men, too, but he believed in mission first" (146). The
lieutenant, unlike Berlin, unlike Timmy O'Brien, and unlike Tim O'Brien, "knew that in

war purpose is never paramount, neither purpose nor cause, and that battles are always

92

fought among human beings, not purposes. He could not imagine dying for a purpose"

(148).

In the chapter on "Who They Were, or Claimed to Be, " we again encounter Paul
Berlin. He "was almost always called by both names, first and last together, which suited
him fine" (130). He had no nickname, though many did. Names, as Berlin informs us,
were sometimes "known in fiill, some in part, some not at all" (130). O'Brien himself was
nicknamed "College Joe" at times , though he additionally notes that of his fellow platoon
members "Most didn't know I had been to college" (Schroeder, 1984, 137). Perhaps one
of the most colorfiil characters to appear in his work is Major Callicles in If I Die, with
whom he works after a transfer to brigade headquarters at Chu Lai in August 1969 (If I
Die, 173 ), several months after receiving a wound which won O'Brien the Purple Heart.

Callicles was a flamboyant officer schooled in the old discipline of American warfare:

He was the battalion executive officer--second in command. He bragged that he'd
started out as an NCO [Non-Commissioned Officer], thrived on the discipline, and
gone on to become an officer, avoiding West Point and doing it the hard way
Barrel-chested--staves and beer and all-he was a last but defiant champion of
single-minded, hard-boiled militarism. He listed his hates in precise order--
moustaches, prostitution, pot, and sideburns. And since all four were either tacitly
or explicitly permitted in Vietnam, he harbored a necessarily silent hate for the
new, insidious liberality infecting his army (186).

Callicles' head-on approach to the Vietnam War (he says of My Lai: "you assume the
worst about [the enemy population]. When you go into My Lai, you know--you assume
they're all VC. 01' Charlie with big tits and nice innocent, childlike eyes. Damn it, they're
all VC, you should know that" (If I Die, 191) leads him to perform several acts of
intoxicated bravery. He plans a nighttime ambush in which he enlists O'Brien's reluctant
support, the officer "spinning around in booze and courage" (If I Die, 197), for which he
later receives a sharp rebuke. In fact, it appears that O'Brien's model for Callicles might

have been another flamboyant major equally possessed with the need to confront the

93

enemy face to face. Major Disney, a name as suggestive as O'Brien's compassionate

screen provided in his memoir,4

lconducts military theatrics rivalling, if not depicting,
those of Major Callicles. Disney arrives in Vietnam in the summer of 1969 and by

September proves himself battle-worthy:

TDI [acronymn unknown] 1030 HRS while on VR [vicinity reconnaissance] of
area VIC 795851 in LOH [light observation helicopter] MAJ Disney spotted
approximately 5 VC in water near ledge & engaged with .45 cal & M-60 MG
[machine gun] fire. Results 5 VC KIA. At 1120 HRS LOH broke station for POL
[petroleum, oil, lubricants]. As LOH was leaving area MAJ Disney reported
seeing an arm reaching out of water to retrieve a KIA VC. MMII [Minuteman II,
a local landing zone] called to transport troops from LZ Minuteman to VIC
795851. MMII called for gunships and muskets 38 came on station at 1050 HRS
& coordinated with MAJ Disney for targets (NAR 23 Sep 1969, 27, 7).

Is Callicles Disney? O'Brien suggested during his interview with me in East Lansing
on 7 April, 1994, that in fact Major Roman, another character who appears in the oftical
military records, served as the model for Major Callicles in If I Die (see attached appendix
for transcription of the interview). What I seek to demonstrate here is that O'Brien's
narratives frequently find their prototypes within the community of soldiers recorded in the
journals. Throughout the late summer of 1969, as noted earlier, A Company sustains
heavy casualties. The incidents O'Brien records repeatedly throughout his work reveal an
undeniable kernel of authenticity, for the "happeningness," as he describes the events, as
much as for the authenticity of events O'Brien witnessed. Theinventories of combat
losses which permeate his work are substantiated by the unit records of the 5th Battalion,
46th Infantry.

Lastly, I will examine the character of Cacciato, for whom O'Brien at one point
provides a compressed image which dramatically conveys the transition of soldier from

innocence to experience:

[Paul Berlin] remembered how the kid used to carry a tattered photo album at the
bottom of his pack inside, arranged in strict chronological order, were more
than a hundred pictures that somehow stuck better to memory than Cacciato
himself Cacciato smiling and shoveling snow, Cacciato with his head shaved

94

white, Cacciato in fatigues, Cacciato and Vaught posing with machine guns,
Cacciato and Billy Boy, Cacciato and Oscar, Cacciato squatting beside the corpse
of a shot-dead VC in green pajamas, Cacciato holding up the dead boy's head by a
shock of brilliant black hair, Cacciato smiling (107).

Elsewhere in the novel, we are told he is "a smudged, lonely-looking figure a shiny
pink spot at the'crown of his skull" (GA C, 6), "Dumb as a dink" (6), about whom there
was "something curiously unfinished" (7), "rockhead" (l6), "ding-dong" (17), "the light of
the world" and even "The happy-assed light of the world" who in the end "had somehow
torn himself free of physical fact" (279). In the final analysis, what provides the grist for
O'Brien's mill is both rooted in reality, the substance of lived experience, and borne of his
imaginative faculties. His struggle to resolve for Paul Berlin the quest for Cacciato
dissolves in the mist of a military pursuit and ultimately requires the redemptive capacity
of the war story to convert the inventory of events into the meaning of reconciliation:
"War stories. That was what remained: a few stupid war stories, hackneyed and
unprofound. Even the lessons were commonplace. It hurts to be shot. Dead men are
heavy. Don't seek trouble, it'll find you soon enough" (GAC, 255). Who, in fact, is
Cacciato, and why escape the war to pursue his mythical shadow?

On 31 July, 1969, one Richard Cacciato reported for duty as the battalion adjutant.
The archival record reads, in typically detached military prose: "(U) Incoming Officers:
CPT Richard Cacciato MOS 1542 [Infantry]" (NAR, 31 July 69, 5, 1). At the most
superficial level, the new battalion adjutant shares the name of O'Brien's fleeing character
in the novel Going After Cacciato. Whether he modeled his character directly in the
image of the actual Cacciato is very diflicult to assess short of O'Brien's own clarification,
but certain facts surrounding Captain Cacciato are clear. First, Steven Kaplan, in
Understanding Tim O'Brien, notes that O'Brien "ultimately ended up carrying the
Captain's radio" after serving as a rifleman and machine-gunner, the "Captain" in this case
referring to his unnamed company commander (ms. 3). As a radio-telephone operator

(RTO) O'Brien called in medevacs and other routine reports of an administrative nature:

95

"I became the radio guy for the squad and had to call for medical evacuations and deal
with the stuff head on" (Shostak, 76). Such duties inevitably would have led him to at
various points communicate with the battalion adjutant, or at the very least non-
commissioned officers or enlisted soldiers working for the adjutant, and thus O'Brien
would likely have been aware of Cacciato's presence. Even if he did not, after his transfer
to Chu Lai, he pulled security duty and worked as "an adjutant battalion clerk" (Kaplan,
ms. 4), or as O'Brien describes the new job, "It was there beside the ocean that I got my
rear job [in late August, 1969]. They wanted a typist in battalion headquarters; they
wanted me" (If I Die, 173). In this new capacity, O'Brien inevitably would have come in
routine, almost daily contact, with Richard S. Cacciato. The irony of selecting such a
name, however, lies in the daily staff journals under whose name, Cacciato, the daily
casualty lists were published. For example, within five days after being assigned to 5th
battalion 46th Infantry, Cacciato's signature authenticated yet one more combat incident

attriting Alpha Company's ugly days of summer:
(U) Casualty Reports:

PFC Robert D. E-- Co A rt. foot injury (from M14 mine) 27th Surg--Good
PFC Eddie L T-- Co A dust-off for high temp (104) & fast pulse 27th Surg
RICHARD CACCIATO, CPT Adjutant

There are, of course, other possible explanations for O'Brien's selection of of the name
Cacciato. Etymologically, the name derives from Italian, and depending upon its usage
syntactically can mean to hunt, to ensnare, to drive out or chase away, to expel, to go
shooting. In one intransitive verb construction, "dove ti sei cacciato?" its meaning
translates, quite appropriately to the novel, as "Where have you got to?"42

In The Things They Carried, of course, O'Brien names his primary narrator "Timmy
O'Brien" but discounts its direct autobiographical reference to himself repeatedly in
interviews. At a certain level, whether Cacciato refers to the Captain serving as O'Brien's

adjutant at Chu Lai or whether Timmy in The Things They Carried necessarily relates

96

events which happened to O'Brien personally becomes irrelevant. O'Brien's interest is
always more on the capacity to create in the reader's mind the "happeningness" of an
event, whether combat or otherwise, much more than to tell the dry facts of experience.
He deliberately and relentlessly undermines the reader's (and listener's--for every war story
told in Things suggests an implied listener) credulity with regard to fact and fiction in The
Things They Carried. For example, he begins "Good F orm" by notifying his audience that
"It's time to be blunt. I'm forty-three years old, true, and I'm a writer now, and a long time
ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier," all events autobiographi-
cally authentic to the writer O'Brien telling stories at the time he was writing the work of
fiction. Yet later on the same page, after recounting a specific, "historical" instance from
that year in Quang Ngai, he warns us "Even that story is made up" but importantly
clarifying his aesthetic purpose by noting that "I want you to feel what I felt. I want you
to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth" (204, emphasis
O'Brien's). In his interview with Eric Schroeder, he explained equally tersely: "You tell
lies to get at the truth," very closely echoing earlier comments about the purpose and the
value of telling war stories (141).

Recovering the reality of O'Brien's experience in Vietnam, in other words, cannot be
assessed other than through the medium of the war story, which requires on the part of the
reader an acute sensitivity to the way in which experience is manipulated to arrive at a
more qualitative personal history for O'Brien. The principal story which exercises both a
metafictional strategy and achieves the supreme articulation of this process is, quite aptly,
"How to Tell a True War Story." The story begins with the assertion that "This is true"43
later reinforced with the statement that "It's all exactly true" ( TTT C, 75, 77). Yet despite
these assertions, the reader is confionted almost immediately by a series of qualifications,
seemingly factual back-pedalling, and convoluted self-critiques by the narrator which
severely complicate the notion of truth. In order to approach the "story-truth" of the

events he depicts, however, O'Brien requires the reader to abandon traditional

97

expectations of narrative reliability and to accept in its place the liberatory constraints
which arise out of the specific narrative construction of the war story. The war story has
its own logic, which blends fact and fiction in order to arrive at a morally and

philosophically more authentic (and more experientially satisfying) representation of what

happened:

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened
from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening
and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed The pictures get
jumbled; you tend to rrriss 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 (78, O'Brien's
emphasis).

Shortly thereafter he adds, "In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you
believe it, be skeptical. It's a question of credibility" (79). During the central portion of
the story, Mitchell Sanders tells the story of a patrol on an isolated hilltop listening post in
Vietnam. The story becomes the practical lesson in demonstrating the principles of telling
a war story elaborated earlier by O'Brien. Sanders, in telling his story, advises his
listeners: "'This next part you won't believe And you know why? Because it
happened. Because every word is absolutely dead-on true'" (81). Yet later, reflecting on
the story he has told, Sanders quietly confesses that "Last night, man, I had to make up a
few things" (83). The narration reverts back to the narrator Tim O'Brien finally, who then
provides further metacommentary on the nature of Sanders' story. He notes how "any
soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a
corresponding proximity to life" (87) and that "the only certainty [in war] is overwhelming
ambiguity." He fiirther defines the precise contours of a genuine war story when he
instructs us that "In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth
itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true"

(88).

98

O'Brien insistently confounds the reader's expectations as he meticulously sketches in
the final details which make up the true war story. The ending of "How to Tell a True
War Story," for example, sudenly jars one back into a literary reading in which a woman
who "hates war stories," despite her usual dislike of all the "blood and gore," inexplicably
likes this one. Yet she fails to truly grasp the essential purpose of the war story she has
just heard: "It wasn't a war story. It was a love story" (90, O'Brien's emphasis). Thus, in
the final comments, O'Brien explains: "Beginning to end, you tell her, it's all made up.
Every goddamn detail None of it happened" (91). Instead of being simply a war story,
whether Sanders' account of the patrol or the instance of Curt Lemon dying by means of
an exploding 105mm artillery booby-trap, the narrator-author suggests that "a true war
story is never about war it's about love and memory. It's about sorrow" (91).

' 'In closing out his definition of the war story, O'Brien subtly incorporates several other
critical components; for example, when recounting the story of killing a small baby water
buffalo, O'Brien emphasizes how "This one does it for me. I've told it before--many times,
many versions--but here's what actually happened" (85). This technique, of retelling the
story endlessly, fiJlfillS the requirement that "You can tell a true war story if you just keep
on telling it" (91). It is this principle which operates, in fact, throughout the fiction of Tim
O'Brien. Concerning the account of the baby water buffalo, for example, the author
details the slaughter of the beast in If I Die and more graphically yet in Going After
Cacciato.44 Even in The Nuclear Age, a novel often noted for the way in which Vietnam
does not Operate as the central theme, one encounters the same archetypal narration of the

incident with the water buffalo:

Then he [Ebenezer Keezer] discussed the particulars of Vietnam. It was a
firsthand account, largely anecdotal. He talked about the effects of white
phosphorous on human flesh He described the consequences of a foot coming
into contact with the firing mechanism of a Bouncing Betty, the reds and whites,
the greenish-gray color of a man's testicles in bright sunlight [he] spoke quietly
about a morning in 1966 when his platoon of marines had gone on a buffalo hunt
in Quang Ngai province, how they'd entered the village at dawn, and burned it, and

99

how, afterward, with the village burning, they had moved out into a broad paddy
where the buffalo were--and how the platoon had lined up in a single rank, as if on
a firing range, and how without hunger or provocation the platoon had gone
buffalo hunting-like the Wild West, he said, Buffalo fucking Bill--how they put
their weapons on automatic and how those slow stupid water buffalo stood
there and took it broadside, didn't run, didn't panic, just took it, how fat chunks of
fat and meat seemed to explode off their hides (177, O'Brien's emphasis).

The stories, the essential actions in the novels, recur, just as O'Brien's definition of
the war story requires. Thus, when one discovers Stink Harris at the end of the "How to
Tell a True War Story" (as well as later in "The Lives of the Dead"), though he is a
character who exists in Going After Cacciato, one is little surprised (91).

Yet the instances might ultimately refer once again back to the actuality of events as

depicted in the daily staff journals. On 13 July 1969, for instance:

A C0: A2 (2nd Platoon) was inspecting & throwing grenades into some fresh
tunnels. One pack [soldier] stepped across gully. When pack was across he
dragged his foot along a pile of logs setting off mine. Said mine was 81mm mortar
pressure release type mine. Said mine was about 5 meters from hootch. Injured
was Sgt [Sergeant] E5 M--, lost left foot and rt [right] leg, also had frag wounds in
face, grid 772838 (NAR, 13 July 1969, 15, 2-3). ‘

This event, though not in O'Brien's platoon, resembles in its essential meanness the
event he records in If I Die: "Chip, my black buddy from Orlando, strayed into a
hedgerow and triggered a 105 artillery round. He died in such a way that, for once, you
could never know his color" (120-21). One recalls that in The Things They Carried, "Curt
Lemon stepped on a booby-trapped 105 round" as well (85). The facts, even in the
memoir, no longer need conform to the rigorous explication of what happened. The
reader already understands that even in the memoir details have been reshaped to convey
the general "happeningness" rather than to articulate the exact actuality. For example,
during the month of August O'Brien informs us in the edition of If I Die cited to this point
that "the month of August was not bad. Only two men were killed" (172), while in an
earlier edition of the same memoir he notifies us that "No one was killed. Few were

seriously hurt" (If I Die, 1983, 175), which conforms to the memoir’s first published

100

edition in 1973.45 In other details, successive iterations of the story constituting a form of
retelling which characterizes the telling of a true war story, and in them O'Brien
incorporates numerous other minor alterations. In the chapter titled "The Man at the
Well," for example, his platoon takes a brief respite to obtain water and rest during
ongoing search and destroy operations. A blind old man helps shower the soldiers, while
Vietnamese children play with the soldiers and assist in the cleaning of weapons and
cleansing. Suddenly, "a blustery and stupid soldier, blond hair and big belly, picked up a
carton of milk and from fifteen feet away hurled it, for no reason, aiming at the old man
and striking him flush in the face" (98). The tale concludes after the old man, "with the
ruins of goodness spread over him," resumes washing the soldiers, revealing no response
to the evil act (98). In the earlier editions, the story ends with the brief phrase, "The kids
watched" (97, 1973 edition), which is absent from the edition of 1989. O'Brien's deletion
of the phrase in later printings changes the outcome of the story in a subtle but important
manner. The earlier rendition implies that not only did the children witness the entire
event, but they likely internalized their shock and anger at the American soldiers, and
potentially later acted against them in order to avenge the old man. Careful comparison of
O'Brien's different printings reveals innumerable alterations of this type. I suggest that
rather than an obliteration of fact, they collectively satisfy the need for a true war story to
be retold time and again, each telling seeking a refinement of the truth, particularly the
"story-truth" which "is truer sometimes than happening-truth" ( TTT C, 204). Similar
instances of revision occur in successive "versions" of individual chapters in Going After
Cacciato, as noted earlier. In my concluding section on O'Brien, "consideration," I will
examine one instance of such retelling, in the story "Speaking of Courage," originally

intended for inclusion in Going After Cacciato but ultimately published in The Things
They Carried 46

101

In the face of O'Brien's insistent blurring of fact and fiction and his conception of what
constitutes a "true" war story, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that at a certain level, all of
his work constitutes a form of nonfiction. The point here is not to suggest that the details
reveal specificity of lived experience, but rather, that they convey the feeling of what his
experience in Vietnam consisted of from February, 1969, to March 1970. When Debra
Shostak asked the writer whether he would have become an author if he had not gone to
Vietnam, O'Brien responded, "No. At least I don't think so. These things are always
mysterious and so any answer has to be equally enigmatic" (74-75). The war continues to
inform his work, providing talismanic motifs which resonate throughout his writing,
reshaped in their details from one account to the next but all sharing some deeper level in
which literary, moral, and psychological truth intersect. O'Brien adopts the war story as
the principle narrative means of confronting experience. The war story permits him the
artistic latitude he requires to blend imagination with memory, in order to responsibly
invent a new, altered history, both personal and collective. Ultimately, however, for
O'Brien, as for many of the other Vietnam authors discussed earlier within this thesis, the
destination of the writer's quest is not simply in retelling the horrific events of combat.
Eventually, O'Brien pursues reconciliation with the past. He not only provides a warning,
that "anyone can die in a war if he tries" (If I Die, 202), but explores universal themes of
human nature such as courage, fear, and magic. Finally, in his writings which take place in
the "postwar" environment, O'Brien even attempts, though perhaps somewhat obliquely,
to perform a variety of therapy--a means of quieting the ghosts of memory in order to
more bravely confront the uncertainty of the future. In "'Vietnam Made Me a Writer': An
Interview with Tim O'Brien," he explains that "there is a kind of catharsis that can come
out of writing. I denied that for a long time; I just didn't feel I'd suffered any problems as
a consequence of Vietnam But in hindsight, as I say in "Notes" [in The Things They

Carried], it's possible--and, I suppose, even probable--that writing had a hidden

102

therapeutic effect for me" (Johnson, 41). O'Brien cautions his listeners to understand,

however, that finally:

What matters is writing a book that is important and therapeutic for other people,
not for the author-—and therapeutic not in the sense of 'Nam stuff‘ or 'war stuff,’ but
therapeutic in the human sense, in that it moves us or expands our capacity for
emotion and response to the world, which is what art is all about (Johnson, 41).

Healing and Consideration in O'Brien

Compared to O'Brien's other works, Northern Lights received relatively sparse critical
attention.47 Most scholars note that its themes only "tangentially" engage the subject of
Vietnam (Schroeder, "The Past and the Possible," 133), although Philip Beidler, in a
recent reassessment of O'Brien's first novel, suggests an alternative way of reading the

place of the war in this work:

Northern Lights is indeed, explicitly, beyond all else, a profound and insistent
meditation on the very idea of courage, its origin, its definition, its promise, its
possibility Set in the dark, northern forestlands of upper Minnesota, Northern
Lights nonetheless does concern itself almost immediately once again with the
experience of Vietnam, in this case the predicament of the returned, half-blinded
veteran Harvey Peny; but it also quickly comes to locate Vietnam so considered as
the "case" of Harvey's brother, Paul Milton Perry, as well and as a condition of the
larger domestic landscape both now inhabit (Re- Writing, 17).

Ironically, Beidler is less severe on O'Brien than the author himself is; in his interview
with Martin Naparsteck, Tim O'Brien calls it "a terrible book. I'm embarrassed by it; it's
hard to talk about it" and submits that "Overwriting is probably the chief flaw of the book"
(2). In "Tim O'Brien's Myth of Courage," Milton J. Bates provides another sympathetic
corrective to O'Brien's self-criticism: "Apart from its concern for courage, Northern
Lights would not seem to be a war novel, much less a Vietnam War novel. Yet it is
implicitly both of these". (269). I will briefly examine ways in which Northern Lights, a
novel not only of the postwar veteran who returns to his hometown wounded (blinded)

and in need of spiritual as well as physical reconstitution, but a book which, as Bates

103

illustrates, "in its juxtaposition of masculine and feminine, woods and pond, apocalypse
and salvation, endurance and love, nevertheless has that 'mythic quality' O'Brien considers
essential to a good story" (268).

Harvey Perry's service in Vietnam makes the war "real" for the population of Sawmill
Landing, the setting of Northern Lights. O'Brien informs us that "a rascal and a bull like
Harvey was the one to go off to the war. In that sleepwalking, slothful departure [of
Harvey's] there had been no time to counter the thought of it all, the blinding foggy
invisible force behind it, was a sure sign that Harvey would come home maimed" (20).
Later, he notes how "It wasn't a war until Harvey got himself wounded and the paper
carried a front-page story" (21). Yet immediately upon his return, Harvey inquires as to
the absence of the traditional, expected homecoming parade: "'Where's my parade [he
asks his brother Paul's wife, Grace]? Shouldn't they have trumpets and flags and things?" ' i
(22). Later, after Paul and Harvey become lost in the woods during a blizzard, managing
to survive only due to the non-veteran brother's refiisal to capitulate to the forces ‘of
nature, the town plans a parade to redress the improper reception of its war hero, and
veterans of Korea and World War II turned out to march proudly with Harvey: " [Harvey]
marched erect, the only veteran of Vietnam. He did not seem much different fiom all the
others, except that he fit his uniform and he was alone" (317).

In the chapter, Harvey reflects on his uncertain expectation of whether he could react
with courage to the hardships of the war: "'Did I worry? Yes, I worried It isn't the pain
I was scared of. I think it was that I wanted to react right when my legs got blown off
or my chest got shot open or something, you understand, seeing the stuff inside and not
going bananas. I used to worry some about that, but not a lot" he confides in Paul (189).

In another sense, the novel suggests larger, mythic parallels to America's role in
Vietnam. As Bates also suggests, the "Indian-baiting" during Paul and Harvey's childhood
points to another analogue: "Addie, the Perrys' less than dependable ally, may or may not

be part Indian; Jud Harrnor calls her 'Geronimo,‘ and her black eyes look sometimes

104

Indian, sometimes Asian" (269). Yet in important ways, the novel, rather than reflect back
onto Vietnam, anticipates the themes O'Brien is currently (spring, 1994) wrestling with as
he completes his work on a novel scheduled for publication in fall, 1994. The novel has
been variously and tentatively titled, at different points in its conception, Lake of the
Woods,48 The People We Many (named after an excerpt by the same name published in
the January, 1992, Atlantic Monthly),49and, as communicated during a telephone
conversation between myself and O'Brien in March, 1994, The Secrets of Marriage. He
ultimately notified his publisher that the work will be titled In the Lake of the Woods.50
Regardless of the title, it is the impenetrability of human nature, the impossibility of ever

reading another's mind, which preoccupies his current literary activity:

What we don't know is inherently intriguing to the human spirit. That includes big
metaphysical things like death and God, and it includes little discrete daily things
like, what is she thinking now as I'm having this drink at the bar? There is always
that mystery because one can't read other people's minds. What fascinates us in .
part about character, about other human beings, is that we just will never be that
person, live that person's life The mystery of what we can't know is what's
dominating the novel I'm working on right now (Kaplan, 1993, 104-05).

In Northern Lights, likewise, Harvey muses on the same types of concerns:
"Sometimes I think you never think I'm serious, but I am. You can't ever know for sure
what people are thinking. And sometimes, sometimes people are thinking just the
opposite of what they pretend they're thinking" (246-47). Thus, one might consider the
ways in which O'Brien, while not necessarily producing a "rewrite" of Northen Lights,
returns to certain themes not fully explored in his previous work. Again, obedient to the
dictates of "How to Tell a True War Story," there is the need to return and retell a story
relentlessly. As he expands the metaphor in his interview with Shostak and Boume,
"Stories, retold, carry the force of legend Legends have to do with the repetition of
things" (89).

As much as any other single story he has dealt with over the years, O'Brien has

continually revisited his story "Speaking of Courage." As noted above, the work

105

originally was intended as part of Going After Cacciato, but "it just didn't have a proper
home in that book It's a postwar book" (Naparsteck, 7). The story is complicated in its
final form as an excerpt in The Things They Carried by the presence of an explanatory
section called "Notes." In this "epilogue" to the story proper, O'Brien engages in what is
perhaps the most metafictional ploy within his work, in that he almost obtrusively calls
attention to the history of the story, "Speaking of Courage," noting how "At the time [that
the character Norman Bowker approached him and asked him to write a story about a
character like himself, who 'just drives around town all day and can't think of any damn
place to go' (179)] I was at work on a new novel, Going After Cacciato, and one moming

I"

I sat down and began a chapter titled 'Speaking of Courage (180). O'Brien's willingness
to draw out such overtly autobiographical details not only suggests that the relationship
between himself and his narrator, Tim O'Brien, is perhaps closer than he admits at times in '
interviews, but in the following discussion anticipates almost verbatim descriptions he

would later use during interviews to examine the problematic note following the story:

To provide a dramatic frame, I collapsed events into a single time and place, a car
circling a lake on a quiet afternoon in midsummer, using the lake as a nucleus
around which the story would orbit For the scenery I borrowed heavily from my
own hometown. Wholesale thievery, in fact. I lifted up Worthington, Minnesota ..
As the novel developed over the next year, and as my own ideas clarified, it

' became apparent that the chapter had no proper home in the longer narrative.
Going After Cacciato was a war story; "Speaking of Courage" was a postwar
story (TT‘T C, 180-81).

O'Brien fiirther undermines his reader's sense of what is true when he comments on the
"Notes" section during his interview with Debra Shostak for Aryitl Dodge. Shostak asks,
"Given your statement that everything in The Things They Carried is fiction, can we
believe "Notes" is nonfiction, when at least the surface assumption is that here you're
giving us the truth about what went on in the composition of another story?" (82).

O'Brien responds with now self-indulgent evasion:

106

You ought not to believe it. In fact, it's utterly and absolutely invented. It's an
example of one more seduction on top of the rest. No Norman Bowker, and no
mother. It's a way of displaying that form can dictate belief, that the form of the
footnote, the authority that the footnote carries, is persuasive in how we
apprehend things (82).

At least some facts can be extracted from his note, however, which seem to contradict
his assertion of utter invention. For example, the story, "Speaking of Courage,"
underwent an actual revision process in which earlier versions of the story corroborate the
claim that it was intended originally as a chapter within Going After Cacciato.
Specifically, the story was originally published separately in Massachusetts Reviewin 1976
and anthologized in Prize Stories I 978: The 0. Henry Awards; in both versions Paul
Berlin appears as the story's main character. Later, it was also published "in an edition of
three hundred numbered copies and 26 lettered copies," all signed by the author.51 The
only readily apparent difference between these early versions is that toward the end of the
story, when Paul Berlin orders a burger, root beer and french flies, in the numbered copy
the waitress "bent forward. She shook her head dumbly" (18) whereas in the copy
published in the Massachusetts Review her action is more austere; "She leaned down"
(252). Both versions differ considerably from the later incarnation which appears first in
Granta (volume 29) and its close model published in The Things They Carried, in which
the death of Kiowa is importantly introduced, Norman Bowker emerges as the main
character, and the section "Notes" is added (though "Notes" might legitimately be
considered an entirely separate story, I refer to it‘ here as "part" of "Speaking of Courage"
because it operates as a commentary upon the preceding tale).

What all three stories have in common, however, is foremost the central action of
driving around the lake and Sunset Park. What especially proves interesting is the manner
in which all of these versions echo a scene from If I Die (which again, among themselves,
provide slightly variant readings). There, O'Brien tells us that "I took a long drive around
the lake, past Sunset Park, with its picnic tables and little beach and a brown wood shelter

and some families swimming. Past the Crippled Children's School. Past Slater Park. Past

107

a long string of split-level houses, painted every color" (1989, 19). In all the versions of
"Speaking of Courage," one finds again Sunset Park (i.e., TTT C , 158) as well as the nearly
identical description of Slater Park: "He [Norman Bowker] followed the road past the
handsome houses with their wooden shingles. Back to Slater Park, across the causeway,
around to Sunset Park, as though riding on tracks" (T‘TT C , 165-66). At this point, one
might reasonably connect O'Brien's admission of driving around the lake as an
autobiographical acknowledgement of an activity he engaged in during the nervous weeks
leading up to his departure for Fort Lewis, Washington, for induction into the Army. It is
in the precise details which follow, in this case to be found in the two early versions of
"Speaking of courage" (though not entirely'transmitted in the copy found in The Things
They Carried), where the slight alterations produce sometimes significant shifts in
thematic purpose. Just as I argued that in the closing scenes of Going After Cacciato, as
Paul Berlin confi'onts his alter-ego Sarkin Aung Wan over the'negotiating table in Paris,
and reveals his commitment to see the war through despite his acknowledgment that the
war is "ill-conceived," I wish to suggest that as Paul Berlin discusses the war with his
father in this central scene of "Speaking of Courage," we again glimpse O'Brien himself, at
an especially poignant transition from a soldier returned from the war, grappling with the
tremendous guilt and simultaneous wish for recognition, and the O'Brien who would later

amend his tale to suit the purposes of his new role as artist-writer:

"How many medals did you win?" his father might have asked.
"Seven," he would have said, "though none of them were for valor"
"That's all right," his father would have answered, knowing fiill well that many
brave men did not win medals for their bravery, and that others win medals for
doing nothing. "What are the medals you won?"

And he would have listed them, as a kind of starting place for talking about the
war: the Combat Infantryman's Badge, the Air Medal, the Bronze Star (without a

V-device for valor),52 the Army Commendation Medal, the Vietnam Campaign
Medal, the Good Conduct Medal, and the Purple Heart, though it 'wasn't much of a
wound, and there was no scar, and it didn't hurt and never had. While none of
them was for valor, the decorations still looked good on the uniform in his closet,
and if anyone were to ask, he would have explained what each signified, and

108

eventually he would have talked about the medals he did not win, and why he did
not win them, and how afraid he had been (245-46, The Massachusetts Review).

In his need to explain his lack of bravery in helping to rescue F renchie Tucker, Berlin

then explains how he nearly won the Silver Star in addition to all the other medals he did

win. The concluding dialogue, absent from the final version of the story as published in

The Things They Carried, suggests the finally redemptive potential implicit in the war

story:

"I almost won the Silver Star," [Paul Berlin] would have said.

"How's that?"

"Oh, it's just a war story."

"What's wrong with war stories?" his father would have said.

"Nothing, except I guess nobody wants to hear them" (246)

He knew a lot of things. They were not new or profound, but they were true. He
knew that he might have won a Silver Star, like F renchie, if he'd been able to finish
what Frenchie started in the foul tunnel. He knew many war stories, a thousand
details, smells and the confusion of the senses, but nobody was there to listen, and
nobody knew a damn about the war because nobody believed it was really a war
at all. It was not a war for war stories, or talk of valor, and nobody asked
questions about details nobody wants to hear war stories because everyone
knows already that it hadn't been a war like other wars. If Max or his father were
ever to ask, or anybody, he would say, "Well, first off, it was a war the same as
any war," which would not sound profound at all, but which would be the truth
(249-50, my emphasis).

In the final version of the story, of course, we do listen to O'Brien's war stories. In

The Things They Carried, Bowker tells the war story of Kiowa's death in the shitfield, a

narrative O'Brien is unable to relate in his earlier conception of the story. What we do

know now, however, is that we have learned, through writers such as O'Brien, how to

listen, how to hear the stories of war.

O'Brien fulfills the promise made by Paul Berlin to his father, if he could only speak to

him. As surrogate listeners, we hear the same lesson again and again:

Another bit of popular folklore has it that Vietnam was somehow different from
other American wars. Fundamentally different for the soldier on the ground, the
combat veteran, every war is identical in its most basic elements: fear, death,
destruction, pain, anger, despair, loneliness, boredom, guilt, anguish. It doesn't
make it any easier to charge an enemy bunker knowing that the folks back home

 

 

'—:—?————
109

are behind you; it doesn't make it easier knowing that your war was sanctioned by
a vote in Congress. Morale is not so much affected by bright home front fires as
by good battlefront food. And a corpse does not look any prettier, any less dead,
in a so-called popular war ("The Violent Vet," 104).

Elsewhere, O'Brien makes the same point in slightly altered terminology:

It's very nice and easy to say that Vietnam was special because it was forrnless and
absurd. But certainly World War I must've seemed equally chaotic and absurd to
Siegried Sassoon or Robert Graves or Rupert Brooke or Erich Remarque. And it
was absurd--men were slaughtered like cattle for reasons that no soldier really
understood. We like to think our own war is special: especially horrible,
especially insane, especially forrnless. But we need a more historical and
compassionate perspective. We shouldn't minimize the suffering and sense of
bewilderment of other people in other wars (McCaffrey, 267).

Finally, and lastly in this vein, there are the comments Doc Peret makes to the Iranian

major, Fayhi Rhallon:

"The point is that war is war no matter how it's perceived. War has its own reality.
War kills and maims and rips up the land and makes orphans and widows. These
are the things of war. Any war. So when I say there's nothing new to say about
Nam, I'm saying it was a war just like every other war It pisses me off to hear
everybody say how special Nam is, how it's a big aberration in the history of
American wars--how for the soldier from Korea or World War Two. Follow me?
I'm saying that the feel of war is the same in Nam or Okinawa--the emotions are
the same, the same fundamental stuff is seen and remembered. That's what I'm
saying" (GAC, 176).

O'Brien clarifies, with finality and without ambiguity, the closing line of Herr's work

Dispatches: "Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we've all been there" (278).
Conclusion

Paul Berlin, and more importantly, Tim O'Brien, found their voices and communicated
the universality of the combat experience. O'Brien's subject matter extends naturally to
other topics in which universal qualities of the human heart are engaged: love, fear,
courage, desire, and magic. While he has, I contend, already provided Vietnam war

literature with the fullest articulation of the method, framework, and ultimately purpose of

110

the war story, O'Brien has yet to exhaust his literary potential. I wish to conclude the
present thesis by turning briefly to selected remarks he has made concerning his work, his
future ambition, and the abiding capacity of literature to speak to us all.

Acknowledging the manner in which his work acts as an ongoing act of seduction for

his reader, O'Brien responded to an inquiry by Debra Shostak by commenting that:

I'm trying to write about the way in which fiction takes place. I'm like a seducer,
yet beneath all the acts of seduction there's a kind of love going on, a kind of trust
you're trying to establish with the reader, saying "here's who I am, here's why I'm
doing what I'm doing. And in fact I do truly love you, I'm not just tricking you,
I'm letting you in on my game, letting you in on who I am, what I am, and why I
am doing what I am doing." All these lies are the surface of something. I have to .
lie to you and explain why I am lying to you, why I'm making these things up, in
order to get you to know me and to know fiction, to know what art is about. And
it's going to hurt now and then, and you're going to get angry now and then, but I
want to do it to you anyway--and for you (80).

Here, O'Brien's reveals his methodology not as the embellishment of historical fact, but
as an artistic sleight-of-hand which conceals in order to reveal. O'Brien confesses to Steve
Kaplan during their interview that "One's attention as a writer is on trying to put down one
word after another with a kind of grace and a kind of beauty that's a constant, never-
ending balancing act of billions of variable" ( 1991, 198). O'Brien further clarifies the final
purpose of such commitment (during his interview with Martin Naparsteck): "
ultimately I'm not writing for my contemporaries but for the ages, like every good writer
should be. You're writing for history, in the hope that your book--out of the thousands
that are published each year--might be the last to be read a hundred years from now and
enjoyed" (6). In other words, he remains faithfiil to the responsible invention of history,
and in his paradoxical flourish, invites his readers to accompany him in his journey to

resolve the fictional evidence created in his work.

Notes

lWilliam Broyles, Jr., "The Ghosts of Vietnam," Newsweek 73.4 (14 February 1994): 30-
32. I make my complain despite William Broyles Jr.'s argument that "Life has gone on,
and the war is over." My position is that the war 'will continue to haunt us mythically,
politically, culturally; Broyles speaks more directly to President Bill Clinton's lifting of
trade the embargo against our former adversary. The continued prominence of Vietnam-

related articles in the media suggests the position I use in opening my thesis (spring,
1994)

2President George W. Bush, quoted in Ann Devroy and Guy Gugliotta, "Bush to _'Move
Fast' on Mideast Peace," The Washington Post 2 March 1991: A13.

3Unless otherwise noted, references hereafter are to the Delta/ Seymour Lawrence
paperback edition of 1989. Additionally, unless otherwise noted, all references to
Northern Lights are to the Delacorte/ Seymour Lawrence edition (New York, 1975); all
references to The Nuclear Age are to the Collins edition (London, 1986); and references
to The Things They Carried are to the Penguin Books edition (New York, 1990).

_ 4The term "in country" is a figure of speech peculiar to Vietnam. Throughout this thesis,
though I will no longer mark its usage, the reader should recall that the term refers to a
particular, Vietnam War application.

5 For a review and characterization of how The Things They Carried suggests new generic
possibilities, see, for example, Catherine Calloway, "'How to Tell a True War Story':
Metafiction in The Things They Carried," forthcoming in Critique: Studies in
Contemporary Culture. Calloway notes hOw the work is "a combat novel, yet it is not a
combat novel. It is also a blend of traditional and untraditional forms" (ms, 2). Calloway
granted this writer written permission to quote from her unpublished article (letter,
Calloway to McNemey, 24 March 1994).

6Gordon 0. Taylor, in "Cacciato's Grassy Hill," Genre 21 (1988): 393-407, refiites the
applicablity of Fussell's position with regard to Vietnam literature. For Taylor, the genre
is still too new and under-developped: "For the moment, however, many attempting to
recount or reimagine American experience in Vietnam" .find themselves--or feel
themselves to be in a position quite different than that posited by Fussell" (393).

7See Alasdair Spark's review essay "A Statute of Limitations: Recent Writings on the
Vietnam War," Journal of American Studies 27. 1 (1993): 97, for a conflicting viewpoint
of the continuing influence of Vietnam studies, historical and literary, on college
campuses. See Timothy J. Lomperis, ed., "Reading the Wind ”: The Literature of the
Vietnam War (Durham: Duke UP, 1987) 22, for a discussion of the early difficulties
experienced by Vietnam writers in bringing works to publication.

8John Hellman, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: Columbia UP,
1986), is the seminal study of Vietnam narratives as the regeneration of the American
frontier myth. He defines myth as "the stories containing a people's image of themselves
in history;" "our explanation of history that can also serve as a compelling idea for the
fiJture" and he admits that "myths may often distort or conceal, but are nevertheless
always true in the sense that they express deeply held beliefs" (ix). Hellmann fiirther

111

 

112

importantly explains that "On the deepest level, the legacy of Vietnam is the disruption of
our story, of our explanation of the past and vision of the future" (x).

9Though presently unpublished, the essentials of O'Brien's biography are recounted in the
first chapter of Steven Kaplan's Understanding Tim O'Brien. In February, 1994, Kaplan
provided a manuscript copy of his forthcoming hill-length study of O'Brien to this writer
(letter, Kaplan to McNemey, 9 February 1994) and subsequently granted written
permission to quote from his study (letter, Kaplan to McNemey, 8 April 1994).

10At least one critic considers autobiographical interpretations of O'Brien works other
than If I Die potential misreadings. In "The Author Reinvents Himself -- The Fiction of
Tim O'Brien," The World and I 7 (1992), Philip Gerard insists that "The character O'Brien
[in The Things They Carried] is not the author O'Brien" (Gerard's italics; 543); yet I
suggest his discussion is reductive: O'Brien consistently introduces himself, with excellent
effect, into his own narrative. Gerard percieves O'Brien's intentional dissolution of
biographical/factual and fictive/imaginative boundaries as merely another deVice in the
service of his artistic purposes. 9

11See also Steven Kaplan, "The Undying Uncertainty of the Narrator in Tim O'Brien's The
, Things They Carried," Critique 35.1 (Fall 1993): 43-52; and Catherine Calloway, "'How
to Tell a True War Story': Metafiction in The Things They Carrie ."

12Tim O'Brien related information to this writer regarding the forthcoming novel during a
telephone conversation, 7 March 1994.

13 The conference was held at the Center for Continuing Education, University of Notre
Dame, fiom 2-4 December 1993. Notable participants include Neil Sheehan, Larry
Heinemann, W.D. Erhardt, Robert Olen Butler, Lynn Van Devanter, and John Balaban.
Thesis author attended the conference.

14William Broyles, Jr., Brothers in Arms: A Journey from War to Peace (New York:
Alfred A Knopf, 1986) 225. Broyles attributes the origination of the concept of the
"third force": "In the winter of 1951-52 Graham Greene went to a party given in Ben Tre
by Colonel Leroy, on a barge stocked with brandy and dancing girls. Greene rode back to
Saigon with an American attached to the economic aid mission, and the American talked
the whole way of the need for a 'third force' between the French and the Communists. On
that ride, Greene recalled, 'the subject of The Quiet American came to me'."

15Peter McInemey, "'Straight' and 'Secret' History in Vietnam War Literature, "
Contemporary Literature 22.2 (1981): 187, insightfully comments that "The Quiet
American is a sort of history, a fiction of the actual past and the real fiiture, a 'story' in the
place of 'history.‘ The collapse of the distinction between these two terms occurs in much
of the literature of the American war in Vietnam." James C. Wilson, in the first sustained
multidisciplinary study of the Vietnam War called Greene's novel "probably the best to
have been written about the Vietnam War" (9) and later echoed this remark by claiming
that "Greene's prophetic account of the beginning of the second Indochina war remains
unequalled among the literature of the Vietnam War (14). See James C. Wilson, Vietnam
in Prose and Film (Jefferson , NC: McFarland & Co., 1982).

16W.D. Ehrhart, "Who's Responsible?" Viet Nam Generation 4.1-2 (1992): 95-100,
details the substance of advice he gave to Mason prior to publication of the novel. His

113

review of the novel reflects the problematic issue of credible witness inherent in writing a
war narrative as a non-veteran.

17Tobey Herzog, Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost (New York: Routledge, 1992)
226 (fn. 13). In the same interview, Mason additionally stated that she "had a right to tell
a small part of that story [Vietnam]. Seeing the mothers, the fathers, the brothers, sisters,
wives, children--the families--there that rainy day, I knew we were all in it together."

18See General William C. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1976) 99-100.

19Appy's precise source for this figure is not clear fiom the text, though claims
surrounding the one regarding ratios of contact are derived from Senator Mike Gravel,
ed., The Pentagon Papers (Boston: Beacon P, 1971) [5 volumes], and Guenter Lewy
America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford UP, 1978).

20See, for example, W.D. Ehrhart, "Why Teach Vietnam," Social Education 52.1 (1988):
25-26. Ehrhart notes how he "had been taught that we were in Vietnam to defend the
Vietnamese from outside aggression, but I found that we were the aggressors and the
people we were supposedly defending hated us because we destroyed their forests with
chemical defoliants, burned their fields with napalm, and called the people of Vietnam
gooks, chinks, slopes, and zipperheads, turning their sons into shoeshine boys and their
daughters into whores" (25). ,

2llnterestingly, Herr and Hasford collaborated on the screen production of The Short-
Timers, Stanley Kubrick's 1987 screenplay Full Metal Jacket. See David E. Whillock,
"The Fictive American Vietnam War Film: A F ilmography," America Rediscovered:
Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War, eds. Owen Gilman and Lorrie
Smith (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990) 309.

22Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Discus, 1980) 218. Page numbers for all firrther
citations are included parenthetically in the text.

23 Philip Beidler, Re- Writing America: Vietnam Authors in Their Generation (Athens: U
of Georgia P, 1991) 264. Beidler positions Dispatches along a broad continuum of Herr's
work which he characterizes as being generically unstable: " beginning in the
postmodern triumph triumph of journalism and art in Dispatches, continuing in major
work on the scripts of the films Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, and extending
along the way, in new domains of the verbal and visual, the narrative and documentary-
cinematic, into the fiirther mixed-media experimentation of The Big Room and, as
mentioned earlier, Walter Winchell--in its challenge to our very ideas of genre, medium,
authorship, and textual authority, and indeed finally to our very ideas of symbolic
representations themselves. "

24Dale W. Jones, "The Vietnams of Michael Herr and Tim O'Brien: Tales of
Disintegration and Integration," Canadian Review of American Studies 13.3 (1982): 309-
20 and John M. Jakaitis, "Two Versions of an Unfinished War: Dispatches and Going
After Cacciato," Cultural Critique 3 (1986): 191-210.

114

25 See James C. Wilson, Vietnam in Prose and Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.,
1982), in which Wilson condemns Dispatches for a lack of "consistent moral stance," and
for failure "to go beyond a surface description" of Vietnam (45-47).

26See Barry M. Kroll, Teaching Hearts and Minds: College Students Reflect on the
Vietnam War in Literature (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992) 6-7. Kroll locates
the strength of Dispatches as "neither a simple narrative, nor a chronological account, nor
a conventional analysis" (6); in other words, the experimental quality provides a
pedagogical talisman to the intrepid teacher.

27Jones, "The Vietnams of Michael Herr and Tim O'Brien" 319 interestingly recounts ,
O'Brien's discreditation of views such as Herr's regarding cOurage; Jones also attributes
O'Brien's low regard for the film Apocalypse Now, which O'Brien described as "a simple
solution to a complex set of questions," to Michael's Herr's partial authorship of the film
script. Jones emphasizes Herr's and O'Brien's divergent conceptions of courage.

28"Rear-echelon mother fucker; support and noncombat troops": See John R. Elting, Dan
Cragg, and Ernest Deal, A Dictionary of Soldier Talk (New York: Scribners, I984) 166.

29Stephen Wright, Meditations in Green (New York: Scribners' Sons, 1983) 260. Page
numbers for‘all further citations are included parenthetically in the text.

30See Matthew Stewart, "Stephen Wright's Style in Meditations in Green," Critique 34.2
(1993): 135, for a convincing explanation regarding the drug's likely identity (footnote 3).

31Larry Heinemann, Paco 's Story (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986). Page
numbers for all fiirther citations are included parenthetically in the text.

32Tim O'Brien, letter to the author, 18 January 1994. Commenting on research he did at
the National Archives in preparation for his trip, in which O'Brien reviewed unit records
from his battalion for the period he served in country, O'Brien remarked "Fascinating to
find the exact coordinates for all those terrible events!"

33William Broyles, Jr., "The Ghosts of Vietnam," Newsweek, 14 February 1994: 30-32.

34See Jeff Johnson, "'Vietnam Made Me a Writer': An Interview with Tim O'Brien,"
Minnesota Monthly (1990): 41, for O'Brien's comments on the "hidden therapeutic effect"
writing provides him.

35N. Bradley Christie, "Reconciling with Our Work: The State of Vietnam Literary
Studies," unpublished paper presented at The United States and Viet Nam: From War to
Peace, a conference at the University of Notre Dame from 2-4 December, 1993.

36Steven Kaplan's suggestions in Understanding Tim O'Brien (forthcoming study, 1994),
appear typical of comments by numerous critics: "Everything O'Brien has written since
Going After Cacciato, up to and including a story which recently appeared in Esquire, can
be viewed as metafiction," (ms.,8). See also Catherine Calloway, "'How to Tell a True
War Story': Metafiction in The Things They Carried"; Philip Gerard, "The Author
Reinvents Himself--The Fiction of Tim O'Brien," The World and I 7 ( 1992): 537-47;
Tobey Herzog, Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost (New York: Routledge, 1992)
156-66.

115

37Unit records were obtained in November, 1993, at the Suitland Branch of the National
Archives in Suitland, Maryland. I covered the "Daily Stafl' Journal or Duty Officer's Log"s
(hereafter "Daily Staff Journal") from the adjutant, intelligence officer, and operations
officer (SI/SZ/S3); selected operational "Plans and Summaries;" and selected daily
intelligence reports ("intsums" or intelligence summaries). All records examined are from
5th Battalion, 46th Infantry, I98th Infantry Brigade ("Light"), 23rd Infantry Division
("Americal") for the period 13 July-24 November 1969, which essentially covers the bulk
of O'Brien's duty as a combat infantryman before assignment to brigade headquarters at
Chu Lai as a clerk in the personnel administration division. All material quoted has been
declassified and original copies contain declassification code numbers. Materials come
from boxes 9-14, range 472, "United States Army, Infantry Units," of the Military
Records Section, Textual Reference Division, Suitland. Verbal confirmation of permission
to quote excerpts from the material was obtained on 22 February, 1994, via telephone,
from David A. Giordano, chief of military documents. All references parenthetically will
be by date, National Archival Record (N AR), Item Number (No.) and page number if a
multiple page document. For example: (NAR, 13 Jul 69, No. 7, 2) refers to National
Archive Record, Range 472, 13 July 1969, item 7, page 2. Range 472 is always implied,
since all material was culled from the same range. While this method of documentation is
admittedly cumbersome, the MLA Style Manual omits citation methods for this type of
material, and all items noted above are necessary for later independent corroboration of
material.

38Numerous outstanding explications of the complex structure of Going After Cacciato
exist. Among the more challenging and informative, see G. Thomas Couser, "Going After
Cacciato: The Romance and the Real War, " Journal of Narrative Techniques 13.1
(1983): 1-10; Tobey Herzog, "Going After Cacciato: The Soldier-Author-Character
Seeking Control," Critique 24.2 (1983): 88-96; Dean McVVrlliams, "Time in Tim
O'Brien's Going After Cacciato," Critique 29.4 (1988): 245—60; William J. Palmer, "The
Literature and Films of the Vietnam War," in Forgotten Warriors: Combat Art fiom
Vietnam (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992) 169-86; and Eric Schroeder, "The Past and the
Possible: Tim O'Brien's Dialectic of Memory and Imagination," in Search and Clear:
Critical Responses to Selected Literature and Films of the Vietnam War, ed. William J.
Searle (Bowling Green: Bowling Green St. UP, 1988) 116-34.

39I cannot exhaustively evaluate the almost unanimously positive treatments of the novel
Going After Cacciato here, but refer the reader to some of the more convincing and
laudatory explorations. See, e.g., Thomas Myer‘s discussion in Walking Point, in which
he calls the novel "the most experimental fiction any writer on Vietnam has produced a
voyage through‘inner space where facts confront imagination" (171); Philip Beidler in
American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam calls it a "conscious imaginative tour
de force one that recpatures the truth of the experience as well ain the whole impact of
its concrete particularness and actuality" ( I 72); James C. Wilson notes how Cacciato
"explores the problem that arises from the absence of historical perspective" (Vietnam in
Prose and Film, 56). Numerous other critics have reseved special praise for O'Brien's
National Book Award winner (1979), many of whose essays are listed in the Works Cited
at the conclusion of this thesis.

 

116

40Ironically, later in the same interview O'Brien explains that his dissatisfaction with
movie scripts for Cacciato stem from the fact that they "take all the dreamlike, fantastic,
surrealistic elements of the book out and tell a pretty straightforward, realistic story,
which to me violates the whole aboutness of the book" (8, my emphasis). See Martin
Naparsteck, "An Interview with Tim O'Brien," Contemporary Literature 32.1 (1991): 1-
11.

41O'Brien included the curious (in this case) disclaimer: "Names and characteristics of
persons depicted in this book have been changed" opposite the title page in If I Die.

42See Vladimino Macchi, ed., Dictionary of the Italian and English Languages, Volume
1 (Firenze (Florence), Italy: I Grandi Dizinoari Sansoni, 1985, 2nd ed.) 175.

43 In his interview with Debra Shostak, "Artfiil Dodge Interviews Tim O'Brien," Artful
Dodge 17 (1991): 80-81, O'Brien informs us that in writing these three words, "This is
true," "the form of the book The Things They Carried] wasn't present by any means, but
the thematic 'aboutness' of the book was there."

44See Eric Schroeder, "Two Interviews: Talks with Tim O'Brien and Robert Stone,"
Modern Fiction Studies 30.] (1984): 141, in which O'Brien discusses the recurring
appearance of the "water buffalo scene." For example, O'Brien notes how "In If I Die the
guys shoot this water buffalo, and they all watch the bullets ripping huge chunks of flesh
from it. There's a similar scene in Cacciato. But it's not a whole bunch of guys; it's just
one guy, Stink Harris, in the scene in which they meet the three women."

45See works cited for listing of earlier editions of If I Die in a Combat Zone which reflect
that no soldiers were killed in August.

46See Martin Naparsteck, "An Interview with Tim O'Brien," Contemporary Literature
32.1 (1991): 7, in which O'Brien explains with regard to "Speaking of Courage": "It was
a piece I took out [of Going After Cacciato]. It's kind of an orphan. I've since rewritten
it, in fact, changing everything except the lake, driving around the lake, but all the war
stuff has been completely changed, and now I'm really fond of the story. I didn't care for it
at all when it was originally written" and firrther clarifies its removal from Cacciato, " it
just didn't fit. It's a postwar story; Cacciato was a war story, and it just didn't have a
proper home in that book." See also explanatory Tim O'Brien, "Notes," in The Things
They Carried, 180-81.

47See Bates, "Tim O'Brien's Myth of Courage," and Marie Nelson, "Two Consciences: A
Reading of Tim O'Brien's If I Die in a Combat Zone, Going After Cacciato, and Northern
Lights," in Third Force Psychology and the Study of Literature, ed. Bernard J. Paris
(London: Associated UP, 1986) 262-79. Also, Steven Kaplan devotes an entire chapter
to Northern Lights in his forthcoming Understanding Tim O'Brien.

48See Johnson, "'Vietnam Made me a Writer'" 41, in which O'Brien hinted "I'm working
on a book called lake of the Woods, set up in that boundary area near the Rainy River,
about a defeated politician it feels good to get away from Vietnam and back to
Minnesota. It's really nice now to be writing about that."

49See Steve Kaplan, Understanding Tim O'Brien, ms. 171.

 

117

50O'Brien revealed his final title selection during a discussion with students at Michigan
State University, East Lansing, Michigan, on 6 April 1994. The previous evening, in a
public reading, he indicated he had selected a title but playfully withheld its name from the
audience. The book will be titled In the Lake of the Woods.

5 1 See Tim O'Brien, "Speaking of Courage," (Santa Barbara: Neville, 1980). Thesis
author obtained a photocopy from number 264 (of 300 signed copies), maintained in the
Special Collections at the Michigan State University main library.

52See Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried, the story "Speaking of Courage" 155-73,
for a comparison of essential differences between the early and later versions of the story.
For example, the later version omits the differentiation "without a V-device for valor"
(cited in the excerpt in the thesis), found in the version published in The Massachusetts
Review 17.2 (1976): 243-53.

 

APPENDIX

Appendix

"Responsibly Inventing History": An Interview with Tim O'Brien

The following interview was conducted by Brian C. McNemey with Tim O'Brien
at the Kellogg Center, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, on 7 April
1994. The purpose of the interview is to explore O'Brien's attitude toward his work, his '5‘“
conception of the relationship between fiction and fact--"happening-truth" and "story-

truth"-and the way in which he manipulates the happened event into the larger moral

 

concerns of fiction. Additionally, I investigate O'Brien's response to his recent visit to i i ,
Vietnam, the first since his departure as a footsoldier in the 198th Infantry Brigade in it
March 1970. Finally, O'Brien commented on his upcoming work, a novel titled In the
Lake of the Country due to be published by Houghton Mifflin in the fall of 1994.
Catherine Calloway, a Professor of English from Arkansas State University, who has
compiled the most complete bibliographic record of works by and about Tim O'Brien,
additionally participated in the interview and provides selected questions during the

interview.

McNemey: Tim, you spoke once in an interview of the need for writers to have

 

substance. Among examples of substance you included "a body of witnessed experience.’
During a recent trip to Vietnam you got to go back and look at the ground in which you

obtained your own body of witnessed experience. Were there some surprises?
O'Brien: In a firnny way there weren't any surprises, thank God! Vietnam the

geography of Vietnam to me is sacred ground in a fiinny way. In the way that for any of

us our backyards, our front yards, are sacred in our memories. Where our sandboxes and

118

119

swings used to be. Those memories we carry with us for the rest of our lives, because of
the important events that occurred on that ground. And when I returned to Vietnam, .
about a month or so ago [17 February-4 March, 1994], I found a few backyards and a few
fi'ont yards and a few places where I spent my adult-childhood, and the terrain, in a fiinny
way, hadn't changed at all. .The paddies were shaped exactly as they were by events which
occurred twenty years before. My firebase, in a firnny way, was more my firebase this
time than it was the first time, because now there is nothing left on it in terms of barbed
wire or buildings, not a scrap. But the outline of the hills on which the firebase was placed
is exactly the outline as it was a long time ago minus all the buildings. In a spooky way it
looks as if ghosts are inhabiting that place now. It's not used for anything because it's
heavily mined. The ARVN took it over after we left. After the Americans left they took
this base over and they mined the place and hence none of the villagers use it for anything.
It's not tilled--the soil-~it's just there, preserved in a vacuum as it was. Precisely as the
land was all those years ago. And I have a feeling it will be that way for a long time to
come. At least until the mines are taken out.

In 1973, when I wrote If I Die in a Combat Zone, there is a line somewhere in
that book, in the chapter called " Step Lightly," you can get the exact quote but it's
something like "Years and years from now, some veteran will take his wife, or girlfiiend,
or children over here, then walk the same soil and I'll bet the mines will still be here. The
earth will not yet have swallowed and disarmed them." It's a kind of bitter statement
saying that this stufi‘ is still here and if you think this war is right, come over and walk this
land and see how you like it. At least that prophecy was in a way fulfilled when I _
returned. The ghosts are still there. It's as if you closed your eyes , [you can] see these
paddies and villages and firebases and so on, and almost hear the soldiers laughing and

drinking still. It makes you believe in a spirit world in a funny way.

 

 

120

McNemey: In "Field Trip," in The Things They Carried, you wrote about your vision of
what it would be like to go back, on an imaginary trip with the character Tim O'Brien's,
daughter Kathleen. In what ways did your trip confirm the expectation you portrayed in

that story?

O'Brien: Again, pretty much identically. The human imagination is a powerfiil faculty.
We use it all the time in our lives, we live our lives by it. It has to be powerful. You
imagined the questions you were going to ask today and you imagined the answers. If I
were to say I saw a Martian in Vietnam with a green head, you would be surprised. But
you are going to hear the answer you imagined. That's kind of how we live our lives.
That's why when we take a sip of coffee, and we've taken a lot of sips before, the next sip
is going to taste pretty much as the sip before it. In all kinds of little ways we use our
imaginations to live our lives. We worry about smoking because we imagine dying of
cancer. It doesn't stop us from smoking but it makes us worry, we imagine it, and then
that worry, that bad feeling we have now and then as we take that drag on that cigarette is
based on the imagined event for the fixture. Our own death, our own suffering, our own
pain. We imagine it more or less fully at times. Sometimes not so fiilly, other times more
firlly. And so when I imagined returning to Vietnam I was basing my imagined chapter or
story on prior events, what Vietnam had meant to menwhat it had been to me--what I had
seen there. My knowledge of how geography [operates is that it] changes very very
slowly. My imagination of what I would want to do when I gotto Vietnam-- if I were
ever to go—would be to find a kind of interpreter. To find hallowed ground. The spot
where Kiowa died is the made up event in the "Field Trip" story. And when you imagine
these things and then you act on your imagination you are bound to find some
correspondences, including emotional ones. And the emotional correspondence was very
precise. A kind of quietude, that sense of ghosts I talked about. There is something just

out there, the sense that things just hadn't changed a lot geographically. I could find

 

121

places, a sense of barely heard voices in the background. In the case of the story it was
the interpreter and the daughter laughing and the guy showing her magic tricks. In my .
own case it was a camera clicking. The Time photographer took pictures. And the
villagers' voices are the present voices and I was hearing the voices of yesterday. The
voices of twenty-five years ago. So in a lot of ways the feeling of going back was exactly
the way I had imagined it. That is the power of the human imagination. That's why I

think we love stories so much. They are kind of fiiture predictors.

McNemey: You reviewed your unit records at the National Archives before you went

back to Vietnam. What were you looking for specifically and what did you find?

O'Brien: I was looking for two things. First, I was looking just to jog my memories, the
names of people who had died. You remember faces often but as you had mentioned you
don't remember the names and you certainly don't remember whole names. I remember a
lot of nicknames, for example. We had so many of them. So, first, to jog my memory as
to who died, just the names of people. And in a couple of cases, more than a couple, in
ten. cases, I had forgotten the guys entirely who had died, because I didn't know them very
well. You get a company of guys and they rotate in and out. They are just bodies
essentially. So that was one thing, to jog my memory.

The more important reason for going there though was to find military
coordinates, six digit numbers where events occurred, so I wouldn't go over to Vietnam
and blindly hump around looking at all the hedges and paddies and villages not knowing
what was what. I knew that would happen and it would have happened if I'd have gone
there without these coordinates. As it was, I had to take the coordinates, you know--here
is where this occurred the day the tracks ran over us. Here is the day where I was

Wounded; here is the day that this guy died, that guy died, where this happened. By

compiling a set of coordinates I was able to go over to Vietnam with a map and

 

122

fortunately could go precisely where I wanted to go. I was being escorted around by a
former VC soldier, now a retired Colonel in the Army-his last name is Thanhuwho was .
taking me to places and by and large he hit it. In a few cases he said "you're there." And I
looked around and said I know I'm not there. I would finally have to get the coordinates
out, and say this is where I want to go, here. And he would say, well, you're here and I

would say I know I'm there and I don't want to be there, I want to be here. And it helped.

 

 

That way I was able to find a couple of villages that I really had to find. ”in
A third thing happened in going to the archives that I should mention. This is 1

important in terms of your research. As far as I know you are the first researcher to have

gone back to find some of the primary stuff, including myself. I had never gone back to it

either. It seems to meithat that is an important thing for someone to do, to find the soil L

that literature grows out of. They do it with all other writers, visiting their haunts and
such. The Brontesunot just war writers--but all kinds of writers. [In the case of]
Hemingway, they visited Key West and Cuba and talked to people he knew. You wouldn't
write for example a history of a battle in a story without going to look at the ground of the
battle to get a feel for it. And for me, for my own purposes, I had forgotten as we all do a
great deal of my own history. And to recover some of that history, some of that ground,
see it freshly and see it anew, it invigorated me as a writer. It's like going back to your
backyard and seeing it again and it invigorates you in a funny way. It gives you courage
to go on and it brings new stories to mind--things you've forgotten. And it makes possible
another five years or ten years of writing for me in a lot of ways. So that is the third

purpose I didn't intend but that occurred anyway.

McNemey: One thing I found when I looked at the archival material was the name
Richard Cacciato, who arrived in country on 31 July, 1969, and assumed the duties of
battalion adjutant. How, if in any way, did this individual affect your character Cacciato in

Your novel, Going After Cacciato?

123

O'Brien: You sly devil [laughter]. The character of Cacciato did not affect the character
in the book at all. The real Cacciato, that is to say, did not affect the character, nothing
like him. All I did was I stole the name, the guy's name, the way you would steal the name
Smith if you liked it. Except there's a lot of Smiths and very few Cacciatos. i liked the
sound of his name. I remember the first time I saw it, I was out in the field and some
document had come in. I was the RTO [radio-telephone operator] for the company
commander and the document came to me and I saw the name printed and I said, "how
the hell do you pronounce this?" And I went catch-chee, cache-shee-ah, we were joking
about it. And then for some reason somebody said Cacciato-somebody who knew him,
and Ilaughed--what a firnny name. The name stuck partly because we laughed at it,
thinking this is not much of a soldier's name. It sounded like the guy should be cooking
spaghetti somewhere. And also because when I did learn the name I loved the way it
came off my tongue. Sort of like "catch." And I was already probably thinking that I
would be going back to the States if I survived and trying to write about this thing. Not
knowing whether it would be fiction or non-fiction or what--I was young. But the name
obviously stuck with me. You know the story that followed. There is no reason to retell
it now. But the real Cacciato discovered that I had used his name and assumed that I was
trying to portray him as a deserter running for Paris and [he] let me know in no uncertain
terms that he wasn't any flicking deserter. And he's right, he wasn't. He was a great guy.
A lot of officers in Vietnam I didn't care for a lot. They seemed firll of themselves and full
of their officerhood, career tracks. So this one guy I really admired a lot. He is a very
nice man and very firm but he still preserved his humanity in a situation that was tense. He
was an adjutant in a firebase, but this firebase was a real firebase, we weren't back in the
rear, even though it was back at our so-called "rear. It was a forward firebase. We got
attacked and mortared often. He was a good soldier. He later became a company

commander out in the field and acquitted himself well. And I want to make it clear that

 

 

124

the real Richard Cacciato is a terrific officer and all I did was swipe his name because of

the sound of it.

McNemey: Let's talk for a moment about the officers. We were talking yesterday about
how some ofiicers emphasized mission. Sidney Martin comes to mind in Cacciato and
maybe also Smith in If I Die. And there are other oflficers that probably have more of a
connection with the men, a Lieutenant Corson or Captain Johansen in If I Die, who
doesn't make the fellows go out, but allows them to report events fiom a safe haven. How
did you respond to the ofiicers over there and how did the soldiers make distinctions

among how these officers emphasized mission or men?

O'Brien: That's a good question and the answer isn't long, thank God. The enlisted men,
the common grunts, preferred an officer who put the emphasis of man over mission. That
is to say, if we were in a situation, a village let's say, and we discovered a bunch of
tunnels, we wanted an officer who would say, "Look, the mission here is to find weapons,
find the VC, and here are these tunnels" the mission would dictate let's go down in the
tunnels, find the weapons, find the VC if they are down there. Whereas an officer
emphasizing the men [that] man would say we shouldn't go down into those tunnels;
someone will die or could die. These things were heavily trapped and mined heavily.
They would say, "Let's just blow the damn things." That's an example I use often in my
work because it occurred on a regular basis. Almost a daily basis in Vietnam. That is,
there are tunnels everywhere, bunkers are everywhere. And if you were to search them all
pretty soon you'd have no men left because they would be all hitting mines. There would
be no men left to do the searching.
Now officers who we liked would make adjustments based on the situation. That

is to say, if there'd been a firefight and we'd seen a VC go down into a tunnel it would be

worth sending a man down because we knew there was something there. There is

 

 

 

 

125

something to get. Whereas if you don't know, it's just a tunnel and nothing has happened
and there it is, and the officer just says "Blow it. Let's not lose a man for no reason." For
me though, my intellect told me that hell, it was a war, you are supposed to win the war.
That's what the Army's objective is supposed to be and I understood intellectually why
some oflicers said let's just search. Let's follow the book, search these things. It's SOP
[standard operating procedure], we're supposed to do it. I understood why, Ijust didn't
like it. Just like I understand you are supposed to stop smoking. I don't like to stop
smoking. I'll do it anyway. Your intellect can know onething but your emotion can
prefer something else. The men preferred the "men" approach.
The officer I most remember emphasized mission over man. I wrote about him in
If I Die. I think I called him Daud. His real name is Julian Barnes. He died. He was a
black Colonel. He was our battalion commander, and he was killed on L2 Gator in an
attack one night in May [1969]. I think it was May 12 or so. You might have the records
of this attack. We were out in the field at the time and saw it from a few miles away, saw
the firebase all night long. I found the records myselfin the battalion [duty logs]. It was a
bad attack. Not just Barnes died, I think four others died, Americans. A lot of the
sappers. And I discovered in my trip back to Vietnam, in talking to some of the villagers
and to the VC, that this was a planned attack to kill that man alone. They knew where to
find him, where his bunker was, where his hootch was. Because he was such a good
officer. Because he emphasized mission so much. That is to say, he was an ass-kicking
officer. And we lost a lot of men in May, as you know, because of the things he was
making us do, but the VC lost a lot of people, too. And they didn't like it. I remember the
day he gave us a speech. We were in stand-down in Chu Lai for three days before going
on to Pinkville for an operation where many people died and were wounded. And I was
wounded myselfin this operation. Before going out on it, we all knew we were going to
Pinkville. We didn't want to go, we hated this place. We had heard about it from some

other soldiers who had been there. I hadn't been there yet. It was my first time going

 

 

126

there. And he came out and gave us this talk and said, "I'm Colonel Barnes, you guys are
going out to Pinkville. It's going to be bad. We are going to lose men. I know that in '

advance and I don't like it but I‘m going to sacrifice you. Some of you. guys are going to

die and be wounded. But I have to do it. And I know you don't like it and you probably

don't like me. I'm sorry, but you're in the Army and when you are in the Army, you have

to do things you don't like."

The guys sort of snorted at him during this speech and yet it was a hell of a good
speech. He was being honest in any case; he wasn't lying to us. I think we sort of
respected him while also hating him simultaneously. In some ways we hated him more
than we hated the VC, to be honest. When he died, we heard it in the night over the radio.
And that is the little episode where we sang "ding-dong, the wicked witch is dea " out in
the field. I started it. Other guys were-too dumb to know the right song to sing. I knew
the song to sing. I admit it's a horrible thing. I'm embarrassed by it now. I would
apologize to God, say I'm sony to him. And yet did it anyway, knowing it was a sinful,
evil thing to do. A man was dead and you shouldn't be celebrating anybody's death. At
the same time I felt, I may live now if the next Colonel isn't quite so gung-ho. That is a

long answer to your question but I had to get it said.

McNemey: There are several instances in The Things They Carried where you
intentionally fi'ustrate reader's comfort with distinguishing the seam between the real and
the invented. -For example, the "Notes" section to "Speaking of Courage." In an earlier
version of that story in The Massachusetts Review in 1976 Paul Berlin figures as the main
character instead of Norman Bowker and the whole incident of Kiowa and the shitfield is
omitted. Also, when Paul's father asks him in the earlier version what's wrong with telling
war stories, Paul responds, "Nothing, except I guess nobody wants to hear them. " Yet in

the revised story as it appears in The Things They Carried, you had the character tell a

 

127

war story. Did your conception of the war story change fiom that first telling to the later

one?

O'Brien: A couple of quick things. One is the main character in The Massachusetts
Review story is Paul Berlin but in the new one is me, not Norman Bowker. Norman
Bowker is the guy that died right. Second thing is that in the first version, in The
Massachusetts Review there is a war story told. It's not as lengthy, I think, but it's about
going into tunnels and almost winning the Silver Star. I had to change that for the novel
because I didn't want to repeat myself from Going After Cacciato, for one thing, but
beyond that I wanted to have an integrated novel in which an episode in one chapter, the
shitfield business with Kiowa, had a reprise or echo in this chapter so that the thing would
carry on throughout the novel. So that the shitfield wouldn't just be there once, it would
be there a few times in the book. Beyond that, I was kind of honest, when I talked in The
Things They Carried, about revising the thing. There were things in the first version I just
didn't like. The writing, about going down in the tunnels and so on, I didn't like the
writing of it. I thought I could improve on it. So that was another part of the revising
process. My notion of the war story itself didn't change much. It still hasn't. I pretty
much believe what I believed when I wrote If I Die. Which is that war stories don't carry
morals. You should keep them as close to the bone as possible without embroidery,
without much but the facts. But my notion of what's factual changed, not [the notion of
the war] story. I began to distrust facts more the older I got. Probably because I realized
I didn't know many of the facts of Vietnam and those I did remember I filtered through my
own memory. That is to say, I'd reworked them. Dialogue you forget, the things people
i say. You forget the sequence of events or the chronology of events. It evaporated very
quickly. What happened first, what happened second? You can't remember after a certain
period of time and hence how do you know it's factual? Again, the older I get the more

I'm convinced fact itself is a malleable liquid sort of thing. It changes form, it changes

128

shape, yet still for some reason is called fact even though it may well not be. Beyond that,
there is the whole question of what's true. One of the reasons I went to Vietnam was to
find out what really happened there. Yet, even going back and talking to the VC people
who were present and villagers who were around, there were all kinds of versions of what
happened in various places.’ The numbers of people killed, where everybody was, and
what transpired that day. I guess I decided to become a fiction writer so I wouldn't have
to obey the normal rules of fact and truth. You are allowed when you write fiction-~in
fact you have to--imagine and make up your own truths. You have to make them up.
You have to manufacture a system that is coherent and meaningful and moving without

having to wade through all these layers of competing versions of fact.

McNemey: That sounds a little bit like what you told Eric Schroeder one time. You said

you tell lies to get at the truth.

O'Brien: It is. It is often what you find yourself doing. They are noble lies. I've sort of
amended what I have said. The word lie has a sort of pejorative connotation to it that I
don't intend. I intend the word "lie" to mean that state which one knows is not true, but to
do it with a noble purpose. I'm stating things as if they were true knowing they are not.
That is, I know there was never any Kiowa yet I stated there was a Kiowa as if there were.
Nor was there any Jimmy Cross, nor did any of these events occur exactly as I render
them. I know they are not true. But that's what every fiction writer does. That's what
Mark Twain did when he wrote Hucklebeny Finn. He knew there was no real Huck Finn.
It's based on a person he knew, but he knew there was no raft, no Jim, no Duke, none of
the events happened, yet he presents it as if it happened. That's what every novel does.
That's why dialogue was invented. Little quotation marks make you believe for a moment
someone is really talking, when in fact nobody is really talking, and there is no character

who could talk. Because this character is just air. That is what fiction is all about. Make

 

129

readers believe something is happening even though you know it's not. It's done for a
purpose. You don't just do it willy-nilly. You do it for a purpose, which is to somehow
approximate emotion and approximate moral values at stake. You approximate the world

as it once was or could be without having to obey the rules of the historian.

McNemey: A little more on this issue of the war story. Could you explain how the war

 

story differs from stories in general? For instance, what effect do you intend the war story

to have upon the listener?

O'Brien: I think not only war stories but all stories are meant to put a reader in the shoes
of a storyteller or at least in the shoes of, if not the storyteller, then the characters in the
story, one of the two. It's almost always the purpose. That's why when you're sitting in a
bar and you say, "Gosh, I gotta' tell you this, something happened today. I was driving
down the street and I saw this clown come out a bar and the clown asked me for
directions." What you are trying to do to that person listening to the story is have that
listener imagine driving down the street and see a clown come out of a bar and whatever
transpires after that. That's why you tell the story, because of something that happened
that you need others to identify with. How would you feel if this happened to you? And
that's kind of what war stories do. They say, how would you feel if you suddenly were
drafted? How would you feel if you hated the war and thought it was wrong? What
would you do? What would you do if your best fiiend were to sink into the muck of a
shitfield and you felt responsible for it in some fimny way? If you turned a light on when
you knew it was against regs [regulations] to do it, and it was against common sense to do
it. How would you feel? Would you feel guilty? How would you feel if your daughter
asked, "Did you ever kill anyone?" All these things are ways of asking the reader to put

himself or herself in the shoes of the person telling the story or the characters in the story.

130

War stories have other fiinctions too, though. Among them is the moral firnction,
which again is not just for war stories, but all stories have at their heart I think an essential
moral function. Which isn't just to put yourself in my shoes but to go beyond that and put
yourself in my moral framework. If you believe what I believe how would you behave in
the world? What is the moral thing to do and not to do? This business of man over
mission is a good example. What would you do if you were a company commander and
you knew you had to try to win a war but also preserve your men? Sometimes these two
things compete. Sometimes you can't preserve your men and win a war. How are you
going to make the moral judgments? How are you going to solve this paradox? Well you
can't solve a paradox. It's insoluble. Still, how would you behave in the world?

I think fiction in general, and war stories in particular, serve a moral function not
to give you lessons, not to tell you how to act. But simply to present you with
philosophical problems and then ask you to try to adjudicate them in some way or another
when you know adjudications are never perfect. As you were telling me the other day, it's
an imperfect world, and we can't find perfect solutions in an imperfect world. And yet,
even in this imperfect world, we have to find proximate solutions. Not ever perfect, but

proximate, and that's the business of living and fiction tries to address that.

McNemey: You once said that William Cowling, from The Nuclear Age, is the only hero
you've ever created in your fiction. That was before The Things They carried and the
novel you're working on now due out in the fall. Ifyou still feel that way, might it in some
way be related to the way you have Cowling deal with courage and with cowardice and

the specific discoveries he makes dealing with things that he finds terrifying?

O'Brien: Yeah, and I still feel as I felt when I made that story and even in my new book
I've not created a hero. What is a hero? Well, a hero in my view has all kinds of

definitions. You have to define what you mean before you describe it. What I mean by

 

it“ -

 

 

131

hero is someone who behaves in such a way that corresponds with his or beliefs. That is
what I mean by heroism. That if you believe you should be doing a thing then you do it.’
It's a correspondence between a moral judgment and one's behavior in the world. So it's
not determined by any outside criteria; it's determined by the criteria that are inside one's
own psyche, by one's own conscience. Cowling is the only character I‘ve created who
behaves in the real world in a way that corresponds with the things he believes about the
world. That is, he believes that the Vietnam War is immoral and he doesn't go to it.
Instead, he runs from it. He believes the world is going to end, and not just in a literal
sense--apocalypse or nuclear war. That is only a metaphor for something much larger in
the book, which is the business that we are all going to die. The whole business of
mortality, human mortality. And not only human mortality but the mortality of the
universe which is talked about in the book in the psychiatrist sections. The sun is going to
flare up and roast the earth and then die out. If you believe in the big bang then you also
believe the corresponding idea, as most scientists now do in some form or another, that
the universe will collapse on itself again at some point. Or else, if it doesn't it will just
continue to expand to eternity and everything will dissolve. These are huge questions and
yet they are questions most of us aren't bothered by because they are so far in the fixture.
Our own deaths are in the fiiture. The end of the universe is millennia away. Most of us
don't worry about them because they are so far in the fiiture. But now and then in our
dreams and in our daydreams we do stop and say, "hey, I am going to die someday and
there are bombs out there than can blow up East Lansing in a second. The universe may
well collapse on itself. When we hit those moments of realization of the endingness of
things, ordinarily we just shut ofi‘ and make ourselves stop thinking about it or go to a bar
or eat our next meal. Cowling is the kind of person who can't shut himself ofl‘. In that
sense he is abnormal or the way a lot of obsessed characters in fiction have been
abnormal-«Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny--all kinds of characters. Lord Jim is

Obsessed by his own failures, and so on. When one creates characters in fiction one

132

usually goes for the extraordinary. You don't go for the common Joe on the street who
doesn't think about anything or care about anything. You ordinarily go for a character I
who cares in a magnified way about the world. That's what fiction writers do--they go for
the extraordinary that's offbeat. He is an amazing anomaly in the world, a person who
can't stop thinking about the question of mortality. The emptiness of things. And he acts
on his beliefs. As weird as his behaviors are, they are still courageous behaviors. The
firnny thing is that in literature, most people who behave as Cowling does end up defeated,
the way Ahab ends up defeated by the whale. He ends up dead. Heroism involves in a
funny way defeat. It ends up in self-defeat. It involves both things.

The way to survive in this world is not to be a hero. The way to survive is to act
in a kind of ordinary, not cowardly way, but a sort of forgetful way. The way an
insomniac in the middle of the night sort of forgets himself and sort of just breathes. That
is how most of us behave in the world. Heroes behave in an extraordinary yet self-

defeating fashion. That's what I think Cowling does.

McNemey: You once said you might rewrite Northern Lights. Then you did rewrite and

republish substantial portions of both Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried

O'Brien: And If I Die. I did a lot of revisions in that.

McNemey: and If I Die as well. Could you talk for a moment about your process of
revision. For example, you say in "How to Tell a True War Story" that one of the
characteristics of a true war story is that it must be continually retold. Is this emphasis on

reworking your fiction part of that idea of working toward the ultimate true war story?

133

O'Brien: That is a good question. It's hard to answer it, because there are layers of
answer. One layer is a simple layer. I revise often simply for writerly reasons. That is, I
make writerly kinds of mistakes. In Cacciato I remember I have a character say some
dialogue--"[blank]," he smiled. Well you can't smile words. You can't say "'Hello,' he
smiled." You don't smile words. So I think it was changed to "[blank] he said. He
smiled." or maybe I took out "He smiled" entirely. I can't remember how I fixed it. That
is one category of things. All kinds of things like that. They involve things like sound.
They involve things like cliche’. If things sound cliched in dialogue I try to make them less
cliche'd. In Cacciato, a lot of writerly things I changed had to do with the section in
Teheran when they are making their escape. They seemed to be too cartoonish. I wanted
a cartoon feel to this, some kind of dream-like feel to this escaping from this jail. I can't
find any solutions out of this. Berlin's imagination fails him in that jail and so he just
imagines this cartoonish escape. But the effect on the reader, at least on this reader--me--
is that it was too cartoonish. It could be toned down a bit and I spent a lot of time trying
to out, just to tone it down.

A second category of revision has to do with this business of the multiplicity of
truth, or the multiplicities of truth. That is, there are different versions to some of these
stories. "Speaking of Courage" is probably the most obvious. A version of going around
this lake. Here is one guy going around a lake in one story thinking abut this event. Here
is a different guy, but the same persona, going around a lake thinking of this story. Subtly
different things happen in these two versions, as you know from reading my work, and as
I know fiom writing the work I'm always up against conflicting possibilities. As you are
composing a world, making a world up, there are always alternatives. She could say this
or she could say that. He could do this or he could do that. The book could end this way
or it could end this way.

I've tended through these revisions to give alternative cuts on possibilities. I've

taken it to an extreme in my new book that is conring out in October. Essentially what I

134

have done is, the situation is that a woman is missing and no one knows what has
happened to her and no one will ever know. So I make up alternatives throughout the ‘
book. Maybe this happened to her, maybe that happened to her, in each separate chapter.
Maybe she drowned; maybe she got on a bus to go to Seattle; maybe she left her husband
for another man; maybe she got lost. Each one is a convincing little story, little
"Hypothesis" these chapters are called. Maybe she and her husband planned to run away
together because she and her husband couldn't stand the world as it was pressing in on
them anymore. All kinds of possibilities. So in this book it is taken to an extreme way.
I've actually built into one version all kinds of alternatives as to what might have
transpired. The reason I do this is not just as a game; it's because that's the way the world
is. That is to say, think of someone you knew when you were in high school. Where is
the person now? Maybe dead, maybe a stockbroker, maybe a mortician, maybe in jail,
maybe a lot of things. And you base the maybes on those few scraps of memory you have
from what you knew in high school about the person. And you make up little hypotheses.
Some seem more probable than others. But you remember the person was kind of morbid,
so that is the mortician. You remember the person who had stolen some candy when he
was six years old, hence the jail one. You build up these possibilities and if you were ever
to really discover what happened to that person maybe none of the possibilities you had
built up was what really occurred to the person. So there is that whole array of
possibilities that you haven't even considered.

And there is that whole business of that mortality thing. When people die, you
know, what happens to us? Where do we go? Do we go to heaven? Do we rot and that's
it? Is there life after death? There's no way we're going to know in the waking world.
We live our lives more than we know it in the world of hypothesis. Christians live by the
hypothesis--strict Christians--that we are going to heaven. The Hindus live by the
hypothesis that we are going to be reborn, by good acts we will come back at a higher and

higher plane. And each of these religions or philosophical systems is simply a hypothesis

135

about maybe this or maybe that. I guess if I wanted to phrase it, for me what echoes is the
phrase "maybe this or maybe that. " And we all live by these maybes much more than we
know. The world is not as certain as we pretend it is. I try to write fiction that takes this
"maybeness" into account. Maybe this, maybe that. Remember, in Cacciato the last line
of the book I think is "Maybe so, the lieutenant says." Maybe he is out there still. Maybe

he will make it but we will never know.

Calloway: In literature that is what we call an open text.

O'Brien: Oh, is that what that's called [laughs playfully].

Calloway: Open text, where it's open to multiple possibilities. Like in The French
Lieutenant’s Woman, John F owles does three different endings for the book. Or the

reader could create his own ending. Were you influenced by John F owles?

O'Brien: I've always loved John F owles' writing. Yeah. Just as an afterthought, he is
one of our most underrated writers I think. Not so much for that book, which I didn't like
as much as a book called The Ebony Tower. A book of short stories, long stories. But
yeah, Fowles also rewrote the ending of The Magus as you probably know. Not just the

ending but other parts as well.

Calloway: Yeah, he completely revised it.

O'Brien: And the thing is, he is open about it. A lot of other writers do it subtly and
slyly. You don't even know about it. They just slip their revisions into the next revision of
a paperback. Most scholars don't notice. Because you don't go back and ordinarily read a

book unless you announce you've done it as Fowles did. You don't know it's been done.

l36

Calloway: Louise Erdrich has recently done that too, with Love Medicine.
O'Brien: Did she really? I didn't know that.
Calloway: It's a new revised copy. A revised and expanded Love Medicine.

McNemey: You stated in an interview with Larry McCaffrey once that books can also

work as magic acts. In the story "The People We Marry" from your upcoming novel, the
character John Wade dabbles in magic as a hobby. And you state at one point that magic
was his life. Do you see a relationship between magic and writing? Do you see yourself

as a type of magician?

O'Brien: Yeah, I do. I was a magician as a kid. It was my hobby. A lot of lonely kids
who later become public in some way are magicians--were magicians. Among them Dick
Cavett, Johnny Carson, Orson Welles. All partly from a sense of isolation in their
childhood, and I was that way. Where you try to make up a better world than the world
you are living in through the power of manipulation of that which can't be manipulated
ordinarily. You can't usually make things vanish or appear out of nowhere. And yet if
you are a magician you can at least have the illusion of doing that. That has flowed I
suppose into my career as a writer in a lot of ways where I can make miracles happen in
my stories. I can make pe0ple wake up fiom the dead. Which I do in The Things They
Carried--they sit up and talk. Where the impossible can suddenly seem to be possible.
Again, it's not just a game, it's not just an act in the sense of a magic act. It has a serious
intent behind it. Which was to explore the world of make-believe and the world of the
human imagination. It's power. If we can imagine the dead sitting up and talking then in a

way the dead have just sat up and talked if you can imagine it.

137

If somebody dies you are close to--say a father or mother--and you are lying in bed
a week later and they are in the ground. It's two in the morning and you can't sleep and '
your dad's face comes to mind. You see him walking down the street and talking to you.
Partly as a memory, partly as something you are just sort of imagining happening. You
can see his face and you hear him laugh and talk. Those moments when you are imagining
that, he is with you. He is as alive, in a funny way, as he was before. He's not dead
exactly when you see him doing these things. If he were dead he would be lying in his
coffin. But he’s talking. What is animation and what is life ultimately? Really, what is it?
All kinds of philosophical issues. It's not quite as easy as we always think it is. When we
see movies we know things aren't real and yet they seem real. We watch the images going
on. There is a kind of happening with a reality to it that we just can't deny. When you are
reading a book, Huck Finn on the raft or Ahab chasing the whale or Cacciato going to
Paris, if the thing is vivid enough there is going to be a kind of "livingness" to it that is not
the same as the waking world we're in but like the waking world we're in. It's a kind of
aliveness. That's what I mean. That is part of a key phrase, "is a kind of." There are
kinds of things. There are kinds of being alive. There are kinds of immortality.
Shakespeare has a kind of immortality. He is not immortal; he is dust now. Yet when we
say he is immortal we are saying that because when we watch one of his plays or read it
we're living his thoughts anew. We are living for him. When those lines of dialogue are
spoken we are living his words. In a way living his thoughts again. It's not exactly the
same as the living Shakespeare speaking to us but it's like it. A kind of life. See what I'm

saying? It's like it, an approximation.

McNemey: Your books now are read in a lot of college courses. Cacciato, The Things
They Carried, and your other writings have received considerable critical attention. How

has your public activity as a writer affected your private activity as a writer?

138

O'Brien: Well, not at all. That is one of the peculiar things about me as a human being.
People who know me well comment on how I am able to isolate the problems and the
realities of the world and sit down. It is a fault; I’m not saying it's a virtue. There is
something about my personality where I can shut out the most traumatic, horrible things
that are occurring in my life‘ all around me. There are like bombs going off in the room
next door and I can still sit and write. I can do that with good things as well. I can have
wonderful things happening in the world next to me. Awards or meeting people on trips
and so on and utterly shut them out. When I left you guys last night I was in my own
world. I can just shut it off. There is something about my personality that can just do
that. It's not always good. So the answer is really--it probably doesn't sound true, but
sometimes the truth doesn't--that I can shut off everything and write. That is to say, when
I am praised it doesn't mean a thing to me. When I am trying to write a sentence, because
the sentence is so hard to write that you are not thinking, "Boy, I'm a good writer."
You're thinking, "God, I can't make this sentence go the right place. I can't make it sound
right. I can't give it a unique quality that makes it jump the way ll want to make my
sentences somehow seem alive. Sort of jump at you and be memorable." If you can't do it
you don't take solace in the fact that you have done it before. You're just lost in the
world of the sentence, the paragraph, and the story. You're utterly lost in it. It's like a
lead room I walk into and when that door closes I'm utterly alone and nothing that has
ever happened in the world means anything. So I don't even think of it. It's gone. I'm just
in a world of that page and words and the story I'm trying to tell. It's a fault. I wish I
could not be that way at times because I ignore the outside world and then it catches up
with me years later or months later or weeks later and I‘ve got to pay the price. The

fiiends that I've forgotten to call back. All the things that you forget to do.

McNemey: Tim, you were recently singled out in a Vietnam War literature journal for

your work, in the way that it was perceived as possibly anti-feminist. You have also had

139

to defend yourself at times from accusations in which you use the words of the
Vietnamese themselves, saying that you have not presented the Vietnamese perspective.‘
Does this type of attention bother you? Do you expect to make any overt

accommodations in answer to these?

O'Brien: Well, I'm making an accommodation by answering now. It bothers only insofar
as it would bother any human being that has something negative said about their person.
You don't want to have bad things said about you. It's like being called a shitball and
you'd prefer not being called a shitball if you don't think of yourself as one and even if you
do think of yourself as one you don't want to be called a shitball. To that extent it bothers
you. i

The question then becomes one of fairness. You have to ask yourself in a quiet
moment if the criticism valid or not. So if someone says, well, you're not answering my
letters and you're not acting like much of a fiiend, you look at your life and you have to
admit to yourself or to the person, well, I haven't been answering your letters and I haven't
been acting as much of a fiiend as I should be. If the criticism is valid you try to
acknowledge it and improve. And I think I do my best to be honest with myself even if I
don't improve. The fiiend thing, for example, and the letters. I'm not a very good letter-
writer and I don't treat my fiiends very well. But at least I acknowledge it. I don't get any
better at it but I acknowledge it. This one I'm not going to acknowledge in either case.
They are invalid criticisms.

We'll do the Vietnamese one first. I think because it is easier. I don't in my fiction
even pretend to present a Vietnamese viewpoint in my books except for one or two
occasions. One of them is Cacciato, when I present a character Li Van Hgoc who is a
fictitious guy, kind of a fable-like character, living down in the earth. I try to give a little
bit of the sense of what I imagine it would be like, in a grossly distorted, almost cartoonish

way, to be a Viet Cong or NVA soldier living in the earth. As they basically did. Having

140

said that though there was a man I killed in The Things They Carried. I try to imagine
what it would have been like to have been a scared, young VC draftee. Except for these
two occasions, I haven't. Why haven't I? Well, the reason I haven't is I don't know it. I
don't know the life of the VC and the life of the Vietnamese. I know only a smattering
about what Buddhism and Confircianism are. I know only a smattering of the culture. I
don't know the language at all. And I'm not going to deign to speak for people who can
speak very well for themselves.

I was recently in Vietnam, as you know, and talked this very issue with five or six
Vietnamese writers at a literary magazine I visited there. I said I and other American
writers have been criticized for not presenting your point of view enough. They laughed
and said well we don't present your point of view. It was obvious among us as writers
that you can't. They said to me and I said to them: you are capable of speaking for
yourself, and I am capable of speaking for myself. To don the mantle of another alien, in
almost all ways, culture and pretend to speak for that culture as if you knew it somehow
seems to me an incredible pride and hubris beyond even the most ordinary standards of
human humility.

I don't know the Vietnamese and don't want to write for them. They are capable
of writing for themselves and have done very well. Even though a lot of their stuff hasn't
been translated yet, they have a thriving literary community in Vietnam that is under
incredible pressure fiom the government. They are always being blackballed and so on but
nonetheless they are speaking for themselves.

The other issue is much more difficult. It is hard to talk about because things will
sound anti-feminist in their sound but which I think are utterly and absolutely feminist. In
fact I think I am much more a feminist than the so-called feminists criticizing me. From
‘ what I've heard—J haven't read their work to be honest--I've just been told about it. So

maybe I am wrong. But I'll try to respond a little bit.

141

There are certain facts in the world. One fact in the world we have to live with,
and like all facts there are layers of it, is that women don't serve in combat in western
societies, much. I think in some cases the Israeli women did. And so in my stories I don’t
have women soldiers walking around. Just as an environment, women are excluded. The
question then becomes what do you do when women are by nature excluded from
participation in events? What do you do with women? Which view do you take? And
what role do they play dramatically in the making of a work of art? If to place a woman in
a combat setting would be to violate the rules of credibility that rules verisimilitude--of
seeming verisimilitude--then you end up having to have characters talk about women.

There are a couple of 1ines--I'll just take a couple of examples--one is in If I Die
where a soldiers says "she's sort of pretty for a gook." Well, on the surface it seems like
an utterly misogynistic statement and a racist statement at that. Which it is. But my role
as a writer is not to make up a world that is better than it is. My role in part is to report
the world as it is. And that statement is a very delicate way of saying something that is
said in much stronger language and much more offensive language every day by men in a
war. It is like being criticized for obscenity for having my character say after being shot,
”Oh, poop, I've been shot!" instead of "Oh, shit!" It would be laughable. "Oh, poop, I‘ve
been shot." To have something like that would be ridiculous. And similarly you wouldn't
have soldiers talking about women or making comments that they wouldn't ordinarily
make in the real world. What I'm trying to say is that while I'm recording a thing I'm not
necessarily endorsing it. Dostoyevsky, when he writes about murder in Crime and
Punishment is not endorsing the acts of Raskolnikov. Instead he is, I think-J hope and I
trust--that his thoughts were to say: here are the complications and complications of a
man pretending he is superman. So when I have characters saying misogynistic things in
dialogue or making misogynistic declarations I am not endorsing them, I'm reporting them.

You don't blame the messenger for the news. That's one level of response.

 

 

142

Another level of response to the criticisms--I picked that example by the way--I
just looked at Cathey's chronology [of articles on O'Brien's work listed in a bibliography
compiled by Calloway] and one of the things was titled that, wasn't it? One of the
articles? I just now glanced at it. I think one of the titles of one of the articles was the

"gook thing." "She is Pretty for a Cook." Is that right?
Calloway: Yes.

O'Brien: That's why I picked that example. Let me just pause there. Ask me a more
specific question to respond to. What are some of the statements made about my work in

particular that would make it seem anti-feminist?

McNemey: For example, there is the business at the end of "How to Tell a True War
Story," where the woman comes up and says that she doesn't like war stories. And I guess
some critics have said that this implies that somehow women are not smart enough or not
intuitive enough to understand a war story, and as you were talking about yesterday, in
part the story "The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" is a kind of answer to that. To the
depiction of women which maybe presents them as less understanding or less in contact

with the emotional force of what's going on in these stories.

O'Brien: There are two levels of response to that. One is this: that I will submit as a
hypothesis that can be verified or disproved through scientific means that by and large
women in America don’t like war stories. That if you were to do a poll, and ask a cross-
section of women demographically selected statistically, "Would you read a war story?" or
"Would you prefer war stories to love stories, father stories, mother stories, son stories,"
that you are going to find the dominant statistical answer being, "Women don't like war

stories." It doesn't mean that they're not perspicacious. It doesn't mean that they are not

143

smart. It doesn't mean that they are not intuitive. All it means is that they don't like them.
They prefer not to read them. The question then becomes why. Why is it? And my
answer to that again is a cultural answer. It is that because women are excluded by law
fi'om serving in combat, and up until recently were really discriminated against from
serving in the armed forces in general. I think that they still are to some extent. There is
discrimination that still occurs but nevertheless there is an exclusion, a cultural exclusion,
which explains, I think, why women would prefer not to read about something with which
they cannot identify for cultural reasons. That is, in the culture they have been excluded
from a phenomenon, which is the phenomenon of combat. Beyond that, another reason
that women may not like war stories has to do with how war stories oftentimes are bad
stories. That is to say, they are full of cliché, blood, death, bullets, bombs, purposeless
stereotypes, oftentimes glorifying war. "All these are valid reasons not to like war stories.
They are perfectly valid. And so when I say at the end of that story, "ordinarily I don't like
war stories, this one I liked"--that's what the woman says at the end of that story, "this one
I liked"--it is supposed to be a backhanded compliment to that woman. This one she liked
because, I hope, it isn't stereotypical, isn't predictable, isn't melodramatic. It touches a
woman's spirit the same way it would touch a man's spirit. "This one I liked."

What I am criticizing is the culturally caused statistical propensity on the part of
women to not give war stories the same open-minded consideration that I would give to a
story about a feminist and a professor in a college. There can be good stories about
women and bad stories about women. Good stories about mothers and bad stories about
mothers. And if it is expected that I should be able to read Madame Bovary, a book about
a woman written by a man, I can expect that a woman would some day write a war story
as good as any I could write through acts of the imagination and acts of cultural
identification through acts of socialization. The essence of the first level of response is

a cultural answer. That is to say, I am criticizing a culture, not women. I am just

r44

criticizing the culture that has unfairly excluded women from the responsibility of taking
part in a social phenomenon.

There is another level to it that is a little more angry. And that level is it seems to
me that women are going to have to acknowledge that men are being treated unfairly.
And women I don't think have thought about it much. I think women by and large in
western society take it for granted that they don't have to serve in combat and it's not even
thought about much. It's just a given. It's as if God had somehow granted a divine right
to women: You don't have to die in combat. You don't have to go through this horror.
Well, God didn't do it, man did it. Law did it. Tradition did it. Culture did it. It seems to
me that excluding women fiom combat is a clear violation of the equal protection clause
of the Fourteenth Amendment to our Constitution. We should all be treated fairly. Why
not only draft blacks, or only draft Albanians, or only draft Italians? There would be a
revolution in this country in any of those cases.

That story is meant to call attention to a fundamental inequity in my opinion. Half
of our population is excluded from the horror of serving in combat. And I wanted to call
attention to that fact because I think it has caused a lot of difficulties in our history.

The third thing I want to say is that I think there is an unsubstantiated belief that
gender determines bellicosity. I wonder if that is true or not. Again, based on people like
Lizzie Borden or Catherine the Great, I can't say that women are absolutely and utterly
non-violent creatures. It seems to me to be a kind of denigration of women to try to
contend such a thing. To say "we are not capable of belligerence, we're not capable of
anger. We're not capable of this." It seems to me to denigrate women to say such a thing.
These so-called feminists who somehow say "we are the nurturers; we are the lovers; we
are the child-bearers of the world; we are endowed with a God—given goodness that men
are not endowed with" is to violate a firndamental humanity about women. That women
are somehow not capable of things men are capable of when in fact I think they are. I

think history, and my own experience and the experience basically of the human race is

145

that women know what sin is, know what evil is. Have participated in it themselves in
their own ways. I guess I am trying to rebel against a stereotype. That one would think a
feminist would be applauding me for. One would think a feminist would be saying "you
are right! " That our gender doesn't make us less than human. Those are the layers of
response I have. What I am curious about is what have I missed? What have I

overlooked in my response?

McNemey: In the story "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," you envision the possibility
of a woman in combat. Of a woman in Vietnam who goes there, and there is a sort of
very "heart of darkness" quality to what she undergoes once she is there. And as I
understand it, and as you have explained it in the last couple of days, to a certain degree
that story is a working hypothesis of exactly what you are talking about. That women just
as much as men under the right conditions, or really under the worst conditions is what we

mean, can experience the same reduction of the soul or the reduction of the self.

O'Brien: Yeah, that's essentially what seems to me an utterly feminist story. It seems to
me to be saying in part if women were to serve in combat they would be experiencing
precisely what I am, the same conflicts, the same paradoxes, the same terrors, the same
guilts, the same seductions of the soul. They would be going to the same dark side of the
human hemisphere, the dark side of the moon, the dark side of their own psyches. It
seems to me that the story is a fable in a firnny way. That it's meant to make explicit that
which I though was implicit all along in my own writing.

I remember a character named Sarkin Aung Wan who is in Cacciato, who is a
figment of Paul Berlin's imagination. I would guess that if I were to read this literature,
I'm going to find some feminist writing about this character incorrectly. I haven't read the
stuff but I would say she might be brought up as an example somehow of O'Brien's view

of women. She to me is an extraordinarily strong character. In fact, she might be the

146

second example of a hero. Maybe she is a second hero. She is a woman who is fleeing
with her aunts from horror and from terror, acting on her convictions. She is made up by
Paul Berlin. She is sort of a made-up character within a made-up character within a made-
up book. Nonetheless, she is an aspect of Paul Berlin's personality. Within the Paris
Peace Talks table scene she' speaks for part of Paul Berlin's personality, speaks for the
good part, I think. Saying, you've walked this far in your imagination, why don't you keep
walking out of this war? Why don't you be brave? Why don't you walk away from the
horror of this war the way Cacciato did and the way I'm urging you to? Let's live in peace
and civility. She is the guide away from that war for Paul Berlin. She is this made-up
guide. She gets him out of trouble when they are down in Li Van Hgoc's tunnel. That is,
she is the guide out of that horror. She has a tenacity of spirit. she has a strength of
endurance that belies her fragility as she is described physically. So I imagine some female
critic of mine has probably written that she has found the language describing her
physically offensive. But what I think they have overlooked is, despite her physical
characteristics-~which are youthful, like that her age is sometimes twelve, sometimes
twenty--she is not sure. Nonetheless she has an abiding obstinacy of purpose and an
abiding strength of both physical and spiritual that is meant to represent part of Paul
Berlin’s own personality. That which would act bravely, that which would flee fi'om war,
that which would do something difficult. So, in that character, which is written, I don't
know, twenty years ago, a long time ago, I try to place a woman in a situation of
incredible stress and terror and have her act nobly and well. In the character of Mary
Anne [Bell], she doesn't act so nobly or well. She acts as others would act. She's seduced
by it. But the capabilities of one woman, to act just as men, sometimes respond this way,

other times this way, is to show that so .too can women [succumb to violence].

McNemey: Northern Lights and The Nuclear Age over the years haven't received quite

the same attention as your novels which are very Vietnam specific or Vietnam-oriented.

 

147

What these share in common, among their concern for issues of courage and cowardice
and so on is that they are both set in the Midwest. The ending to If I Die also takes the ‘
reader over the farmlands of Minnesota as your plane comes back in to home. What
significance does locale play in these instances and what are your feelings now towards
those small towns which created such a strong gravity in you and in your decision to go to

Vretnam?

O'Brien: My feelings are always ambivalent. The way we all look at our hometowns if
we are sane. I see virtue in the Midwest. But I also see horror. I see a kind of grotesque
horror. The same kind of horror probably that Flannery O'Connor saw in Georgia and the
South: I see lines side by side like parallel railroad tracks. I see one track through the
Midwest of independence of spirit, belief in the human individual, almost the inviolable
sanctity of the human individual. As virtue is. But the line next to that track is a peculiar
sort of in-grown smugness. I want to say this as delicately as I can, it's hard to do. A kind
of smugness with respect to personal virtue. A kind of smugness that takes delight in
ignorance in a firnny way. Those high-falutin' Eastemers, those crass Westerners. Those
redneck Southerners. A kind of delight in ignorance.

I wrote in several places--I'll try to get Vietnam specific now--about how the
pe0ple in my hometown didn't know Bao Dai fiom the man in the moon, is one little
phrase I use. Didn't know the first thing about French colonialism. And it's true. They
didn't and probably to this day don't, by and large. If you were to give a quiz, "Name
three prominent Vietnamese figures during the last forty years," I'd say that most people in
my hometown would not be able to come up with more than say one. Which would be Ho
Chi Minh. That would probably be it. They would scratch their heads and say, "Who was
that president of South Vietnam? Who was that guy I wanted to have my son die for
again?" I'm not sure they would remember Khanh or Ky or Thieu or Diem. I doubt they

would. In fact I know they wouldn't. It's not a doubt. And yet these are the guys who

 

148

personified a South Vietnam that they would want to send their sons to die for. Well, that
kind of smugness and that kind of delight in their own ignorance. They don't want to
know. They think, "Fuck, I don't care about that." It made me very angry. And you can
tell now that I am just barely controlling my anger. When I go home to this day--I go
home once a year to play in.a golf tournament in my hometown-J go out to the golf
course and there are these people in their white shoes and polyester pants. Which to me
represents smugness;I don't have anything against polyester, but I have a lot against what
polyester represents in my imagination, which is an attitude of smugness. And now it's an
attitude of ignorance of the world and a delight in Worthington as the center of the
universe. And America as the center of the universe. Everything beyond that I don't have
to know about. My country right or wrong. Well, it got us into a lot of trouble in
Vietnam, that attitude. And it almost got me dead. I have struck back oftentimes at that
place. I recognize the virtues such as they are. But I'm glad I don't live there anymore. In
a way I never lived there. That's what I meant by that lonely feeling, that isolation feeling.
I always felt uncomfortable. You talk about ways to answer your question. This "maybe"
stuff we have been talking about and possibilities and layers of truth. I'm not the kind of

guy that's going to fit into Worthington. Truth [there] is just with a big "T."

McNemey: This last question is one I had really wanted my students to ask you
yesterday during the lecture. Can the non-participant understand the combat experience
through literature? In the same vein, can the non-participant convey the essential quality

of war or is there even such a thing as an essential quality of war?

O'Brien: No, there's not. War is everything. I mean, in one of the stories, I think in
"How to Tell a True War Story," I make a long list: war is adventure; war is holiness; war
is pity; war is longing; war is love; war is ghosts. I mean it is long. War is a multiplicity

of events. Maybe always but certainly now, for me, the environment of war is the

149

environment of life, magnified. That is, instead of mortality pressing on us twenty years
from now, the possibility of cancer, it is pressing on me now. It is the only real difference
[of war]. The stakes of living in a war, the stakes are enhanced only because of the
awareness of the proximity of death. That is to say, I'm almost dead. With every step I
take in a war as opposed to'fifty steps to the day I get cancer or have a first heart attack.
We are all living in a war. It's just that the wolf isn't quite at the door. The wolf is sort of
baying in the woods, in the lives we live in the ordinary world. The wolf is out there
baying but it's a ways away. Whereas in a war the wolf is right at the door scratching and
the door is unlocked and partly open and you're trying to keep it closed but that's the war.
The enemy is right there; death is right there. But nonetheless it is right there, we just
don't recognize it, with every puff of the cancer stick and in every sip of coffee and in
every breath we take of the air, we are one breath closer to the grave. I hope that my
work will ultimately have its effect not in understanding war with a small "w" but the big
war of living. That the stakes are always high. We are always almost dead in our lives we
just don't know it. The problems and dilemmas that are presented in a war setting are
essentially the problems and dilemmas of living itself. It's hard to be brave in the world.
The ordinary world. It's hard to know what bravery is in the ordinary world. It's hard to
know what rectitude is in the ordinary world because we are often put into situations of
paradox much as this oflicer I mentioned-—man and mission. In the daily world you are in
these situations constantly. Of trying to adjudicate that which is ultimately insoluble. I
love her [but I also] love her. What should I do? I love them both. You can't do both.
Who are you going to live with? Who are you going to marry? Who are you going to be
faithful to? That is just one example which should hit home to women, men, Martians,
Albanians. It should be specific to nothing except to humanity itself. Those paradoxes
which war presents with the wolf at the door therefore become so important and make

your nerves jangle, are there all the time. I hope that when my books are read they'll

150

reverberate for those reasons, for those who have never experienced war and never will,
but experienced a different war, the war of life itself.

I should say just as a factual addendum that I receive a lot of letters about my
work. I would say--I haven't counted so the numbers are not going to be accurate--but I
would say that at least 80%. of the letters I receive are fi'om women. Maybe more. My
instinct is to say 90% because I think that's right but I'll be conservative. In any case, the
letters are from the mothers of soldiers who served in Vietnam and Desert Storm and
other wars. They are from sisters. People married to these guys. Saying essentially all
the same thing, "Thank you for writing this book because now I feel something in terms of
identification, and in terms of participation that I didn't feel before. My husband can't talk
about. it, but now I sort of understand why he doesn't, why he can't." There is a joy that
you get through receiving that kind of a letter as opposed to a letter from a vet saying I
read your book and thank you for writing it. It echoed my experience. I don't have to
echo his experience. He knows what his experience was. He's been there. It's nice to
have an echo but he doesn't need it the same way that a child of nineteen needs it before
trying to make up his mind or her mind whether to join the Army. Or the citizen needs
when it comes time to enter the booth to vote. Or that a woman needs to be able to give
comfort or counsel to a husband suffering or a child trying to decide whether to join the
Army or not. That we all need in our lives.

What I'm trying to say is the joy I get is probably the same joy Conrad got when he
would get letters from people who weren't sailors. Saying, God, you know, thank you for
that experience of going through that typhoon. Now I've had an experience I couldn't
have otherwise, without being able to read Conrad's art. That is the joy. The joy is not
the joy of touching veterans or touching people who have lived what you have lived. The
joy is just the opposite. Maybe that's what hurts me when I hear that articles are being
written by women saying I am anti-feminist. The whole creative joy is to touch the hearts

of people whose hearts otherwise wouldn't be touched. That's why it hurts I guess to have

151

these things saying I am antifeminist. It hurts me badly because the purpose of art is to
touch the human heart in its solidarity and solidity. It has very little to do with the

differences among us but has a lot to do with the similarities we share.

Calloway: You mentioned yesterday that you don't want to write another novel.

O'Brien: Right.

Calloway: What kinds of future writing projects do you have in mind?

O'Brien: What I want to do is write short stories. There are two things about a novel.
One is that it takes so much out of your life. How many years do I have left? I am 47 and
let's say I live to 80. Well I haven't got a lot of years left. For a novel on average it takes
me five to eight years, somewhere in there. Give or take. They used to take less but now
they're taking that long. That's not many more books. And I don't want to have to be able
to concentrate for the rest of my life on just three more people, main characters, or groups
of characters. I'm aware of the limits of my life now as we all are when we get older. I
would prefer to be able to do fifty stories about different facts of the world as opposed to

just three or four more books which is all I would be able to finish.

Calloway: But you turn so many of your short stories into books.

O'Brien: Yeah, but this time I can let the reader turn them into books if they want to.

You know what I mean.

Calloway: A big, open text. Yeah.

O'E
so 1
yet

l0

152

O'Brien: A hugely open text! But there is also the business of gratification. There are
so few gratifications that come to the writer. And to have to wait eight years to receive.
your gratification of a book coming out is too long to wait now for me. I need to be able
to feel that I am accomplishing things in the world. Say if you were a lawyer and you
were just stuck on one case- forever and ever. You'd feel you weren't accomplishing much.
You are just stuck in it. So I'm pretty sure. You should never trust what a writer says
about his goals for the future because they are so fluid. Given the way I feel now I can't
imagine writing another book. And if I can't imagine it, as I said earlier, the odds are very
slim that I'll do it. I have to be able to imagine a thing before I can do it. Before I could.
I could imagine writing this book I'm writing now. I could imagine the hardships; I could
imagine the joys. Now I can't imagine that. What I can imagine instead is writing stories.

Maybe forty pages, fifty page stories. But still just stories.

 

Works Cited &
Selected Bibliography of Reference Material

xWorks Cited

WorkabLQ'Brien (arranged alphabetically)
Going After Cacciato. New York: Delta/Seymour Lawrence, 1989 [New Delta Edition].

If] Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. New York: Delta/Seymour
Lawrence, [September] 1989. First Delta edition.

-—-. New York: Laurel, [July] 1983. Third Laurel-Leaf printing.

--. New York: Delacorte P/Seymour Lawrence, 1973. First printing.

"Loon Point." Esquire (1993): 91-94.

Northern Lights. New York: Delacorte/ Seymour Lawrence, 1975.

The Nuclear Age. London: William Collins, 1986 (lst edition, 1985).

"The People We Marry." The Atlantic Monthly 269.1 (1992): 90-98.

The Things They Carried New York: Penguin Books, 1991. (First published in
hardback in Boston: Houghton Mifflin/ Seymour Lawrence,l990).

"Speaking of Courage." Granta 29 (1989): 135-54.

--. Santa Barbara, CA: Neville Publishing, 1980. [Limited edition of three hundred
copies signed by author].

--. The Massachusetts Review 17.2 (1976): 243-53.

"The Violent Vet." Esquire 92 (1979): 96-97, 99-100, 103-O4.

"We've Adjusted Too Well." The Wounded Generation: America After Vietnam. Ed.
A.D. Horne. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1981. 205-07.

I . . l I' 0313 . '

Blades, John. "War Stories." Chicago Tribune 27 April 1990 (Tempo) 5: 1-2.

Johnson, Jeff. "'Vietnam Made Me a Writer': An Interview With Tim O'Brien."
Minnesota Monthly (1990): 40-41.

Kaplan, Steven. "An Interview with Tim O'Brien," The Missouri Review 14.3 (1991):
95-108.

McCaffrey, Larry. "Interview with Tim O'Brien." Chicago Review 33.2 (1982): 129-49.
Rpt. in Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists.
Ed. Thomas Leclair and Larry McCaffrey. Urbana: Univ of Illinois P, 1983. 262-78.

Naparsteck, Martin. "An Interview with Tim O'Brien." Contemporary Literature 32.1
(1991): 1-11.

Shostak, Debra and Daniel Boume. "Artful Dodge Interviews Tim O'Brien." Artful
Dodge 17 (1991): 74-90.

E' llllI l'Il'ICl l “3.:
Broyles, William, Jr. Brothers in Arms: A Journey fiorn War to Peace. New York:

Alfred A. Knopf, 1986. .

Caputo, Philip. A Rumor of War. New York: Ballantine Books, 1977.

Greene, Graham. The Quiet American. New York: Penguin Books, 1973. (First edition
1955)

Hasford, Gustav. The Short-Timers. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.

Heinemann, Larry. Paco's Story. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986.

Herr, Michael. Dispatches. 1978. New York: Discus (Avon), 1980.

153

154

Mason, Bobbie Ann. In Country. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children 's Crusade; A Duty Dance with
Death. 1968. New York: Laurel [Dell], 1991.

Wright, Stephen. Meditations in Green. New York: Scribners' Sons, 1983.

Culinalflatkionflflrien (includes works with significant sections on O'Brien's work)

Bates, Milton J. "Tim O'Brien's Myth of Courage." Modern Fiction Studies 33.2 (1987):
263-79.

Beidler, Philip D. American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam. Athens: The
Univ of Georgia P, 1982.

--. Re-writing America: Vietnam Authors in Their Generation. Athens: The Univ of
Georgia P, 1991.

Bowie, David [Colonel]. "Reconciling Vietnam: Tim O'Brien's Narrative Journey."
Unpublished paper presented at The United States and Viet Nam: From
War to Peace, a conference at the University of Notre Dame, 2-4 Dec. 1993.

Busby, Mark. "Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato: Finding the End of the Vision."
CC TE Proceedings 47 (1982): 63-69.

Calloway, Catherine. "'How to Tell a True War Story': Metafiction in The Things They
Carried. " Forthcoming article, Critique (1994).

--. "Pluralities of Vision: Going After Cacciato and Tim O'Brien's Short Fiction."
Gilman and Smith 213-24.

Couser, G. Thomas. "Goung After Cacciato: The Romance and the Real War. " Journal
of Narrative Technique 13.1 (1983): 1-10.

Gerard, Philip. "The Author Reinvents Himself--The Fiction of Tim O'Brien." The World
and] 7 (1992): 537-47.

Gilman, Owen and Lorrie Smith, eds. America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on
Literature and Film of the Vietnam War. New York: Garland Publishing, 1990.

Griffith, James. "A Walk Through History: Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato." War,
Literature, and the Arts 3.1 (1991): 1-34.

Hellmann, John. American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam. New York: Columbia UP,
1986.

Herzog, Tobey C. "Going After Cacciato: The Author-Soldier-Character Seeking
Control." Critique 24.2 (1983): 89-96.

-. Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost. New York: Routledge, 1992. .

J akaitis, John M. "Two Versions of an Unfinished War: Dispatches and Going After
Cacciato." Cultural Critique 3 (1986): 191-210.

Jones, Dale W. "The Vietnams of Michael Herr and Tim O'Brien: Tales of Disintegration
and Integration." Canadian Review of American Studies 13.3 (1982): 309-20.

Kaplan, Steven. Understanding Tim O'Brien. Unpub. manuscript of full-length study in
progress. 1994.

--. "The Undying Uncertainty of the Narrator in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. "
Critique 35.1 (1993): 43-52.

McWilliams, Dean. "Time in O'Brien's Going After Cacciato. " Critique 29.4 (1988):
245-60.

155

Melling, Philip H. Vietnam in American Literature. Boston: Twayne, 1990.

Myers, Thomas. Walking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam. New York: Oxford
UP, 1988.

Palmer, William J. "The Literature and Films of the Vietnam War." Forgotten Warriors:
Combat Art from Vietnam. Ed. Dennis L. Noble. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992.
169-85. Appendix.

Raymond, Michael W. "Imagined Responses to Vietnam: Tim O'Brien's Going After

Cacciato. " Critique 24.2 (1984): 97-104.

Saltzman, Arthur M. "The Betrayal of the Imagination: Paul Brodeur's The Stunt Man
and Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato." Critique 22.1 (1980): 32-38.

Taylor, Gordon 0. "Cacciato's Grassy Hill." Genre 21 (1988): 393-407.

Wilkie, Everett C. "Tim O'Brien." DLB Yearbook 1980. Detroit: Gale Research Co.,
1981. 286-90.

3 11:” 111° . ICE 1.. l:
Appy, Christian G. Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam.

Chapel Hill: The Univ of North Carolina P, 1993.

Baky, John S. "Literary Resources of the Vietnam War." War, Literature, and the Arts
5.1 (1993): 15-24.

Bates, Milton J. "Men, Women, and Vietnam." Gilman and Smith 27-63.

Beidler, Philip D. "Re-Writing America: America as Cultural Revision in the New

Vietnam War Fiction." Gilman and Smith 3-9.

Boettcher, Thomas D. Vietnam: The Valor and the Sorrow. Boston: Little, Brown and
Co., 1985.

Bonn, Maria S. "The Lust of the Eye: Michael Herr, Gloria Emerson and the Art of
Observation." Papers on Literature and Language 29.] (1993): 28-48.

Broyles, William, Jr. "The Ghosts of Vietnam." Newsweek 73.7 (1994): 30-32.

--. "Why Men Love War." Esquire 102.5 (1984): 55-56, 58, 61-62, 65.

Bush, George W. In Ann Devroy and Guy Gigliotta. "Bush to 'Move Fast' on Mideast
Peace." The Washington Post 2 Mar. 91, natl. ed.: A13.

Butko, Robert Nicholas. "American Vietnam War Fiction: The Combat Survivor's
Search for Integration." Diss. Catholic U of Amcrica, 1992.

Casciato, Arthur D. "Teaching the Literature of the Vietnam War." Review 9: I 98 7.
Ed. James O. Hoge and James L.W. West III. Charlottesville: Univ of Virginia P,
1987.

Christie, N. Bradley. "Reconciling with Our Work: The State of Vietnam Literary
Studies." Unpublished paper presented at The United States and Viet Nam: From
War to Peace, a conference at the University of Notre Dame, 2-4 Dec. 1993.

Ehrhart, W. D. In the Shadow of Vietnam: Essays, 1977-1991. Jefferson (NC) and
London: McFarland & Co., 1991.

--. "On Michael Herr's Dispatches. " Ehrhart (1991) 4-7.

--. "Who's Responsible?" Viet Nam Generation: A Journal of Recent History and

Contemporary Issues 4.1-2 (1992): 95-100.
--. "Why Teach Vietnam?" Social Education 52.] (1988): 25-26.

156

Elting, John R., Dan Cragg and Ernest Deal, eds. A Dictionary of Soldier Talk. New
York: Scribners, 1984.

Epstein, Renee. "Talking Dirty: Memories of War and the Vietnam Novel."
The Massachusetts Review (1993): 457-80.

Franklin, Karen. "Vietnam 101: The Lessons of the War Have Reached America's
Classrooms." Veteran (June 1988): 20-22.

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford UP, 1975.

Hemingway, Ernest. Introduction. Men at War. Ed. Ernest Hemingway. New York:
Berkley Medallion, 1963. lst ed. New York: Crown, 1942.

Jason, Philip K, ed. Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature.
Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1991.

Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History; The First Complete Account of Vietnam at War.
New York: Penguin, 1983.

Kroll, Barry M. Teaching Hearts and Minds: College Students Reflect on the Vietnam
War in Literature. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992.

Lomperis, Timothy J. "Reading the Wind": The Literature of the Vietnam War.
Durham: Duke UP, 1987.

McInemey, Peter. "'Straight' and 'Secret' History in Vietnam War Literature."
Contemporary Literature 22.2 (1981): 187-204.

Myers, Thomas. "Dispatches from Ghost Country: the Vietnam Veteran in Recent
American Fiction. Genre 21 (1988): 409-28.

Nathanson, Stephen. "Patriotism, Military Service, and Unjust Wars." Patriotism,
Morality, andPeace. Lanham (MD): Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 1993. 133-47.

Scott, Wilbur J. "Writing and the Vietnam Experience: Where is the Line Between
Nonfiction and Fiction?" Unpublished paper presented at The United States and Viet
Nam: From War to Peace, a conference at the University of Notre Dame, 2-4 Dec.
1993.

Spark, Alasdair. "A Statute of Limitations: Recent Writings on the Vietnam War. "
Journal of American Studies 27.] (1993): 93 -98. Review essay.

Stewart, Matthew. "Realism, Verisimilitude, and the Depiction of Vietnam Veterans in In
Country. " Jason 166-179.

--."Style in Dispatches: Heteroglossia and Michael Ben’s Break with Conventional
Journalism." Gilman and Smith 189-204.

--. "Stephen Wright's Style in Meditations in Green." Critique 34.2 (1993): 126-36.

Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. New
York: Methuen, 1984.

Whillock, David E. "The Fictive American Vietnam War Film: A Filrnography." In
Gilman and Smith 303-312.

White, Hayden. "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality." Critical
Inquiry 7 (1980): 5-27.

SelectedBoQkRexiews
Chow, Dan. Rev. of The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. Locus: The Newspaper
of the Science Fiction Field 26 (1991): 35.

157

Freedman, Richard. "A Separate Peace." Review of Going After Cacciato. New York
Times Book Review 83, 12 February 1978: l, 21.

Pochoda, Elizabeth. Review of Going After Cacciato. Nation 228 ( 1978): 344.

Streitfeld, David. "Getting the Word Out." Washington Post Book World 19 May 1991:
15. '

Warga, Wayne. "Will Hollywood Be Going After O'Brien's Cacciato?" Los Angeles
Times (Calendar) 25 November 1979: 3.

Selected Bibliography of Reference Material

The following materials are not cited directly within the thesis, but contribute substantively
to either the accumulation of bibliographic materials, historical information (i.e.,
particularly with regard to locating specific records on O'Brien's Army unit), or suggested

improved methods in conducting literary research.

Baky, John S. "Literary resources of the Vietnam War." War, Literature, and the Arts
5.1 (1993): 15-24. ‘

Calloway, Catherine. "Tim O'Brien: A Checklist." Bulletin of Bibliography 48.] (1991):
6-11.

--. "Tim O'Brien: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography." Bulletin of Bibliography
50.1 ( 1993): 223-29.

--. "Vietnam War Literature and Film: A Bibliography of Secondary Sources." Bulletin
of Bibliography 43.3 (1986): 149-58.

Hamer, James L. Literary Research Guide: A Guide to Reference Sources for the Study
of Literatures in English and Related Topics. New York: Modern Language Asso.,
1989.

Jason, Philip K. The Vietnam War in Literature: An Annotated Bibliography of
Criticism. Englewood Cliffs: Salem P, 1992. Magill Bibliographies.

Lepper, Gary. Vietnam War Literature: The Gary Lepper Collection. Berkeley:
Serendipity Books, 1989.

Lopez, Ken. Vietnam War Literature: A Catalogue. Hadley (MA): Ken Lopez, 1990.

--. Vietnam War Literature: A Supplement (Including the Best 25 Vietnam War Books).
Hadley (MA): Bookseller, 1991.

Newman, John and Ann Hilfinger. Vietnam War Literature: An Annotated Bibliography
of Imaginative Works About Americans Fighting in Vietnam. Metuchen: Scarecrow
P, 1988. Rev. ed.

Si gler, David Burns. Vietnam Battle Chronology: US. Army and Marine Combat
Operations 1965-73. Jefferson (NC): McFarland & Co., 1992.

Spector, Ronald H. "'In the Nam' and 'Back in the World': American and Vietnamese
Sources on the Vietnam War." Journal of American History 75.1 (1988): 209-14.

--. Researching the Vietnam Experience. Washington, DC: Analysis Branch, US.
Army Center of Military History, 1984. [Historical Analysis Series]

Stanton, Shelby L., ed. Vietnam Order of Battle. Washington, DC: US. News Books,
1981.

Wittman, Sandra M. Writing About Vietnam: A Bibliography of the Literature of the
Vietnam Conflict. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1989.

158

"lllllllllllllllll“