‘The things they carried’ in Tim O’Brien’s war novel

I first heard it from the late Franz Arcellana, quoting another author, that the writing of literature is an enterprise of remembrance. It’s easy to concede to that dictum, but I never realized its full significance until I got hold of The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. It’s a collection of stories culled from the author’s experiences as a foot soldier during the Vietnam War, beautifully constituted into a novel.

At one point in the book, O’Brien wrote that "telling stories can save us." Perhaps he was being modest about his vocation as a writer of literature: for me, the telling of stories is our salvation. We had been brought up to the truism that those who fail to remember the past are doomed to repeat it. Forgetfulness indeed, in most ways, spells the failures of the human species. But more than the writing of history, I figured that it is the sort of memory supplied by literature that makes the difference.

But what difference could another novel on the Vietnam War make? And after more than a decade into the post-Cold War years? No, I sighed heavily as I pulled the book from the bookstore shelf, not one more of those melodramatic American attempts to exorcise the ghosts of a war they lost. I was a martial law baby and so my movie-going life before 35 had been regularly intruded by Hollywood flicks calculated to convince the world of either the Americans’ distinct valor in trying to eliminate the Vietnamese people, or of their earnest breast-pounding, mea culpa. But then, one could never, literally, put a good book down. So after a short sampling through the pages, I went straight to the cashier.

Oh, it wasn’t just good. It was so good I don’t have to read any other book on the Vietnam War. Or to be even more precise: It is the one instructive book, if ever one has to read about wars.

The book is not written in the conventional manner of a novel with a tight plot lineally, logically pursuing a conclusion. Instead, it moves cyclically as stories are told and retold. This way, it mimics the workings of the human faculty of recollection. Remembrances come to us in fragments, random fashion. But then, the seemingly chaotic mix of recalled experiences would slowly gather into a sprawling tapestry, and you realize they speak to us of just a singular but compelling insight on life.

Thankfully, O’Brien‘s war vignettes are not situational illustrations of heroism, or of the proverbial "bringing out the best in us during the worst of times." Nor do they try to explain or justify the going to war, especially of America getting into the Vietnam War. Mercifully indeed that neither are the strains of the American anthem perceptible from between the lines, nor do the stars and stripes flash momentarily across as the reader blinks in between lines.

O’Brien’s stories of war are simply trying to grapple with the most basic aspect of life, and the most repulsive because it is its negation: death and dying. The wonder of it all is that the book manages through beautifully. I always thought that death is at once the easiest and most difficult to tackle in literature. Killing characters is the convenient trick of mediocre fiction writers in order to force readers to the intensity of their contrivances. The good ones would be busy spending their talents meditating on the infinite aspects that confront people in between the beginning and the termination of life. If a writer must tackle death itself, one will have a lot of proving to do. And O’Brien’s The Things They Carried carries well the most abhorrent thing to write about. Beautifully.

As one reads through the recurring stories, one gets the feeling of a cocoon spinning silk on the reverse direction, a getting-free from one’s own sapot. The novel is a circling, layered exercise in liberative meditation. The author, a survivor of war, came home alive but as dead as the worm in a cocoon. Telling the stories was his way to get out and be able to fly again.

If the writing of literature is the business of remembrance, the criterion of literary worth must be accuracy of recollection. But the accuracy of a recalled experience is not about the precision of the material dimension, but of insight. The insight however that we gain from literature does not come in a neat formulation of statement. It might contain intellectualized precepts. But it is one always conjured up by the juxtaposition of images, sights, sounds and tastes, by things people do, or by the things that bear weight on people; it is mostly a quality of feeling.

In the O’Brien book on war, the writer starts out with a story that makes an inventory of the things soldiers carry as they launch themselves off to the business of killing. Mimicking the human enterprise of remembrance, this book on Vietnam War’s recollection does not immediately involve the terrible but begins with the surface, the seemingly inconsequential, but nonetheless concrete aspect of people making war: the things they carry.

For the things you carry to war spell the difference about your state when you emerge from it. So in the opening story, the author rattles off an enumeration of the implements that one burdens one’s self with in order to effectively pursue the soldier’s goal: terminating the enemy’s life and warding off one’s death, both the physical and the psychic sort.

Pound for pound, O’Brien accounts for each and every gear, item or article, taking note of brands or types, allowing myriad variations depending upon each soldier’s idiosyncrasies. Manners of killing and avoiding death are highly variable according to individual circumstances. The inventory is done in a chilling, almost clinical coldness. And in the third person yet, as if an attempt itself by the author to deny his complication in the war’s life breaking and making exercise. But soon, the stories become first-person as O’Brien becomes more and more involved, and so the reader is absorbed into his swirling journey of remembrance as he tries to grapple with the senselessness of death.

Towards the middle of the book, O’Brien does the unexpected, his tour de force. He suddenly suspends the reader’s suspension of disbelief and talks about the craft of writing. At the point when one is already intimately engaged, the writer douses cold water on the reader. But more than just a trick of self-reflexivity, it is yet another dimension of O’Brien’s personal journey of remembrance: He takes account of himself as a former soldier writing about the war. He tells readers that the stories didn’t exactly happen as told, but that they remain no less accurate. He demonstrates his point by telling the way one story actually took place. But who cares about it anyway? One’s gut feeling is that the literary version is more accurate in terms of the saving quality of remembrance. So the book becomes some sort of an illustrative manual on how to write fiction.

The centerpiece story, the most compelling, of course, is worth mentioning here. One unremarkable day of the war, O’Brien’s platoon launches off to an operation in a village near the Song Tra Bong River. Reaching the place at night, they set up temporary quarters on an open field near the river banks. Then a heavy downpour assaults them. In no time at all, the river swells and the land they are on starts to turn into muck that reeks with shit. They realize it was a place where the Vietnamese folk relieve themselves, a common toilet al fresco. The flooding muck reaches up to their bellies but it’s too late to find another place. They are in deep shit. As indeed the war is deep shit. Then suddenly, enemy mortar fire starts battering them. As a round hits ground, it creates an enormous hot, steaming hole that noisily sucks up the muck. One soldier, the Bible-carrying soldier of the platoon, is sucked up into one such steaming hole of shit. The next day, the platoon wades around turning upside-down the field searching for the soldier who carried the Holy Book. They don’t find him.

The genius of a writer of fiction lies in the way reality and metaphor become one and the same. I have never come across a more appropriate symbolism of the Vietnam War. In O’Brien’s book, reality, metaphor and the act of writing fiction as remembrance, as a way to save oneself, all beautifully, seamlessly merge into one.