1B: Tim O'Brien (b. October 1, 1946)

O'Brien in Vietnam.  Photographer and date unknown.

For information about Tim O'Brien see his webpage. and the one maintained by Texas State University, where he teaches. Here is an interview O'Brien had with PBS American Experience in 2009 about his time in Vietnam, and a profile of him in Ploughshares. A timeline of the Vietnam War can be found here.

Soldiers are dreamers.

 -- Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)

 poet, writer and soldier for Britain during World War I

Sassoon's words serve as O'Brien's epigraph to his National Book Award-winning novel, Going After Cacciato (1978). The character Cacciato is a soldier-dreamer, who goes AWOL from his post for a journey that takes him from Indochina, across Asia to Paris. Cacciato is Italian for "caught" or "hunted."

How to Tell a True War Story

a selection from The Things They Carried

by Tim O'Brien

Selections from the story appear below.

This is true.

I had a buddy in Vietnam. His name was Bob Kiley but everybody called him Rat.

A friend of his gets killed, so about a week later Rat sits down and writes a letter to the

guy’s sister. Rat tells her what a great brother she had, how strack the guy was, a number one pal

and comrade. A real soldier’s soldier, Rat says. Then he tells a few stories to make the point, how

her brother would always volunteer for stuff nobody else would volunteer for in a million years,

dangerous stuff, like doing recon or going out on these really badass night patrols. Stainless steel

balls, Rat tells her. The guy was a little crazy, for sure, but crazy in a good way, a real daredevil,

because he liked the challenge of it, he liked testing himself, just man against gook. A great,

great guy, Rat says.

. . . .

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest

models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they 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 that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been

made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.

. . . .

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. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. When a guy dies, like 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.

In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. It’s a
question of credibility. Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t because the normal
stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness.

In other cases you can’t even tell a true war story. Sometimes it’s just beyond telling.

. . . .

You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end. Not then, not ever.

. . . .

In a true war story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth. You
can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in
the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe “Oh.”
True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis.

For example: War is hell. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true, and
yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can’t believe it with my stomach. Nothing turns
inside.

It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.

. . . .

How do you generalize?

War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and
adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love.
War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you
dead.

The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in
truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat.
You stare out at tracer rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons. You crouch
in ambush as a cool, impassive moon rises over the nighttime paddies. You admire the fluid
symmetries of troops on the move, the harmonies of sound and shape and proportion, the great
sheets of metal-fire streaming down from a gunship, the illumination rounds, the white
phosphorous, the purply black glow of napalm, the rocket’s red glare. It’s not pretty, exactly. It’s
astonishing. It fills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer
forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the
aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference—a powerful, implacable beauty—and a true war
story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly.

To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true.

Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any
soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding
proximity to life. After a fire fight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees
are alive. The grass, the soil—everything. All around you things are purely living, and you
among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin
awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become
by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency.
You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a
kind of largeness to it; a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when
you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love
what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your
foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and
although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things
and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder
and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world
could be and always should be, but now is not.

. . . .

In the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about the special way that
dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the
mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s
about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.

to read all of the story click here.

TIM O'BRIEN: How To Tell A True War Story

"The Vietnam in Me"
The New York Times, October 2, 1994
by Tim O'Brien

Z GATOR, VIETNAM, FEBRUARY 1994 -- I'm home, but the house is gone. Not a sandbag, not a nail or a scrap of wire.

On Gator, we used to say, the wind doesn't blow, it sucks. Maybe that's what happened -- the wind sucked it all away. My life, my virtue.

In February 1969, 25 years ago, I arrived as a young, terrified pfc. on this lonely little hill in Quang Ngai Province. Back then, the place seemed huge and imposing and permanent. A forward firebase for the Fifth Battalion of the 46th Infantry, 198th Infantry Brigade, LZ Gator was home to 700 or 800 American soldiers, mostly grunts. I remember a tar helipad, a mess hall, a medical station, mortar and artillery emplacements, two volleyball courts, numerous barracks and offices and supply depots and machine shops and entertainment clubs. Gator was our castle. Not safe, exactly, but far preferable to the bush. No land mines here. No paddies bubbling with machine-gun fire.

Maybe once a month, for three or four days at a time, Alpha Company would return to Gator for stand-down, where we took our comforts behind a perimeter of bunkers and concertina wire. There were hot showers and hot meals, ice chests packed with beer, glossy pinup girls, big, black Sony tape decks booming "We gotta get out of this place" at decibels for the deaf. Thirty or 40 acres of almost-America. With a little weed and a lot of beer, we would spend the days of stand-down in flat-out celebration, purely alive, taking pleasure in our own biology, kidneys and livers and lungs and legs, all in their proper alignments. We could breathe here. We could feel our fists uncurl, the pressures approaching normal. The real war, it seemed, was in another solar system. By day, we'd fill sandbags or pull bunker guard. In the evenings, there were outdoor movies and sometimes live floor shows -- pretty Korean girls breaking our hearts in their spangled miniskirts and high leather boots -- then afterward we'd troop back to the Alpha barracks for some letter writing or boozing or just a good night's sleep.

So much to remember. The time we filled a nasty lieutenant's canteen with mosquito repellent; the sounds of choppers and artillery fire; the slow dread that began building as word spread that in a day or two we'd be heading back to the bush. Pinkville, maybe. The Batangan Peninsula. Spooky, evil places where the land itself could kill you.

Now I stand in this patch of weeds, looking down on what used to be the old Alpha barracks. Amazing, really, what time can do. You'd think there would be something left, some faint imprint, but LZ (Landing Zone) Gator has been utterly and forever erased from the earth. Nothing here but ghosts and wind.

To read the remainder of this article click on this link.

O'Brien in Vietnam. Photographer and date unknown

Document: Tim O'Brien's Archive
by Sarah Funke Butler
Paris Review, October 30, 2013

The Professional, edited by Tim O'Brien, October 11, 1969.
 Reproduced by permission of Tim O'Brien, courtesy the Harry Ransom Center.

O'Brien's handwritten passage of  If I Day In the Combat Zone

Tim O’Brien was drafted into the U.S. Army and sent to Vietnam on April 5, 1969, to serve with the Third Platoon, Company A, Fifth Battalion, Forty-Sixth Infantry Division. What he saw in battle has been so well documented that while reading his memoir I expected each page to be his last, anticipating the report of his own death. After eight months he secured a coveted rear job where his most onerous task was the preparation of The Professional, “a weekly authorized publication of the 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry, APO 96219,” of which he said this:

The newsletter was one of my assigned duties as battalion clerk, the job to which I was assigned after 8 months in the field with Alpha Company. By that point in my tour, as I discussed in some detail in If I Die… I was no longer doing infantry stuff, just the typical things you might expect of a clerk—typing letters and reports, filing paperwork, counting casualties, etc. (I despised the job, and I especially despised that ridiculous newsletter. But it beat getting shot dead.)

After the war O’Brien went for a graduate degree at Harvard, where he prepared his memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone. Not much draft material survives for that book, but we never doubt its veracity. In his archive, now ensconced at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, there are letters home, to his parents; there are photographs; there is a uniform; there are medals. There is a lot of material from the nineties as he tracked down fellow members of Alpha Company, and as he revisited Vietnam. And there are two copies of The Professional: October 11 and October 20, 1969. The first issue, two pages from which are reproduced here, includes illustrations, cartoons, Vietnamese-English vocabulary lists, stories, and news. It also prints a story by O’Brien entitled “Trick or Treat,” portions of which appear verbatim in If I Die.

The Professional is a remarkable survival, especially given the handful of specific objects O’Brien mentions in the memoir which have not surfaced: letters from a girl he loves, unrequitedly, who sends him a poem by Auden, and who tells him, he writes, that he “created her out of the mind. The mind, she said, can make wonderful changes in the real stuff.” A letter to his parents, asking for his passport and immunization card, as he considers the appeal of Europe over Vietnam. Escape plans he kept folded up in his wallet. A journal he began, “vaguely hoping it will never be read.” And, perhaps most interesting, two letters from his first army friend, Erik Hansen, transcribed into the book. None of these narrative prompts within If I Die appear to have survived.

Perhaps surprisingly, much more of the more fictional The Things They Carried is documented by material in the archive. Why surprising? He's prepared us to believe it's as true as it isn't. He writes that, “story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth,” and “But only to say another truth will I let the half-truths stand.” In the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story,” O’Brien writes that a “true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.” In the chapter “Notes,” he explains, “By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened … and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.” In “Good Form”: “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. Almost everything else is invented.”

And yet, it’s not, not from the opening line:

“First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl name Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey.” Tim O’Brien carried letters from a girl named Gayle, and carried them back to civilization, and preserved them for decades. He also saved a letter he wrote to her on October 17, 1968, but never mailed. In his youthful, tense, inconsistent hand, he is already conscious of the disconnect and unity between reality and his presentation of it:

The very form of the letters and words here (my penmanship is straight & jerky & kinda childlike) conveys wrong things now. Add to that the fact that the thoughts themselves, the substance I put down, is inaccurate to reality, and you have a real problem. … I can go over to Vietnam, set up shop, and try to keep bullets & shrapnel & blood off my body & hands; the other choice is desertion, pure and simple. No, just pure. Not so simple, if you think about it, and I admit that I have done that. All night after getting the news.

Martha of the first chapter, the reader eventually learns, was not Jimmy’s—or even O’Brien’s—first love. That place of honor was held by the nine-year-old Linda of the last chapter: his fourth-grade sweetheart who died of a brain tumor in the summer of 1956, before returning for the fifth grade. Linda, the book version of a girl named Lorna Lou Moeller with whom O’Brien had been in love at the age of nine, incites and dominates the book’s final chapter, “The Lives of the Dead,” which appeared on its own (as did several chapters of the book) in Esquire. After publication O’Brien received a five-page letter from Mrs. Moeller, who had read the chapter, recognized her daughter, and remembered the O’Brien boys. She sent O’Brien a dozen photos of Lorna Lou, and a clipping documenting the too short life of a girl who would occupy space in O’Brien’s consciousness throughout his teens and adulthood. Moeller recalls her daughter’s feelings for the O’Brien siblings, and recounts the course of her illness and death.

In “The Lives of the Dead” O’Brien had written, “It is now 1990. I’m forty-three years old, which would’ve seemed impossible to a fourth grader … And as a writer now, I want to save Linda’s life. Not her body—her life.” These thoughts dated back, though, to the late fifties: two stories, composed in high school, have been preserved, in which he grapples with Lorna Lou’s illness and inevitable death. In “Two Minutes,” composed on seven leaves of his father’s letterhead from the Equitable Life Assurance Society, he recounts his futile attempt to save “Nancy,” who killed herself because “I’d persuaded her—no forced her would be a better word—to come with me to New York from her Indiana farm.” He races home in his car, knowing she is at death’s door, hoping he’ll make it in time to save her. Another story, called “Tulips,” filling twenty-two leaves of letterhead, is about a girl named Linda and a boy named Tim. O’Brien writes in 1990 that he had, in his youth, “saved” Lorna Lou in his dreams, always seeing her alive, sometimes discussing her death with her. In one dream he asks her what it’s like to be dead. She responds, “I guess it’s like being inside a book that nobody’s reading.”

By the time O’Brien came to write The Things They Carried, he had experienced staggering death and loss as an adult, but his mind returned, still, to the nine-year-old girl:

And then it becomes 1990. I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now, still dreaming Linda alive in exactly the same way. She’s not the embodied Linda; she’s mostly made up, with a new identity and a new name … She was nine years old. I loved her and then she died. And yet right here, in the spell of memory and imagination, I can still see her as if through ice, as if I’m gazing into some other world a place where there are no brain tumors and no funeral homes, where there are no bodies at all.

He can also see his dead Company mates, Kiowa, Ted Lavender, Curt Lemon. “And sometimes I can ever see Timmy skating with Linda under the yellow floodlights. I’m young and happy I’ll never die.”

In response to my description of The Things They Carried as “(perhaps marginally) more fictional than If I Die,” O’Brien commented,

by any ordinary standard the vast bulk of TTTC is invented and is fiction. Even the Gayle/Martha material is almost entirely the product of my imagination, both in terms of its detail and in its rendering of events. The Lorna Lou/Linda stuff calls more heavily on actual events, yet 80 or 90 percent of the chapter is completely invented. As a novelist, I have ruthlessly (and joyously) sacrificed the so-called ‘real world’ for the sake of story.

What interests me, then, is the process by which O’Brien cast and shaped and finessed objects, facts, memories, and dreams into a compelling narrative. Working papers for this—though not for If I Die—proliferate in his archive. In addition to raw drafts of individual chapters and two annotated rounds of the complete manuscript, I saw page proofs, with O’Brien’s final autograph revisions throughout.

He put his hand to eighty-five pages, sometimes adding, dropping, or changing a word, other times, revising an entire speech or paragraph or striking through a line or series of lines. He seems to have had the most difficulty settling on text in “In the Field” and its complement, “Field Trip,” but the distribution of the balance of revisions is fairly even throughout the book.

Where we’ve all seen “Joint Chiefs of Staff,” he originally had “Bobby Kennedy.” The “orange glow of napalm” was originally black. Bad breath had been fever blisters, and before that, acne. An aluminum suitcase turned into a cardboard box, and then back, to “a metal suitcase.” A banyan tree became a palm tree. Was it “hot and steamy,” or, better, “cold and steamy?” High school had been college, and a “lacy red blouse” had originally been a pink T-shirt. More substantively, he deletes “I was a coward” and a discussion of gallantry, and rewrites a sentence about losing the Silver Star. Such examples convey the spirit of this final round of revision and show a fair sampling of the sort of changes that could be either alterations to enhance the story, or more simply reversions to accuracy (after all, if Faulkner was right, “memory believes before knowing remembers”).

O’Brien has played so much, and so successfully, with genre that I wonder that we bother to acknowledge some of the distinctions that seem so important to the publishing sales force and the bookstore buyers and the talk-show hosts. Does it make any kind of sense to separate If I Die from The Things They Carried and even Going After Cacciato in the bookstore? Clearly, someone thinks we as readers care. I’d argue strenuously that we should not. We should simply take a page out of one of O’Brien’s books: “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.”

Sarah Funke Butler is a literary archivist and agent at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, Inc.

Tim O'Brien Interviews

O'Brien with PBS NewsHour

O'Brien talked with Jeffrey Brown of the PBS NewsHour, on April 28, 2010, about 35 years since the Vietnam War ended, in which the United States lost about 52,000 lives.  It was also the 20th anniversary of The Things They Carried, a collection of linked short stories, has sold more than 2 million copies since its publication in 1990.

You can find the video and transcript of O"Brien's NewsHour interview here.   

Towards the end of the interview the NewsHour's Brown asks O'Brien about the high school students he had addressed earlier that day. Brown's question to O'Brien: "Twenty years later, what is it that you hope that they and others take from the book?"

O'Brien's response: "To move beyond platitude, to move beyond the mythology we carry about ourselves and our country, to move beyond the — sort of the notion, I suppose, that, through physical violence, we’re going — we can always accomplish what we want.

"Sometimes — sometimes, things like wars can do precisely the reverse of what you want with a policy. You can manufacture enemies, as I was telling the class, that a bullet can kill the enemy, but a bullet can also produce an enemy, depending on whom that bullet strikes.

"If it strikes some little boy, a 3-year-old, you have got a very angry mom and a very angry dad and a bunch of neighbors who are not happy. That isn’t to say I’m arguing against all war. And — but it is to say that I think young people, in particular, need to understand the complications and the ambiguities of these things, and to hear it from someone who has not only gone to a war, but devoted a lifetime to suffering from it."

O'Brien talks with the NEA for its "Big Read" of The Things They Carried, which was published in 1990.

O'Brien with War, Literature & the Arts: O'Brien has spoken often about the conundrum that writers and readers face when they examine a work of literature.  Out of this tension there is one goal, O'Brien claims when he is speaking with Brian C. McNerney in the journal War, Literature, & the Arts, Fall/Winter 1994.  O'Brien tells McNerney, "All stories are meant to put a reader into the shoes of a storyteller or at least into the shoes of, if not the storyteller, then the characters in the story."  O'Brien then adds, "Fiction in general, and war stories in particular, serve a moral function, but not to give you lesson, not to tell you how to act.  Rather, they present, they present you with philosophical problems, then ask you to try adjucate them in some way or another.  But it's an imperfect world, and we can't find perfect solutions in an imperfect world.  And yet, even in this imperfect world, we seek proximate solutions. That's the business of living, and fiction tries to address that." (10-11)

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin

Fellows Find: “How to Revise a True War Story”
by Alicia Dietrich

Tim O’Brien Becomes First Fiction Writer to Win Pritzker Award
by Abigail Cain