MoBoReMo 3: The Things They Carried
Nov. 27th, 2009 07:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alyson_mThe Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien
1990
Anyone with a passing familiarity with Tim O'Brien's work knows that the author is a Vietnam vet who frequently revisits his war experiences in his writing. This piece starts with the title, literally enumerating the things, both tangible and intangible but mostly of the material, measurable type, that the combatants carry around. This could be incredibly dull in a less nuanced writer's hands, but the literalness of listing all those items, and their respective weights, gives the piece its initial grounding in the quotidian reality of the soldiers' lives. I didn't bother with the arithmetic--I'm almost afraid to break out the calculator and tally up the sheer poundage pressing on any particular combatant's back on a given day. It's the kind of weight where the author will list the ounces of each item, because when you're talking about that kind of weight, every ounce counts. The litany of concrete things, ounces and pounds makes its point to such an extent that the "weight of the world on his shoulders" cliche doesn't need to be voiced and might not even be relevant. The immediate picture it paints is no less valid for its literalness: a picture of young men in varying degrees of innocence and cynicism, carrying untold tens of pounds of armor, weapons, ammo, tools, rations and other supplies around on their persons in all weather, over all kinds of terrain, in the execution of a war they didn't start and in most cases had no choice but to fight.
It's interesting that O'Brien starts out with the poundage involved in carrying out--pun acknowledged but not intended--the quotidian business of war in intersubjective reality, because the real substance of the book is about the inherent shortcomings of the intersubjective. It is ultimately a collection of post-war stories that form not a memoir but rather a meditation on the substance of truth. He describes several scenarios to illustrate the distinction between what is a true story and what really happened, using a variant of post-modern logic which is arguably applicable only to warfare, but the most striking example, in my mind, is the tale of how he once killed a young man for only the most thinly defensible reasons. He describes what the body looked like after the grenade struck, he describes the young man's life, using information which I'm fairly sure O'Brien pulled out of thin air, he describes how his friend Kiowa tells him not to worry about it, and he attempts to explain what led him to throw the grenade, though not exactly in that order and not without some repetition which is wholly unnecessary for anything except rhetorical effect. Then later on he says he didn't actually kill the guy, but he's responsible for the death in the sense that he was there at the scene and was complicit in the killing. By that point, O'Brien has put so much prose into meditating on what's true in war and what actually happens, that I'm honestly not sure which version of that incident is the verifiable truth. As in: did O'Brien actually lob that grenade, with the intention of killing the dainty young man on the path, or was he just one of the GIs on the scene at the time? After reading that far into the book, I really don't know which version of the story is the "true story that didn't happen," and which is the one that a journalist could report in good conscience.
All this is not a complaint about the approach that the author takes to this type of storytelling. I think I get the point he's making. The distinction isn't about promoting post-modern reality-building, it's about the effects of war on psychology and behavior. It's about the conflicting pulls of guilt and terror, independent of actual events. It is true that O'Brien feels guilty for his complicity in the dainty young man's death, regardless of his direct action, and it is also true that he didn't have the luxury of thinking over his actions and making a rational decision, regardless of how the guy ended up with a grenade popping a hole in his neck. Decades later, when his daughter asks him if he ever killed anyone, he's not lying when he says he could say yes, or no, and either would be true.
Tim O'Brien
1990
Anyone with a passing familiarity with Tim O'Brien's work knows that the author is a Vietnam vet who frequently revisits his war experiences in his writing. This piece starts with the title, literally enumerating the things, both tangible and intangible but mostly of the material, measurable type, that the combatants carry around. This could be incredibly dull in a less nuanced writer's hands, but the literalness of listing all those items, and their respective weights, gives the piece its initial grounding in the quotidian reality of the soldiers' lives. I didn't bother with the arithmetic--I'm almost afraid to break out the calculator and tally up the sheer poundage pressing on any particular combatant's back on a given day. It's the kind of weight where the author will list the ounces of each item, because when you're talking about that kind of weight, every ounce counts. The litany of concrete things, ounces and pounds makes its point to such an extent that the "weight of the world on his shoulders" cliche doesn't need to be voiced and might not even be relevant. The immediate picture it paints is no less valid for its literalness: a picture of young men in varying degrees of innocence and cynicism, carrying untold tens of pounds of armor, weapons, ammo, tools, rations and other supplies around on their persons in all weather, over all kinds of terrain, in the execution of a war they didn't start and in most cases had no choice but to fight.
It's interesting that O'Brien starts out with the poundage involved in carrying out--pun acknowledged but not intended--the quotidian business of war in intersubjective reality, because the real substance of the book is about the inherent shortcomings of the intersubjective. It is ultimately a collection of post-war stories that form not a memoir but rather a meditation on the substance of truth. He describes several scenarios to illustrate the distinction between what is a true story and what really happened, using a variant of post-modern logic which is arguably applicable only to warfare, but the most striking example, in my mind, is the tale of how he once killed a young man for only the most thinly defensible reasons. He describes what the body looked like after the grenade struck, he describes the young man's life, using information which I'm fairly sure O'Brien pulled out of thin air, he describes how his friend Kiowa tells him not to worry about it, and he attempts to explain what led him to throw the grenade, though not exactly in that order and not without some repetition which is wholly unnecessary for anything except rhetorical effect. Then later on he says he didn't actually kill the guy, but he's responsible for the death in the sense that he was there at the scene and was complicit in the killing. By that point, O'Brien has put so much prose into meditating on what's true in war and what actually happens, that I'm honestly not sure which version of that incident is the verifiable truth. As in: did O'Brien actually lob that grenade, with the intention of killing the dainty young man on the path, or was he just one of the GIs on the scene at the time? After reading that far into the book, I really don't know which version of the story is the "true story that didn't happen," and which is the one that a journalist could report in good conscience.
All this is not a complaint about the approach that the author takes to this type of storytelling. I think I get the point he's making. The distinction isn't about promoting post-modern reality-building, it's about the effects of war on psychology and behavior. It's about the conflicting pulls of guilt and terror, independent of actual events. It is true that O'Brien feels guilty for his complicity in the dainty young man's death, regardless of his direct action, and it is also true that he didn't have the luxury of thinking over his actions and making a rational decision, regardless of how the guy ended up with a grenade popping a hole in his neck. Decades later, when his daughter asks him if he ever killed anyone, he's not lying when he says he could say yes, or no, and either would be true.
