The Things They Carried is an ambitious collection of short stories about the Vietnam War. But that description, while wholly accurate, is completely inadequate. The stories penetrate deeply into the complexities of the phenomena of war to an extent that may be unparalleled, so affixing it with the label Vietnam War stories potentially obscures the many themes that are woven into the text.
What makes Tim OBriens book particularly powerful is the way he uses the prism of war to illuminate larger truths about life, death, and the power of storytelling. In fact, a convincing case can be made that the most prominent and important theme of the book is that artful storytelling can convey emotional truths inaccessible through a factual recounting. This theme is most clearly revealed in two of the stories: How to Tell a True War Story and Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong. Both express the point that storytelling is the central element in the mechanism that OBrien and the other soldiers in his unit employ to deal with the grim reality of seemingly pointless violence and death that constitutes their war experiences.
How to Tell a True War Story, is, by definition, an example of meta-fiction. The text is a self-conscious commentary on the mechanics of shaping stories and how those tales are re-shaped in the act of being told. A true war story is never moral (68) is the way OBrien begins his account of how to tell a war story. To further illustrate his point, he states As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil (69). Not only is he giving instructive advice as to how tell the story, he is also impliedly criticizing the traditional war stories that tend to play up the heroic aspects of war without delving deeper into the more mundane and horrifying realities that the ordinary soldiers experience. When OBrien tells us about the frustration that Rat Kiley feels when he writes a letter to Curt Lemons sister, bearing his soul to her about Curts death, we understand what he means when he says, Jesus Christ, man, I write this beautiful fuckin letter, l slave over it, and what happens? The dumb cooze never writes back. (69). Rat cant deal with his own sadness and grief over losing his friend Curt and so he deals with it by taking his anger out on Curts sister, someone whom he feels free to blame because she doesnt understand.
Understanding is a relative concept in war stories, according to OBrien. He writes:
In any war story, but especially a true one, its difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happenthe pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss 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. (71)
OBrien is explicitly confronting the difference between perception and reality. He chooses to place an emphasis on the subjective experience and the feeling for an emotional truth that is distinct from a recitation of the facts. Even if the pictures do get jumbled it doesnt matter because Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth (83). What matters are the feelings; the individual reactions of the soldiers during and after these events integrally and ultimately shape the reality of the event.
The personalized view of a war story is important to OBrien because of his strong opposition to over-generalizing about what war means to everyone. He aims to convey the ambiguity of war to the reader:
War has the feel --- the spiritual texture --- of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law in anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You cant tell where you are, or why youre there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity. (82)
This passage makes explicit that war complicates truth in the capital T sense of the word. The binaries of right and wrong, of true and false, are subverted to the point that the concepts, which are diametrically opposed in terms of logic, are rendered indistinguishable. The randomness of war destroys the ability of an individual to determine fact from fiction.
It is altogether fitting that shortly after OBrien explains the mechanics of telling a true war story he proceeds to tell one that illustrate the war story process. In Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong, Rat Kiley tells a fantastic story about his time in another company and how a soldier in that company, Mark Fossie, sends for his girlfriend to come join him in Vietnam. Mary Anne Bell arrives and becomes engulfed by the war to the point where she disappears into the woods never to be seen again. From the very beginning of Rats story, Mitchell Saunders is skeptical of the tale and keeps pushing Rat to tell the story with a greater fidelity to the facts. When Rat gets lost in one of his digressions, Mitchell Saunders says the whole tone, man, youre wrecking itthe sound. You need to get a consistent sound, like slow or fast, funny or sad. All these digressions, they just screw up your storys sound. Stick to what happened.(107) Mitchell Saunders now is augmenting the advice that OBrien has offered for telling stories, urging that the attitude of the narrator of the story remain constant throughout. It is only natural for a reader to wonder how one can tell a story in a consistent tone about war when there is a fog that clouds consistent feelings about life.
Mitchell Saunders further prods Rat Kiley to fulfill his part of the bargain by telling the story from beginning to end. When Rat seems as though he is going to abruptly end the story without a definitive conclusion, Mitchell will not abide and says, Jesus Christ, its against the rulesAgainst human nature. This elaborate story, you cant say, Hey, by the way, I dont know the ending. I mean, you got certain obligations.(112-13) Mitchell Saunders expresses views that seem in stark contrast to the way OBrien thinks war stories should be told. Unlike OBrien, who doesnt really think war stories have a conclusive end, Saunders feels that resolution is mandatory. Even if there doesnt appear to be any rules to the war they are fighting, Saunders, being a great storyteller himself, demands that the rules of good storytelling be superimposed on their war.
In his attempt to impose some type of order to this war story, Mitchell Saunders is merely a commentator. By contrast, Rat Kileys narrative follows OBriens notion that a true war story is rarely ever a story about war. Rats story is really an allegory for the experience that all these young men felt when they were shipped off to a foreign land at such a young age. OBrien puts it this way:
What happened to her, Rat said, was what happened to all of them. You come over clean and you get dirty and then afterward its never the same. A question of degree. Some make it intact, some dont make it all. For Mary Anne Bell, it seemed, Vietnam had the effect of a powerful drug(114)
Mary Anne is symbolic of all the young soldiers who start out innocent and All-American but turn to something else when stuck in the jungle too long. The drug-like effect that the war has is the fog of war - the hazy feeling that blurs right from wrong and truth from fiction. Whether or not there was a Mary Anne who came over and got lost in the jungle is most definitely beside the point because Rat and Mitchell and OBrien and the rest are that girl; they are the ones who came over clean and ended up dirtied by the horrors of war.
Ultimately, these two short stories do not merely tell us how to tell a true war story, they also tell us something important about the art of storytelling in general. While war stories may feature extremely heightened emotions reflecting the extraordinary conditions they are incubated in, they are not totally divorced from the ordinary feelings all people feel. Whether its missing a girlfriend, mourning the death of a close friend or taking stock of your loss of innocence, virtually everyone has these experiences in his or her own way. The emotional responses are universal if different in particularity and intensity. Perhaps that is why it doesnt matter whether these events actually happened or are true in the literal sense of the word. What matters is that the reader feels that these things could happen or should have happened.
OBrien has transcended his own deeply personal account of formative years in the Vietnam War by stories that transform the experiences so that any reader might come to understand some the realities without suffering the actual slings and arrows of the battlefield.
Works Cited
OBrien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Broadway Books: New York, 1998.
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