Truth In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

For Tim O’Brien in The Things They Carried, the question of truth is omnipresent. A collection of stories set in the context of the disastrous theater of the Vietnam War, O’Brien constantly grapples with the nature of storytelling and the difficulty, perhaps futility, of telling an accurate story about the horrors of modern imperial warfare while also sufficiently conveying the clouded memories and emotional experiences of its direct participants. Indeed, much of the novel revolves around the demarcation between what he calls “happening-truth”, a simple rendering of objective facts about events, and “story-truth”, that which exposes the difficult, abstract emotional reality of his characters and, finally, himself; in the words of O’Brien,

that which may be “truer than the truth” (80). In no chapter is this better illustrated than “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”, an outlandish story of a young woman visiting her soldier boyfriend in Vietnam, only to turn into a monstrous volunteer for the Green Berets. The emotional power of the story evokes a disturbing inner-truth, one that is more intimately, perhaps more factually, examined in another chapter, “The Ghost Soldiers”, where O’Brien explores his cruelty towards a medic.

“The Ghost Soldiers” reveals that the “truer than the truth” story of “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” is O’Brien’s internal wrestle with his own darkest impulses, those which find destruction, domination and violence, the traits of warfare, instinctively gratifying.
Both “The Ghost Soldiers” and “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” center around a traumatic event set near the Song Tra Bong, a river in Vietnam. In “The Ghost Soldiers”, O’Brien recounts the second time he was shot and the botched treatment by a new field medic, Bobby Jorgenson, which results in a serious infection to his rear-end; the result is a twisted story of O’Brien’s descent into obsessive malice towards Bobby. In “Sweetheart”, a soldier, Mark Fossie, is horrified to witness the transformation of his visiting young girlfriend, Mary Anne, as she begins to go out on excursions with the Green Berets and, eventually, becomes a murderous volunteer soldier who relishes in the violence and death she creates. The similarities between the two stories seem to elicit the same “story-truth”: both are tales of the discovery of human brutality; “Sweetheart” being a more fantastical take on the theme, “The Ghost Soldiers” more straightforward. But the contrasts between the structure of the two stories may provide further insight into O’Brien’s own psychological struggle as a veteran of modern war.
“The Ghost Soldiers” is O’Brien’s confession of the spiteful feelings he holds towards Bobby Jorgenson. When describing Bobby’s frozen response as he lies in shock from his wound, O’Brien uses a series of degrading descriptors to convey his hostility: “son-of-a-bitch”, “scared-white face”, “buggy eyes”, “the way his lips twitched and the silly excuse he had for a mustache” (181); later, he will call Bobby “a little squirrel of a guy, short and stumpy looking” (189). O’Brien’s words are heavily laced with insults specifically designed to attack Bobby’s masculinity, suggesting he is fearful, weak, small; mothered by a “bitch”. Later, O’Brien recounts feeling “humiliated” in hospital care, as his nurses jokingly call his wound “diaper rash”. This “made [O’Brien] hate Bobby, […] gut hate, the kind of hate that stays with you even in your dreams” (182). Specifically, he wishes “to make Bobby Jorgenson feel exactly what [he] felt” (184); not just the pain and fear of the injury, but the embarrassment of his emasculating wound. In both style and content, this chapter reveals a violent impulse within O’Brien which goes beyond mere exhilaration from the chaos of warfare, into an obsessive, dark viciousness towards human beings who burden him with what he perceives as inferiority and feebleness.
Finally, O’Brien acts upon these feelings with the help of a friend, Azar, rigging a complex prank involving ropes tied to noisemakers and flares near Bobby’s position to frighten him. As they rattle the noisemakers with the ropes, O’Brien reveals his immense satisfaction in psychologically punishing Bobby:
I felt a sense of immense power […] Like a puppeteer. Yank on the ropes, watch the silly wooden soldier jump and twitch. […] It was cruel, I knew that, but right and wrong were somewhere else. I heard myself chuckle. (198)
Then, they enact the next stage of the prank, setting off flares near Bobby as he lets out a fearful cry.

In a peculiarly indulgent bit of prose, O’Brien again reveals the grandiose feelings this callous act brings him, ascribing to himself some vaguely otherworldly attributes as he fills his target with fear:
I was down there with him, inside him. I was part of the night. I was the land itself–everything, everywhere–the fireflies and paddies, the moon, the midnight rustlings, the cool phosphorescent shimmer of evil–I was the blind stare in the eyes of all those poor, dead, dumbfuck ex-pals of mine–all the pale young corpses […] I was the beast on their lips–I was Nam–the horror, the war. (199)
Bobby ultimately discovers the prank and the two make a sort of amends, with Bobby recommending O’Brien go into film directing after orchestrating such an elaborate show. But the chapter closes on an ominous note: during the prank, Azar insulted O’Brien for wanting to end it too early in his eyes, and eventually kicked O’Brien in the head, calling him sad (206). Given what the preceding pages have shown us, the last words of the chapter are unsettling:
“Let’s kill Azar”.
Jorgenson gave me a half-grin. “Scare him to death,

right?”
“Right,” I said.
“What a movie!”
I shrugged. “Sure. Or just kill him.”
The impulse explored in “The Ghost Soldiers” is instructive in interpreting “Sweetheart”, a captivating, disturbing, and thoroughly unbelievable tale. As told by O’Brien’s friend Rat Kiley, another soldier, the stable and steady Mark Fossie, has his girlfriend, Mary Anne, visit Vietnam. She is cheerful and holds a sunny disposition, “perky and fresh-faced, like a cheerleader” (92). She admires the culture and environments of Vietnam. She even swims in the Song Tra Bong. In this way, she is analogous to the other soldiers, including O’Brien, who arrived to Vietnam possessing innocence, curiosity, and a moral conscience.
However, before long, she is associating with the Green Berets, going out on missions with them. Eventually, Fossie goes in to the camp of the Berets to find his girlfriend. He discovers her living quarters, a hooch that includes a pile of bones beneath a foul sign which includes a racial slur. When he finds Mary Anne, she is wearing a necklace beaded with the tongues of Vietnamese corpses. He confronts his girlfriend, who informs him that what she’s doing isn’t “bad”. As Fossie looks on at the transformation in shock, she informs him that he is “in a place[…] where you don’t belong” (106). Then, in perhaps the most disturbing moment of the book, Mary Anne explains her feelings about Vietnam:
Sometimes I want to eat this place. Vietnam. I want to swallow the whole country-the dirt, the death-I just want to eat it and have it there inside me. That’s how I feel. It’s like this appetite. […] I feel close to myself. When I'm out at night, I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and fingernails, everything, it's like I'm full of electricity and I'm glowing (106)
But given what we know about O’Brien’s storytelling philosophy and the impulses explored in “The Ghost Soldiers”, it is perhaps best to conclude that this speech is O’Brien’s, not the fictional Mary Anne’s. It is he who possesses this latent sadism, which is far more than just a desire to win or the adrenaline rush of combat. There is within him an urge to consume others, to pile their bones up, to collect their tongues. Fossie, then, is O’Brien’s own superego, learning from his own now-fully exposed id, Mary Anne, that he doesn’t belong in warfare. This terrible emergence of a wicked unconscious is so horrible for O’Brien that he can only properly explain it through “story-truth”, though he hints at, behind the shield of understatement, in “The Ghost Soldiers”:
I’d turned mean inside. Even a little cruel at times. For all my education, all my fine liberal values, I now felt […] something dark and beyond reason. It’s a hard thing to admit, but I was capable of evil. I wanted to hurt Bobby Jorgenson. (190-191)
Whatever truly did happen at the Song Tra Bong - or whether anything in particular happened there at all - the war led to a traumatic self-realization for O'Brien. The emergence of this sadistic trait deep within him is more directly addressed in “The Ghost Soldiers”, but it is more vividly and effectively chronicled in the embellishments of “Sweetheart”, where the sheer morbidity he is capable of imagining better reveals the existentially mortifying nature of his revelation. This tendency directly clashes with his morality; previously in the book, he is trying to avoid the draft and decidedly anti-war. For him, the discovery that he was not immune to the darkest recesses of the human imagination and emotion is catastrophic, so much that he had no choice but to explain it in the “story-truth” of an innocent young woman gone mad with bloodlust. O’Brien’s dilemma, then, is a reflection of the American empire: the conflict between professed liberal, humanitarian aspirations, and primal, brutal instincts when real-world situations frustrate them. For both O’Brien and the U.S., moral self-justification can become license to revel in the depravity of violence.