Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

“I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.” The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien, provides the reader with perplexing contradictions, just like the one above, throughout the entirety of the novel. O’Brien questions everything from what it truly means to be a “man,” to what it means to tell a “true” war story. Many of the ideas O’Brien tries to imbibe on his readers are further explained in literature. More specifically, poetry. Poets Felix Pollak, Denise Levertov, and Yusef Komunyakaa all assimilate elements of O’Brien’s beliefs and views on war into their own work.

As ironic as it may seem, O’Brien felt that he was a coward for going to war. Despite the preconceptions of bravery and violence being coexistent, O’Brien believes that real bravery and courage occur when a man or woman makes an “unpopular,” but honest decision. When someone makes a decision true to their own moral compass, that is when

courage is exhibited. Felix Pollak describes the two-sided nature of the war perfectly in “Speaking: The Hero.” This poem, widely acclaimed to be one of the great peace poems of the Vietnam era, is about a man struggling with the complex duality of war. Pollak says,

“They said my mother should be proud.
My mother cried.
I wanted to live.
They called me a coward.
I died a coward.
They called me a hero.”

There are two disparate sides to war, the side that the patriotic public sees, and the side that the soldiers see. Pollak says that he tried to flee, he tried to escape the terrors of war, but he was received with hateful speech. He was called a coward. When he died a coward, the military officials then called him a hero. The dual nature of war perplexed Pollak just as it did O’Brien.

In O’Brien’s The Things They Carry, there is a chapter, “The Man I Killed,” where the narrator describes a dead Vietnamese soldier that he has just killed. Every gruesome detail is described in length, “His jaw was in his throat,” “His neck was open to his spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny and it was this wound that had killed him.” However, sandwiched between the grotesque details of the murder are very innocent remarks and assumptions. “Secretly, though, it also frightened him. He was not a fighter. His health was poor, his body small and frail. He liked books.” Despite not truly knowing anything about this young man lying before him, O’Brien begins to connect on a personal, emotional level with him. He shares in his struggle, they have a commonality in this land of horror and violence. Neither of them really know why they are in this war. They know that the “bad guys” are on the other side, but they question their involvement in the entire war. Denise Levertov explains in a poem titled “What Were They Like” this idea of innocence and confusion. The poem contains dialogue between a young man asking questions and another, wiser man answering them.

“Did the people of Viet Nam
use lanterns of stone?
Did they hold ceremonies
to reverence the opening of buds?
Were they inclined to quiet laughter?”

These type of genuine questions are what some soldiers internally struggled with. They thought, quietly, to themselves, “Why am I killing my brother over an issue I am not involved in?” The other man wisely explains “after their children were killed / there were no more buds.” He explains that “laughter is bitter to the burned mouth.” America did not provide a chance for the rehabilitation of the relationship. We burned their homes, and bombed their cities. We killed more than a million Vietnamese men, women, and children and ruined countless more Vietnamese lives. “Laughter is bitter to the burned mouth.”

In a war poem entitled “A Break from the Brush” Yusef Komunyakaa displays a common war habit.

Soldiers did anything they could to take their mind away from the pain of war. Whether it be getting “high on Buddha grass,” or using crude humor to soften the pain, soldiers tried their best to move their minds to a place far, far away, void of suffering. When Curt Lemon, in The Things They Carried, died, his peers coped with the pain of losing a friend in strange ways. After stepping on a mine, Lemon was blown to pieces, leaving him scattered on a tree nearby. Instead of mourning the loss of a good friend, the group began to sing “Lemon Tree,” a popular song during the Vietnam war, while they picked up his disembodied corpse. This kind of gross use of crude humor is the exact kind of escape Komunyakaa describes in his poem. “miles away / machine guns can be heard. / Pretending we're somewhere else, / we play harder.” The men ignore their call to war, gunshots, and continue to allow their mind to wander to sweeter, safer

places.

The truth of war is far from black and white. However, the one undeniable truth about war is there are, indeed, countless truths. One person's account of an event could be drastically different than another’s, yet both stories are equally true. As long as a story conveys a feeling that incites the truth, it is intrinsically true. This is what O’Brien is trying to explain through these stories. Whether these stories are fiction or not is irrelevant. The facts of the stories are not what are important. The emotion, the feeling is what truly matters. We can better try to understand O’Brien’s mystifying theory of truth through the poet's aforementioned. Literature can do amazing things. Literature can give readers insight to experiences like the Vietnamese war, an event that many generations could not begin to comprehend. The truth of a story is evident in the emotion elicited, not the factual evidence.