posted on 27 Jul 2018

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

Tim O’Brien, who saw active combat service in Vietnam, has written a full-length memoir of his time in the US military, a number of novels, and the 1990 collection of linked short stories The Things They Carried. Unusually, it is probably for these short stories that he his best known. Rereading them recently reminded me what a sophisticated book it is.

I’ll go out on a limb here and say that I think that the great literature of the Vietnam war is probably non-fiction rather than fiction. Michael Herr’s Dispatches comes to mind, as does Tobias Wolff’s In Pharaoh’s Army and Tim Page’s Page After Page. These titles are all memoirs or reportage or a combination of both. One might argue that they are to some extent new forms. I think a similar claim may also be made for Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried: it stands out – it has endured and will endure – because it isn’t conventional fiction; it seeks to subvert or extend the fiction form and in doing so comes very close to greatness.

O’Brien uses the short story form not just as a new medium, but perhaps also to new purpose. Yes, he uses it to tell stories of course, but he also uses it to reflect on the morality and truth of story-writing and especially of war stories; he uses it to question truth and accuracy; and perhaps most of all he uses it to probe his own scepticism and self-doubt regarding the possibility of redemptive story-telling – the idea that we “tell stories in order to save ourselves”.

While the stories are linked both in terms of action and characters – they all revolve around Alpha Company, O’Brien’s platoon – they are not conventional linear narratives. Some are fragmentary vignettes, while others are repeated, retold from a variety of perspectives, their inner truth – the accuracy of the narrator, say, or the interpretation of events – queried and re-examined. Twenty years separated the events described in these stories and their publication, and almost another thirty years has passed since that publication. And yet the anguish and self-doubt of those who were witnesses to and participants in the Vietnam war remain hotly alive in these stories. Their subject matter may now be increasingly remote, but O’Brien’s covert craft is compelling, as is what a New York Times reviewer has called the “intimate urgency” of his voice: “There is an Ancient Mariner quality to the narrator,” he wrote; “he needs you to listen to his tale, even if he remains uncertain of its import.”

Sometimes it feels as if the story form is being deconstructed even as you read it, your grasp on factual and moral certainty questioned. Not all of the stories work equally well. The best bring the terror and brutality of combat, the comradeship and loss, the stifling jungles and the foot-rotting paddy fields of Vietnam alive again in ways that feel new, probing and exciting; some of the weaker stories, however, have a feel of creative writing workshop about them.

But nonetheless, The Things They Carried belongs alongside the greatest literature that has come out of that awful war. The sometimes harsh unflinching judgements O’Brien makes never more shocking than when they are directed at himself – a twenty-year old soldier who ended up in Vietnam: “I survived,” he writes, “but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.” The real test of courage, he is suggesting, was not to fight.

Rooted in the lived experience of the Vietnam war these stories rise above any limitations of their time and historical subject matter. O’Brien’s austere unornamented prose, his restless self-doubt and his refusal to be placated belong to all ages, to all conflicts, to all situations that test – and perhaps even destroy – our moral resolve. It is probably safe to say that we will not see a better collection of short stories about the Vietnam war.

 

Alun Severn

July 2018