This is a collection of short stories O'Brien wrote about his time serving in Vietnam. Sort of. There is a young man named Tim O'Brien in the stories, but he's not necessarily the real Tim. He's Story-Tim. Story-Tim created problems for me.
"Ambush" is about a man Tim killed when he was on night watch over a road in the jungle. This follows, "The Man I Killed," about another man in Tim's platoon trying to pull him away from staring at the body, while Tim's mind invents an entire life for this corpse. That he was sickly and studious growing up, that he went to college to study mathematics, but returned to his village to do his duty and fight as a Viet Cong, only to get blown apart by a grenade one night.
50 pages later, in "Good Form," O'Brien states he did not actually kill the man in the story. He did see a man die on that trail, and because he was present, he feels guilt. Then he says, 'But listen. Even that story is made up. I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth.'
He spends another 4 paragraphs talking about how what you feel can be a truer representation of what happened than what actually happened, and so he feels he can answer his daughter's question of whether he killed anyone with either "yes" or "no", and it'll be true either way.
Which, OK, fine. Granting I'm coming at this in a world 36 years after the collection was published, I'm not sure I'm up for arguing how what I feel the world is more accurately reflects it than the actual facts. Smacks of "alternative facts." It's not O'Brien's fault I'm making that connection, and this is ultimately fiction, so it doesn't have to be factually true.
But inserting himself - or a version of himself - in the stories, then dancing back and forth about whether it's really him, or a "vibes" version of him, doesn't do the work any favors. Now as I'm reading, I'm wondering if this is about him or someone else. If it happened, if it didn't happen. If it didn't, what point he's trying to make writing like it did. If it did happen, what point he's trying to make actually telling it. Or, if it happened, why, as in the events surrounding "Kiowa's" death described in "Speaking of Courage," he attributed it to another person entirely.
I'm stuck in some awkward, stuttering, meta-aware state where I can't simply read the story and then decide what I thought about it or took from it, because I'm hung up on his approach. I'm interacting with the style and not the text, which is usually a bad sign for me when it comes to books (Tristram Shandy being the prime example of a book that's entire approach just pissed me off to the point I couldn't take anything from the book except how much I hated it.) If he just doesn't use his own name in the stories, changes it like he did all the others, it's a non-issue.
It isn't as though he's trying to make himself look better, unless this is all performative self-disgust. "On the Rainy River" is about Story-Tim receiving his draft notice and briefly fleeing to Minnesota, right near the Canadian border. There he stalls out, for days, at this cluster of fishing cabins that are closed for the season, unable to decide which direction to go. Ultimately, he goes back, out of shame. Because he's too afraid of the scorn he'd face, from people he'd likely never see again, if he became a draft-dodger.
I imagine that informs the sense of collective guilt and responsibility he applies in "The Man I Killed", and "Ambush." He didn't want to go to this war. It wasn't his war, he didn't believe in it. But he didn't have strong enough convictions to run. He let the weight of opinion of people he barely knew make his decision for him. And so, for that cowardice, he is responsible for the dead man.
Now, just that dead man, or all the dead men (and women, and children) in the villages getting burned out or airstriked because one soldier got sniped? Not sure, though he tends to rather relate them calling in napalm or whatever the way you or I might describe watching the path of a mail truck. Guilt only goes so far, I suppose.
That said, O'Brien's a pretty good writer. The obsessive creation of a life in "The Man I Killed," the way he's conjured up this entire idea of who this man was. Especially in terms of the life he conjures, which seems like it mirrors his in certain ways. The studious, reluctant soldier. The killer, projecting himself onto the victim, seeing a possible future for himself.
The periodic lines from Kiowa, increasing in frequency, as he tries to get Tim to stop staring, and later tries to get him to talk about it. He doesn't offer any consolation, because there's nothing to say. The man is dead. That can't change now. Story-Tim threw the grenade, and all this stuff he's fabricating about the dead man doesn't really matter. Whether the man was like what Tim envisions or not, he's not that any longer. And Tim hears it, but it just rolls off him. They're short, discrete sentences that have no connection to what's running through his head.
O'Brien also captures the collective weight of opinion that drives people into doing things they'd rather not, and what that does to their psyche. "The Things They Carried," as a marker of what helped the soldiers cope with the situation they were in. That helped them feel safe, or at least feel like they had some control over a situation they largely did not control. Because they ceded that control to someone else when they, for whatever reason, enlisted or showed up when drafted. And they know it, and they know they may die for it.
So they hold on to whatever they can. Letters from a girl back home that will never love them, or stockings from a girl that loved them, then left them. Or mean-spirited pranks, or religion, or whatever. And sometimes the different approaches grind against each other, the guy who wants silence against the guy who can't stop talking. The guy demanding a moral from how someone died against the one who thinks that notion is ridiculous.
'They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.'
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