Should I Read... The Things They Carried?
And what separates fiction from fact?
Not long ago, I was in a San Diego bookstore with my cousin. In this store, more or less, the genesis of this website came about. She recommended three books—four at most—and I picked two in the span of five minutes. Her search was not nearly as quick; she picked up A Secret History and The Things They Carried upon my campaigning. Enjoying the process, I wandered the store, thinking, “Should she read… should she read…”
Suffice to say it’s hard to get people to buy into a would-be grisly genre. And if not for the dreck she sifted through—think synopses like AI learning to write—it’s unlikely I could have pushed so much for The Things They Carried. “It’s not really a war story,” I told her. “It just takes place in a war… and is about war.”
I was floundering here. She vacillated. But the book was too important to shrug off.
“Everyone in my high school class loved it,” I said at last.
That’s a sleeved ace you rarely get; getting young men and women alike to enjoy a book with a necklace of severed tongues has to be special.
When is a war story not a war story?
There are a few things in life that some people can never understand: for the chronically single (to thee I sing), it’s the feeling of first seeing your newborn. Winning the big one in professional sports. Going to war. Hollywood and other forces have thought up every trick in the book to bridge this gap; the very best efforts, like Saving Private Ryan, can unlock extant memories in the people who served. For the rest of us, we get closer to the action. We will always be on the sidelines.
The Things They Carried, in what might have been a first for the genre, chooses not to bother with making us understand. (I can’t recall one sentence that went overboard with detail, in an obvious attempt to strike at hyper-realism.) The problem with war lit is not so much that experiencing horror is exclusive to the enlisted. It’s that civilians still have the comfort of slipping into an “other” world where this all just happens—without consequences to our sanity. Our brain does this autonomously, recognizing the cruciality of keeping war and humanity separate.
I tried to avoid as much in my Vietnam script, using flashbacks at just the moment an audience might stop seeing the soldiers as boys, but even I fell prey to creating “a new normal” in writing it.
So how does Tim O’Brien avoid our coping habits?
In the Gravity’s Rainbow post, I talked about how the absence of a thing can make it more powerful. I wouldn’t say that’s the case here. I won’t tell you this book avoids war scenes. However it’s not hard to imagine a version without them.
So often, bad books happen because an author lacks conviction: constantly introducing new ideas without resolving them, because new ideas are fun and writing a climax is hard. But in this book, resolution is different. We don’t need the conventional war climax because here death comes in all forms. It comes in the people who betray you back home, in a crumbling building, in failing to preserve a soldier’s memory.
O’Brien doesn’t bring us into the war. Rather, he shows us war lurking in what we can understand. His open whoppers and fabrications serve to keep us in the fold; we must be lied to about death to keep from emotionally detaching. A harrowing war story might take the shape of a pair of shoes. Or a toothache. We are on a touristy walking tour with gunfire just in the distance. We understand being able to attach huge value to innocuous things. And that terror hidden in small moments is as close to real war as we, the citizens, may ever get.
What works best in TTTC?
The book is simply magic because you shouldn’t be able to convey true brutality without trying to show it, fiction or non-. It would be like going to the publisher and saying, “Picture a war story. Got it? Paycheck, please.” And even when brutality is shown, which is seldom, we are expressly told that it may not be true.
Indeed Hollywood folk often try to capture “gritty realism” through the terse dialogue and jargon of war. But you must either go so big as to be a blockbuster or become so bleak that we can empathize but not relate—with no satisfying in-between. (Stories that toe the line, trying to find redemption in war, like Fury, always fail to be authentic.) As a script reader for a major studio, I suggested a hard pass on no fewer than a dozen of such submissions.
And I felt for the writers, many of them veterans—even as stories went to desperate extremes like a dog driving a Humvee in Act III—for they were trapped between two worlds. They wanted to explain war off their chests and they possessed Homeric bravery to even try.
Thus it showcases O’Brien’s brilliance to do the unthinkable: he lied and told us as much. It’s just… it violates every law of writing for the author to jump in and say, “You are reading a book. Most of this never happened.” (Even postmodern folk would call that tactic “a bit much”.) We already know this fact; you still can’t say it. And certainly not repeatedly. So why does it work?
On some level, we were waiting for this book. Every single story about war ever told has been a lie. We are lied to when it’s made up, we are lied to when the events must capture what happened. You would think that telling an untrue story is nothing groundbreaking in fiction. But O’Brien asserts absolutely that this novel is creative non-fiction. Half the events of TTTC are more fictive than Apocalypse Now. Yet he is meeting us on our level, so we are inclined to agree: We can’t imagine what it’s like to be in a war, yet we can imagine the lies we would tell ourselves to survive it.
O’Brien may have been the first writer to realize that battle scenes are completely unnecessary to our understanding of war. What soldiers feel in a war is what matters; and what O’Brien felt like, as a veteran, was a pedestrian grappling with denial.
How does O’Brien maintain a sense of urgency?
Obviously the biggest problem with telling the reader you’re lying is that they are excused from caring. Telling them that you’re lying some of the time is arguably worse, as it may invalidate that which is actually true. It’s the same reason people, like myself, hate texting in movie theaters: yes, it’s a thin level of immersion, but it must be preserved.
Inside the novel, immersion sustains because the reader wants to discover why O’Brien is lying to us. Quickly do we discover that O’Brien the Author can be and is the main character of a fiction. Not since Lolita has a narrator shaken up the ordinary so effectively. We, or at least I, feel what society has asked of O’Brien and others: to go off to a foreign land, carry out orders they may never know are right or wrong, return to face their mandated slaughter alone. We can say that the government makes them do it, that we find war detestable. But if we really placed the souls of infantry above everything construed as an attack on freedom, the war would not happen. O’Brien’s prose rings true, despite the lies, because we are lying to ourselves about war. The more O’Brien admits to events being imagined, the worse we must realize war is.
Soldiers are the frontline workers on steroids. We prop up a certain group of people as being capable of anything, responding to a call we cannot answer. But when the soldiers resort to lying as a means of communicating truth… we start to realize what we’re doing to them. For a long time, perhaps, we hid behind the maxim: “You wouldn’t understand.” An easy phrase that lets soldiers do their job and absolves us of guilt. The Things They Carried puts an end to that. Now you do understand what it’s like, even if and especially because it’s not what happened. We live together in the realm of untruth, united by an imagined pain.
Overall…
Read this book, please.