After Reading
Afterward to "Things They Carried"
The odd construction of this story – paragraphs on Jimmy Cross, interspersed with paragraphs on the things the men carried – somehow works. For me at least, this still reads like a story. One way O'Brien accomplishes this is by carefully integrating the story of Cross with the list of the things they carry. For instance, the story opens not with paragraph 2 – a list of things – but with the items that will come to be central in the plot of the story, Cross's photographs of Martha. The reader is first presented with a specific character, a specific situation, and even a bit of mystery – "They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping" (1263). Why was he hoping? Will his wish come true? Questions like these draw us in by working with our sympathies and our sense of wonder: we identify with the heart pangs of a lonely soldier in a far away land, and wonder why he would delude himself if he knows she doesn't love him. These questions are an essential part of the mystery of fiction, that desire to find out what happens which stems from our innate curiosity -- our desire to know.
The first paragraph is also important because it introduces the theme of imagination. Cross's delusions about Martha stem from his imagination, which acts as a doubled edged sword in the story. On the one hand, it makes Cross "a bit distracted" (1263), a dangerous state for a commander in a theatre of operations to be in. On the other hand, it offers him and his men a welcome respite from the rigors and terrors of war. Without it, they would lose those distinctive human capacities that help people retain their moral compass, their humanity. The problem was that the sheer physicality of war dulled the senses; as the narrator notes "the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility" (1270). Without the saving grace of imagination, a person could lose "human sensibility" and devolve into an animal state. Yet Cross ultimately deems it a burden that must be shed, a carryover from stateside that cannot survive the transition to the jungles of Vietnam. The narrator seems to feel this way as well. Standing over the edge of the tunnel Lee Strunk enters, the men wait and sweat, their fears taking over their minds. As the narrator notes in a telling yet offhand line: "Imagination was a killer" (1268).
But here the mystery deepens. Did it really kill Lavender? Would stricter field discipline have saved Lavender from the sniper's bullet? Probably not. By nature, war is chaotic, and in a guerilla war, no amount of preparation can save you from a random shot from a village or a rigged 105mm shell . Still, the danger of dreams (that hopeful and often delusionary use of imagination that sustains us) hovers over this story, both the danger to the heart (Cross's delusions make his heart-ache all the more wrenching) and to the body (Lavender's dope jumpstarted his own illusions) stress the negative aspect of imagination. As Cross tells himself at the end of the story: "No more fantasies" (1275).
Imagination is one of the things the men carried, and what they carry is, as the title suggests, the main focus of the story. The "things" are often an extension of their character, a kind of metonymic identification of thing with person. The characters are identified by what they carry. Cross – a romantic, a dreamer – carries the letters and pictures of a girl he is hopelessly infatuated with, spurred, in some strange way, by his unrequited love. He likes to slip into his fantasy whenever he can. And who can blame him? Twenty-two, surrounded by the horror of war and burdened with the responsibilities of leading the men, he retreats into the safety and beauty of the fantasies he can conjure from well-creased photos and well-worn letters. Lavender, "who was scared" (1264) escapes the war in a different, chemically induced fashion; he carried "six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity" (1264). These are the material things carried, but more important than the things are the intangibles, the "things" they carried in their minds. Cross, of course, carries love; Lavender, carries "unwieghed fear" (1266); and, in a symbiotic connection between material and immaterial, everyone carried "a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried" (1273). But the burden of the immaterial pressed down on their minds, becoming, in an odd sense, a physical presence. As the narrator notes towards the end of the story, "Grief, terror, love, longing – these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight" (1264). These intangibles slowly accrue weight in the story, becoming, by its end, perhaps the heavist load the men will carry.
Another "intangible" the men carried was their attitude, a way of facing the world. As the narrator notes, "they carried themselves with poise" (1272) In this sense, the verb "carry" is like a mask you put on, a defense mechanism, a way of hiding, or "pos[ing]" (1272) to be or feel something you cannot. With so many psychological burdens placed upon them, it's no wonder that Cross and the others sought the defense of a pose. As one critic notes, t he soldiers attempt mind games to exert control (Herzog 119). Thus their first line of defense against the outside world is the stance they take against it. By manipulating this stance, consciously creating a front line, the men exert their will against the environment that faces them, forming a barrier that protects them. The narrator calls them "actors" (1272), and their poses are simliar to the distance actors place between themselves the audience. Yet this pose is ultimately debilitating; actors aren't always on stage, yet in a war, you're always "on." For these men the stage lights never fade; there is no green room to unwind, to supply a safe transition between you and the real world.
Cross's pose involves "acting" like a leader when all he wants is to spend time with Martha. He reveals the extent of his acting at the end of the story when he thinks about the talk he wants to have with his men. He will take a new pose with them, "dispens[ing] with love; it was not now a factor" (1275). This applies to "his obligation" as a commander "not to be loved but to lead" (1275). Of course it also applies to his new-found attitude towards Martha and imagination. Read in this way, the story travels the typical trajectory of a modern story of initiation: like Sammy in "A&P," or Gimpel in "Gimpel the Fool," Cross learns something about himself and life in general through the central event in the story – the death of Lavender. What makes this story more modern – or should I say post-modern – is O'Brien's playing with the idea of storytelling. He lets us know the climax – the death of Lavender – early in the story, but it is really a red herring: the real climax is Cross's own reaction to the death. The reader sees the connection only implied by O'Brien: the death of Lavender equals the death of innocence/hope for Cross. It's the cross he'll have to bear for the rest of his life. This throws his compasion for Lavender into question: when he cries, are the tears for the death of Lavender, or his realization that Martha doesn't really love him?
The men see Cross's tears as a measure of his compassion for his men. Kiowa tells Bowker, "Say what you want, the man does care" (1271). On one level he's right, Cross does feel badly and does feel responsible for Lavender's death. But on a level that the men can never understand, his real pain, and the true cause of the tears, is this loss of innocence. O'Brien seems to be suggesting, as Updike did in "A&P," that we can never fully understand the causes or meanings of another's actions, be they walking out on a job, or a crying jag in a foxhole. This discrepancy between the pose and reality is subtly exposed by O'Brien through the shifting perspectives in the narrative. As the omniscient narrator shifts the focus from Cross to Kiowa, the readers see how one man's actions, when misinterpreted (as they usually are), can have wholly unintended effects. The narrator reports that "Lying there, Kiowa admired Lieutenant Jimmy Cross's capacity for grief. He wanted to share the man's pain, he wanted to care as Jimmy Cross cared" (1272). Did Kiowa care about Cross's lost innocence and his realization that Martha didn't really love him? I don't think so, and if he knew what was on his mind, his feelings towards Cross would probably shift from veneration to vexation. Yet as a character in a story, he is trapped by his own point of view; as readers, we see Cross's tears aren't entirely untainted by self-pity, just as we see Sammy's actions are not wholly selfless in "A&P."
Another way O'Brien explores point of view is in the various renditions of Lavender's death. We see it from a variety of angles and perspectives, from the narrator's initial offhand reference to his death in the second paragraph " . . . until he was shot in the head outside of the village of Than Khe. . ." (1264); his comrades' seeming nonchalance, sitting and "smoking the dead man's dope until the chopper came" (1266); Cross's overwhelming sense of guilt, "Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war" (1271). These different perspectives create a fuller picture of the variety of human experience, but it also distorts and masks perceptions. For instance, the narrator, by his constant repetition of the event in the narrative voice, suggests that something is unsaid; unlike the stoically neutral narrator of "The Lottery," Lavender's death seems to have effected the narrative voice in this story. Likewise, the repetition of the event by the soldiers show that they too are groping for an understanding of his death. Their actions, such as the burning Than Khe (1266), speak louder than their words. Cross's reactions, as shown earlier, also have the capability of distortion. This distortion is part of the defense mechanism the men use to maintain their sanity. O'Brien makes it clear that point of view can act as a shelter, another mask the men use to distance themselves from what is happening. Confronted with the inanity of the death, "Zapped while zipping" (1271), their only recourse is to retreat into the relative safety of their poses and filter the killing through their own points of view.
For me, the beauty of this story is the way O'Brien manages to juggle all these seeming conflicting ideas – the presentation of a grunt's life, the love story of Cross, the interweaving point of view – and maintain a narrative that has an inexorable pull. Like the Energizer Bunny, the story keeps going and going, and you follow it until you find out "what happened." No mean feat for a story that ranges so far afield and seems so disjointed at first.
What the author/critics say
"The Vietnam War affords a familiar moral and physical terrain that engenders inherent intensity, conflict, and genuine emotions. As a writer, therefore, he doesn't not have to work at creating these elements in a story but instead can explore deeper moral, political, and human issues that are timeless and not confined to the battlefield. The subject of war becomes a starting point for O'Brien's self-described quest for 'everness' and 'alwaysness' to his writing. Consequently, his broad themes relate to his ultimate goal of having his works contribute to 'understanding the war of the living' – individuals' daily struggles with issues of conscience, despair, deteriorating relationships, evil, temptation, moral dilemmas, self-discovery, and, of course, mortality. And at the heart of an O'Brien story is the mystery that is related to these characters, outcomes, and truths and that is ultimately shared by readers and the author. This underlying focus of O'Brien's writing is what Catherine Calloway labels a postmodernist interest in the 'problematic nature of reality, a process that engages both the protagonist and the reader'" (Herzog 24).
Afterward to "How to Tell a True War Story"
Truth and storytelling are locked in a weird, oxymoronic tango in this story. Even the title undercuts what it seems to be saying: how can the word "True" fit with "Story"? Isn't a story something made up? The difference lies in our perception of the truth – or in our desire to make the truth real. Definitions always help, and it's important to understand O'Brien's view of "truth." As I noted in the introduction, in the story "Good Form" he makes a distinction between "story truth" – which he feels most accurately conveys what occurs in any given situation – from the "happening truth" (203) – what seemed to have physically occurred. For O'Brien, what actually happened – the "happening truth" isn't necessarily the "truth." For him, fiction is often closer to fact: "I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why the story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth" ("Good Form" 203). And to an extent, he's right: most of history – what we consider "fact" – is really a story. Granted, it is a story rooted in the happening-truth, but as any historian worth her salt will tell you, history is based on conjecture: what you read is what the historian "want[s] you to feel."
Essentially, what O'Brien is doing is playing with the nature of reality, asking us to realize that the discrepancies between these two kinds of truth is the playground the story-teller revels in. Thus, learning to tell a "true" war story, paradoxically, involves making up details so the story becomes real for someone else. And isn't that what all artists do?
The Portrait of Dora Maar (1937)
No woman looks like "The Portrait of Dora Maar," but Picasso was interested in getting others to see perspective from his point of view – to transform the static, two dimensional world of the canvas into a three dimensional representation of the real world. To do so, he had to "lie" and show things not as they are, but as he sees them. He believed that only by distorting the visual truth could he fully represent the visual world.
In "How to Tell," O'Brien relates different anecdotes, some horrific, some beautiful, to convey his feelings and thoughts about the war. While he plays with this idea of truth, he seems to realize that his efforts are futile. For all his conjuring, for all his story-telling abilities, the "truth" – his truth – slips away. This conundrum is illustrated in at least two parts of the story. In one instance, Mitchell Sanders cannot convey the "truth" of his story about the patrol hearing the "rocks" sing. The narrator writes "I could tell how desperately Sanders wanted me to believe him, his frustration at not quite getting the details right, not quite pinning down the final and definitive truth" (83). At the end of the story, the narrator himself is confronted with the inability to communicate the truth. Frustrated with the reaction of one listener at a reading, he resignedly says, "All you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth" (91). Note, in particular, the last phrase – "making up . . . to get at the real truth." For O'Brien, fiction is a way of getting at the "truth;" it's his mode of conveying "reality."
On another level, the story deals with perspective. For instance, take the opening anecdote with the description of Rat Kiley's letter. What would you do if your brother was killed in a war and someone you've never even heard of sends you a long, rambling letter about how your sibling had "stainless steel balls," and went "trick-or-treating almost stark naked." And then, most frighteningly, the letter writer tells you that he will "look [you] up when the war's over" (75, 76)? I, for one, would probably move to another state and cancel all forwarding mail – after placing a restraining order on Kiley. The problem is that Rat's mind is locked in the jungles and rice patties of Vietnam and can only understand the world from a soldier's perspective. As the narrator notes, "In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself" (88). Since perspective – in its larger sense of point of view, context, and understanding – determines how we perceive the world, it's no wonder that truth itself is determined by it.
This is intimately connected to the nature of art. Since we are all locked in our own perspectives, we seldom fully "see" what happens. As O'Brien says "When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The 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 " (emphasis in original 78). Repetition is one way O'Brien tries to get at the truth. Here, as in "Things," the death of a soldier is examined several different times from subtly different angles, as if the mere repetition somehow makes it true. And how far is that from the truth? If you say something long enough, it becomes accepted as "fact." For instance, George Washington chopping down the cherry tree makes a great tale, but there is not a shred of historical evidence to support it. Historians now know that Mason Weems, in an 1806 edition of his bestseller The Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington , included this fictional incident to suggest Washington's inherent honesty. Yet because it represents what we think of as the "real" Washington, generations of school-children have eagerly gulped the lie down and hungrily asked for more (such as the Liberty Bell? The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere?). Apparently, when a lie is repeated enough times, it accrues the weight of truth. In a similar fashion, the narrator hopes that the recurring image of Lemon stepping from shade to disappearing in a burst of light will become, by its mere repetition, a version of the truth, and he will succeed in conveying his impression, his "feelings" about the incident.
But there is a reality at work in this story. The backdrop to the abrupt shift to violence -- the torture and killing of the baby water buffalo -- seems designed to reflect the reality of Vietnam, specifically, the My Lai massacre*, where a group of tired, hot, well armed American soldiers proceeded to kill over three hundred civilians. O'Brien was stationed in the area a little while after the massacre, and has explored the massacre in other contexts more directly in his fiction (especially in In the Lake of the Woods ). Here in "How to" he dwells on the capacity of ostensibly kind men (Rat is a medic and the story opens with him writing a letter) to inflict suffering, in this case, to assuage the loss of a friend. This sudden incursion of violence reminds readers that, for all of the philosophical dimensions to this tale, it is, after all, a "War Story."
Finally, let's address matters of genre. In "How to Tell a War Story" we're confronted, as in "Things," with a question of form. Is this a short story or an essay? On one level, it's an essay on truth in fiction. But here, as in "Things," the narrative thrust of the story is tied around a soldier's death and a comrade's reaction to it. In both cases, a letter provides the conflict as well. Yet both stories have some of the features of an essay as well – long descriptive interpolations or narrative intrusions that break up the actual story with kernels of fact or opinion. And just what is the story here? Is it, as the narrator notes at the end, "a love story" (emphasis in original 90)? That would make the Rat Kiley/Curt Lemon story the main thread. But is it love, or would it be just as appropriate to call it a ghost story: is Rat, like Cross, only bemoaning the loss of his friend, or is it the deeper, more hidden losses, the ghosts he'll always carry with him? What is the narrative thread that holds this story together? I would argue, as you could probably tell from the paragraphs above, that this is a story about telling stories. The love story is there to get you hooked, to engage our minds in that familiar pull of "what happens next." Or I could be completely wrong. An argument could be made that this is a love story, or a story about the beauty of war, or the savagery of war . . . . it all depends, as O'Brien would say, on your perspective.
Footnotes
* For a compelling overview of My Lai, see the follow page (note -- it's on a rather repellent site, but the material on the page I've linked is quite good). http://www.rotten.com/library/history/war-crimes/my-lai-massacre/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre
http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/mass/lai/index_1.html (long and detailed look at the event)
For a contemporary version of My Lai, see the following http://www.rotten.com/library/crime/prison/abu-ghraib/
What the author/critics say
O'Brien in an interview: "Time is scrambled in our memories and in our imaginations and in our dreams . . . . We don't remember events, most of us, always in chronological order" (qtd. in Herzog 22)
Herzog, Tobey, C. Tim O'Brien. Twayne's United States Authors Series No. 691. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997. Print.
"Beyond anything, I think, a writer is someone entranced by the power of language to create a magic show of the imagination, to make the dead sit up and talk, to shine light into the darkness of the great human mysteries" (O'Brien 177)
O'Brien, Tim. "The Magic Show." Writers on Writing. Ed. Robert Pack and Jay Parini. Hanover, New Hampshire: Middlebury College Press, 1991. 175-183. Print.
© 2000 David Bordelon