Everything and Nothing

If reading Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried with only a superficial eye you may find his continuous contradictions to be frustrating and awkward. You may think the admission that most of the content in his stories is not factual to be downright unnecessary. Unfortunately, reading this culmination of stories at that level will cost the reader an experience from which they could gain much insight and knowledge about a time in history and a swarm of veterans that our generation knows little about and lacks even the tiniest understanding of. This novel is as much about the general nature of being at war as it is about fear, love, bravery, and the psyche of the mind.

Fear's Weight

In the first story, The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien describes all of the objects his platoon carries with them each day. Some of these items were specific to their role for the platoon and others were of a more personal nature. They don’t just carry the weight of these material objects though. They carry fear and the weight of the unknown: the weight of their lives, their fellow soldiers’ lives, and the lives of the innocent people living in the villes they attack in the name of war.

Each soldier carried their fear differently. Henry Dobbins carried extra food rations and his girlfriend’s pantyhose around his neck. Dave Jensen was devoted to hygiene and carried soap, dental floss and toothbrush, perhaps trying to control the one thing he could: the health of his teeth. But Ted Lavendar carried something completely different; he carried tranquilizers and “six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity.”

On page 18 we read, “For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity. Now and then, however, there were times of panic, when they squealed or wanted to squeal but couldn’t, when they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons blindly and cringed and sobbed and begged for the noise to stop and went wild and made stupid promises to themselves and to God and to their mothers and fathers, hoping not to die.” After the shooting stopped the men would start to gather themselves emotionally “first in private, then in groups, becoming soldiers again.” Every moment of every day these men feared for their lives and the lives of their fellow soldiers.

Thinking about the fear and undying will to survive the war reminded me of a song by 3 Doors Down, It’s Not My Time. Some lyrics of this song seem to have a very literal fit to the idea of the soldiers being scared and wanting to believe it was not their time to die each time they encountered their enemy or the mines they left behind. It you think of the war as the current in the song and the infinite amount of fear  a soldier carries with them you can feel the strangulation of it.

But now the current's only pulling me down
It’s getting harder too breath
It won’t be too long and I will be going under
Can you save me from this?

Cause it’s not my time I'm not going
There's a fear in me it’s not showing
This could be the end of me
And everything I know

“This could be the end of me, and everything I know” paraphrases what I would imagine was on the mind of every soldier every day. 

 

More of the Same

 If you take a deeper look at this story you can see the monotony of their lives as soldiers. “If you weren’t humping, you were waiting. I remember the monotony. Digging foxholes. Slapping mosquitos. The sun and the heat and the endless paddies. Even in the deep bush, where you could die any number of ways, the war was nakedly and aggressively boring.”

Each day had a certain rhythm to it. They woke up, when on patrol or out on an ambush that had been ordered. Later in the evening they would settle in at designated coordinates radioed to them by a higher ranking official, pull out their letters and pictures of loved ones and stand guard in their foxholes. Sometimes the days and nights included the death of a fellow soldier but all of their days were basically the same. As an illustration of this idea that everything is the same even though it’s different I chose the song Blue on Black by Kenny Wayne Shepherd.

I chose this song for a couple of reasons. If you listen to the rhythm of the guitar you notice a methodic riff that simply repeats throughout the song. The simplicity of the music may call most listeners to focus on the lyrics but in this context the lyrics have less to do with the meaning and relationship to the idea of monotony at war.

The other reason I chose this song is because I believe the lyrics of the chorus actually do reflect the idea that no matter what you do on a given day each day is the same as the one before and will be the same as the one after it. “Whisper on a scream doesn’t change a thing.” I wonder how many soldiers have whispered their final words over the screams of battle.

“Hey, blue on black, tears on a river
Push on a shove it don't mean much
Joker on jack, match on a fire
Cold on ice a dead man's touch
Whisper on a scream doesn't change a thing
Don't bring you back
Blue on black oh yeah, blue on black”

Broken Soldier

Another idea to consider throughout these stories is the reality of how soldiers, who are thought to be tough and fearless, reach a point when they’ve seen too much blood, too much death and personal loss that they experience a psychological mental break. This break is not positive like a breakthrough; this break changes a solder’s psychological well being and can make them a danger to themselves and to others.

In Night Life, we read about Kat Riley and how the war had changed him. He “sank inside himself, not saying a word, but then later on, after five or six days, it flipped the other way. He couldn’t stop talking. Wacky talk, too.” Kat Riley had served as a medic for his platoon and seen a lot of death and dismemberment. On page 210 we read that “Rat developed some peculiar habits. Constantly scratching himself. Clawing at the bug bites. He couldn’t quit digging at his skin, making big scabs and then ripping off the scabs and scratching the open sores.”

One night Rat Kiley went to Mitchell Sanders and said, “It’s not right. These pictures in my head, they won’t quit. I’ll see a guy’s liver. The actual fucking liver. And the thing is, it doesn’t scare me, it doesn’t even give me the willies. More like curiosity. The way a doctor feels when he looks at a patient, sort of mechanical, not seeing the real person, just a ruptured appendix or a clogged-up artery. Anyway, the day’s aren’t so bad, but at night the pictures get to be a bitch. I start seeing my own body. Chunks of myself. My own heart, my own kidneys.” He goes on like that for quite a while further revealing the severity of his psychological breakdown.  The next morning he shot himself in the foot. “I swear, it’s too much. I can’t keep seeing myself dead”, he’d said.

I believe When the Levee Breaks by Led Zepplin represents the idea that the body and the mind can only process and cope with a particular threshold of raw emotion, fear and stress before it comes crashing down. In a way the title and some of the lines in the song are representative of a psychological “levee” breaking but the music with this song is what I think captures the feeling of how this type of breakdown occurs. The lead in to the lyrics is long and drawn out, reminiscent of someone trying to keep some sense of whatever has happened to bring them to “the edge” in hopes it will save them from falling off the side. The music builds in intensity as it continues through with the lyrics, representing the very moment when a person loses their disconnected grasp on reality and folds under the pressures of their mind altering experiences.

In Love with Love

When Ted Lavendar was shot and killed Lieutenant Jimmy Cross had been lost in thoughts and daydreams of Martha. As described on page 11, his love for her was a “dense, crushing love.” He had been looking at her pictures, sucking on the pebble she had collected from the beach and sent him and daydreaming of a life with her. He pondered what kind of love she meant when she signed her letters “Love, Martha”, knowing it probably wasn’t the love he wished it to be. He also spent a great deal of time contemplating whether or not she was a virgin and who took one of the pictures she sent him. He was obsessed with this idea of a life with her, an idea of a love that didn’t actually exist. 

It goes on to say “…his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered. He wanted her to be a virgin and not a virgin, all at once. He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes?” Later we read, “He was just a kid at war, in love. He was twenty-four years old. He couldn’t help it.” What he was afraid to admit, although he knew it was true, was that this “love” was not real love. It was not reciprocated and in realizing that he wished he knew her “intimate secrets” he reveals that he didn’t really know Martha well enough to be in love with her, further proving that he was merely in love with the idea of her; the idea of love and a life with her.

While lost in these thoughts something terrible happened and the day went completely off course, leaving Lieutenant Jimmy Cross to question whether or not things would have been different if he had not been so wrapped up in a fictional love story with Martha.  I think the song Runaway Train by Soul Asylum is a great depiction of how being so focused on one thing can cause other aspects of life to spin out of control. For this particular selection it’s the lyrics that really drive home this idea of being on a destructive path and having to mentally regroup and get focused on the job in front of you.

“Can you help me remember how to smile?
Make it somehow all seem worthwhile
How on earth did I get so jaded?
Life's mystery seems so faded

I can go where no one else can go
I know what no one else knows
Here I am just a-drownin' in the rain
With a ticket for a runaway train

And everything seems cut and dried,
Day and night, earth and sky,
Somehow I just don't believe it

Runaway train, never going back
Wrong way on a one-way track”
Seems like I should be getting somewhere
Somehow I'm neither here nor there

And the Guilt Lives on

Throughout these stories we read about the guilt each of these soldiers carries with them. After Ted Lavendar was shot Lieutenant Jimmy Cross felt and enormous sense of guilt; he believed if he had not been so focused on Martha he could have saved Ted. On page 11 we read, “Lieutenant Cross gazed at the tunnel. But he was not there. He was buried with Martha under the white sand at the Jersey shore. They were pressed together, and the pebble in his mouth was her tongue. He was smiling. Vaguely, he was aware of how quiet the day was, the sullen paddies, yet he could not bring himself to worry about matters of security. He was beyond that.” It was only moments after this when Ted Lavendar was shot in the back of the head and died.

On page 16 we read, “…Lieutenant Cross found himself trembling….He felt shame. He hated himself. He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavendar was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war.” After digging his foxhole “he sat at the bottom…and wept. It went on for a long while.”

He decided then that in order to be the soldier he was responsible for being he had to forget about Martha. “On the morning after Ted Lavendar died, First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross crouched at the bottom of his foxhole and burned Martha’s letter. Then he burned the two photographs.” After fighting the rain “he realized it was only a gesture. Stupid, he thought. Sentimental, too, but mostly just stupid. Lavendar was dead. You couldn’t burn the blame.” He knew he would carry the feeling of guilt for Ted Lavendar’s death throughout the war and probably throughout his life.

In the Field, we read about two soldiers carrying guilt for the same death: the death of Kiowa. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross blames himself for not ignoring the orders and sending his men to higher ground. He was the one that kept them in what they later learned was a shitfield for a village. He constructed various versions of a letter he would send Kiowa’s father, in which he would accept responsibility for his son’s death, saying “my own fault.”

In the same story we meet an unidentified soldier searching through muck and water for a picture. “Like Jimmy Cross, the boy was explaining things to an absent judge. It wasn’t to defend himself. The boy recognized his own guilt and wanted only to lay out the full causes.” He and Kiowa had been huddled up the night before and this soldier turned on his flashlight to show Kiowa a picture of his girlfriend. We can argue that the young soldier is Tim O’Brien who later reveals his guilt by taking Kiowa’s boots back to the paddy where he died the night the river overflowed.

Kenny Chesney recorded a song “Who You’d Be Today”. The lyrics of this song express the overall idea of what was left in the minds and hearts of soldiers that lost their friends, their fellow soldiers, in war. Whether they feel responsible for that person’s death or not it was someone they loved, someone they fought with, someone that never came home.  I would imagine many soldiers that come home from war wonder what their friends’ lives would have been like if they had come home too.

 

Movin' on

Throughout the story Tim O’Brien tells us “I’m forty-three years old, and a writer, and the war has been over for a long while.” His inability to let go of the war, the things he experienced and the people he knew there and lost, reminds me of all the soldiers that lost themselves in the Vietnam War; those that came back and were never the same again. These soldiers were not able to leave the war in the past and focus on the present and the future.  O’Brien knows that writing about the war conjures up memories and sadness that he would sometimes rather forget but he can’t. He says, “…But the thing about remembering is that you don’t forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present.” No matter where these soldiers turn in their post war lives there are always reminders of what really happened while they were at war. 

Later, Tim O’Brien goes on to say “I’m Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever.” For these men remembering is like reliving the loss of their innocence, their old lives and dreams.

Collecting Your Jar of Hearts by Christina Perri is a song about a person that keeps coming back and breaking her heart. If you think of the war as a metaphor for the person it is easy to see how remembering and reliving of the war steals a little bit more of their soul than the time before. In so many ways war leaves scars, tears love apart, and leaves its soldiers to live on as ghostly reminders of that war. Think about this as you read the lyrics below and listen to the song and the melodramatic tone to the music.  

"No I can’t take one more step towards you
Cause all that’s waiting is regret
And don’t you know I’m not your ghost anymore
You lost the love I loved the most

I learned to live half alive
And now you want me one more time

And who do you think you are
Running around leaving scars
Collecting your jar of hearts
And tearing love apart
You’re gonna catch a cold
From the ice inside your soul
So don’t come back for me
Who do you think you are"

From Soldier to Civilian

The story of Norman Bowker’s return from the war really struck a chord with me. It is an unbelievable illustration of how impossible it can be for some soldiers to readapt to their lives as civilians. Nothing is the same as when they went to war and they are not the same person they were before the war. When Norman Bowker returned home he had no one to share his stories with, no one to talk about Kiowa’s death with. He felt completely alone and without purpose. In a letter to Tim O’Brien he described the problem of “finding a meaningful use for his life after the war.” He worked various, random jobs for brief periods of time and even enrolled in junior college, “but the coursework, he said, seemed too abstract, too distant, with nothing real or tangible at stake, certainly not the stakes of a war.” Tim O’Brien quotes Norman’s letter to him as well, “The thing is, there’s no place to go. Not just in this lousy little town. In general. My life, I mean. It’s almost like I got killed over in Nam…Hard to describe. “

Later we learned that Norman Bowker hanged himself at the YMCA. According to a note his mother sent Norman didn’t leave a note or a message anywhere so we can’t say with certainty why he killed himself but it seems to me that he felt a life without purpose wasn’t a life worth living.

Sometimes we come across that seems to sum up everything we are feeling about our life at the moment. What could take an average person 17 pages to try to explain to someone a songwriter sums up in just a matter of a few stanzas put together with a fitting chorus. Creed’s song Weathered strikes me as the perfect melodic summation of everything Norman Bowker was trying to tell Tim O’Brien in his letter and everything he wanted O’Brien to tell in his story.

“Simple living is my desperate cry
Been trading love with indifference
yeah it suits me just fine
I try to hold on but I’m calloused to the bone
Maybe that’s why I feel alone
Maybe that’s why I feel so alone

Me…I’m rusted and weathered
Barely holding together
I’m covered with skin that peels and
it just won’t heal

The sun shines and I can’t avoid the light
I think I’m holding on to life too tight
Ashes to ashes and dust to dust
Sometimes I feel like giving up
Sometimes I feel like giving up

Me…I’m rusted and weathered
Barely holding together
I’m covered with skin that peels
and it just won’t heal”

"Why?", he asks.

The summer Tim O’Brien received his draft letter reveals his very first questions of the Vietnam War. On page 38 we read, “In June of 1968, a month after graduating from Macalester College, I was drafted to fight a war I hated. I was twenty-one years old. Young, yes, and politically naïve, but even so the American war in Vietnam seemed to me wrong. Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons. I saw no unity of purpose, no consensus on matters of philosophy or history or law. The very facts were shrouded in uncertainty: Was it a civil war? A war of national liberation or simple aggression? Who started it, and when, and why?”

Tim O’Brien goes on to say, “It was my view then, and still is, that you don’t make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.” Not only did Tim O’Brien question the purpose of the war before every being drafter for it but he continued to question it as the years went on.

 Even twenty years after the war, when O’Brien returned to Vietnam, it was clear he still did not know why he had ever been sent there. He had taken his daughter and while they were visiting the paddy where Kiowa died she said, “Well, I don’t get it. I mean, how come you were even here in the first place?” His response was, “I don’t know, because I had to be. It’s a mystery, I guess. I don’t know.” The question of “why” still had not been answered and likely never would be.

This made me think of Pink’s song Dear Mr. President. This song is dedicated to the idea of questioning the government. It reminds us that our society is built on the idea of it being ok for the American people to question the acts of its elected government officials, even the President. In the 1960’s the people questioned why we were at war in Vietnam, today we question why we went to war in Iraq. Perhaps the most important thing to gain from this is the idea that we must continue to question our government when we do not understand what they are doing.

 

What is Brave?

 In On the Rainy River we encounter this idea of bravery and what it means in various contexts. According to www.dictionary.com the word brave means “having or displaying courage, resolution, or daring; not cowardly or timid.” In the summer of 1968, for Tim O’Brien, it meant standing up for something that went against the patriotic views and support of a nation at war. It meant fleeing his country to avoid being drafted to fight in what he believed to be “a wrong war.”

In this story we encounter an opposition to the “every day ideas” of what it means to be brave. Traditionally speaking, brave people step in front of a moving vehicle to save someone else’s life; they fight fires and rescue people trapped inside the burning infernos. People with courage stand up for what they believe in: religion, abortion, equality among races and genders; they sacrifice their lives in the name of freedom for their nation and its people.  O’Brien challenges this idea as he endures the moral struggle of being drafted for a war he does not believe in. “There were occasions, I believed, when a nation was justified in using military force to achieve its ends, to stop a Hitler or some comparable evil, and I told myself that in such circumstances I would’ve willingly marched off to the battle. The problem, though, was that a draft board did not let you choose your war.”

As the summer progressed O’Brien struggled with the possibility of escaping to Canada. “Both my conscience and my instincts were telling me to make a break for it, just take off and run like hell and never stop.” “Run, I’d think. Then I’d think, Impossible. Then a second later I’d think, Run.” For O’Brien the brave thing to do was to stand up against the war and walk away from his draft notice, refusing to fight in Vietnam. That act of bravery came with its very own excruciating consequences. It meant he would leave his family, friends and everything he had ever known in his entire life behind and go off into a new country all on his own without the ability to return home.

This developed into a fear of exile. He thought of his parents, his school teachers, friends and people at the old Gobbler Café; all of them he knew would think, “How the damned sissy had taken off for Canada.”  He wanted to challenge them all; he wanted to tell them “How much I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simpleminded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love-it-or-leave-it platitudes, how they were sending me off to fight a way they didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand.”

As the story goes, on page 55, while sitting on a boat just yards away from Canada, O’Brien concluded, “Right then, with the shore so close, I understood that I would not do what I should do. I would not swim away from my hometown and my country and my life. I would not be brave.” Later, after a dramatic hallucination of all the people that be believed would call him a coward if he actually did cross the border into Canada he realized “…I couldn’t make myself be brave. It had nothing to with morality. Embarrassment, that’s all it was.” “I would go to the war – I would kill and maybe die – because I was embarrassed not to.” Even though he did succumb to the mainstream belief in what he should do he refused to abandon his idea that it required more bravery to run than to fight.

I chose the song Cowboy by Kid Rock for this idea of bravery and what it means to Tim O’Brien. Movies depict cowboys as fighting for what they believe in; fighting for survival on their farms and on what we passively call the “great frontier.”Being a cowboy also comes with the connotation of being somewhat of a rebel and in the 1960’s dodging the draft would have been considered a rather rebellious act. Although the lyrics of the song do not specifically fit the idea of bravery in the context of this novel, I do believe the idea of wanting to be a “cowboy” is something most American boys grow up believing is brave. I also believe the harshness of the music with these lyrics reflects the tension O’Brien’s mind and body would have experienced as he decided whether or not to be brave and flee to Canada.

Did that even happen?

Throughout this novel we read a story and are told later that what we read didn’t actually happen. Many people may question “why not tell us what actually happened?” I suppose when someone sits down to read a story about someone’s experiences in war they expect to hear the truth; they expect to read about death and other gory details they wouldn’t expect to read in another type of book. They expect to read things that are outlandish and seemingly impossible because they know that real life as a soldier at war is different than real life as a civilian at home. In The Things They Carried Tim O’Brien challenges the reader to recognize and understand why many war stories are said to be untrue.

“In a 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 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.” O’Brien later says, “Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true.” The point is that in war events can take place in such a rapid movement that no one really knows what actually happened. They simply know that shots were fired, everyone dropped to the ground and in the end someone had lost an arm. The minds’ peripheral picks up on the things that “seem” to have happen though. Perhaps it seemed like 20 minutes of rapid gunfire they were unable to return and someone’s arm was blown off but in reality it was only 10 minutes of rapid gunfire and the paralysis of fear was only in their minds and someone’s arm really did get blown off. 

“Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” Perhaps knowing the validity of the specific details of a war story isn’t necessary for understanding the emotion of the moment or the lesson being offered. In fact, it is possible that even if soldiers could tell all of the true factual details of the events they survived that we might not find them as heroic or worthy of telling. Tim O’Brien’s story of the summer he received his draft letter is a perfect example of that. On The Rainy River is a story that seems so real, so incredibly believable but we know O’Brien never went to that river. Instead he stayed home playing golf that summer as he struggled with the decision of whether or not to run. I suppose we’ll never know for sure, but maybe if Tim O’Brien told us how that summer really went he would not have been able to engage the level of emotion in the reader that the fictional story does such an incredible job of eliciting.

I chose Elton John’s song, Candle in the Wind, for this idea of real truths vs fictional truths and how they can work for or against an author as they try to help their readers feel what they felt at a particular moment in their life. The lyrics have nothing to do with whether or not something is real, although the memories these soldiers carry with them are in a sense “candles in the wind.” However, the song as a whole elicits a very strong level of emotion and this level of emotion is what I believe Tim O’Brien is trying to evoke in everyone that reads this culmination of stories. 
 

In the End

After reading these stories and struggling with the ambiguities of actual happenings vs. story happenings, I can honestly say that I have a different idea of the purpose of this book. In fact, I believe there are many purposes for it. Perhaps one of them is to serve as a response to generations of people that ask why Vietnam veterans continue to talk about the war and all of the sadness and terror it represents for them. Or maybe it is written in honor of all of the soldiers that served and died or were forever changed by the cruelties of what they witnessed and experienced, as well as the cruelties they faced in those that protested the war when they returned home. And perhaps it was written to mean all of these things and more. In the end, each person that sits down to read this book is likely to walk away with a different understanding of the stories told and the purpose behind telling them and maybe that is the sign of a classically written book.

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