‘The Things They Carried’ author gives candid reflections on war
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Tim O’Brien answers a question during his Novel November presentation at Peters Township High School.
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Members of Room 100, Peters Township High School’s contemporary a cappella group, perform prior to Tim O’Brien’s presentation.
Myra Oleynik, Peters Township Public Library director, greets guests for Novel November.
His position at the podium and behind the microphone notwithstanding, author and Vietnam War veteran Tim O’Brien explained who he is and isn’t.
“I am not a public speaker,” he asserted. “I’m a writer, and I spend my time alone, in a room, in my underwear, writing stories.”
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Prior to his talk, Tim O’Brien greets Kaitlyn Strine, a sixth-grader at McMurray Elementary School who is a National History Day competitor.
As such, his Nov. 7 talk at Peters Township High School focused on storytelling, in a manner reminiscent of the self-contained chapters of his bestselling 1990 book, “The Things They Carried.”
For 54 thought-provoking, often heart-rending minutes, O’Brien provided an often brutally candid summary of his experience with war, which for all intents and purposes persists nearly half a century after his year of service in Vietnam.
“Stories are a way of connecting us, partly to ourselves and partly to the rest of the world,” he said. “Stories can embolden us and give us courage. I believe in them.”
And so he was emboldened to share three stories with his audience during the second annual Novel November event presented by the Peters Township Library Foundation.
The letter
For years, O’Brien carried with him a voluminous letter of about 100 pages that a 26-year-old woman from his native Minnesota mailed to him, until one day much of it blew away down a Chicago street. By then, he’d memorized enough of the content to continue to use it for his public storytelling.
When the woman was young, she discovered her father had served in the Vietnam War, even though she’d never heard him talk about it. As a matter of fact, he never talked about much of anything.
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Nick Grimes, a U.S. Army veteran who served from 2004-2011, including a total 27 months in combat in Afghanistan with the 10th Mountain Division, provides the introduction for Tim O’Brien.
Her mother, though, did admit that she’d married the father out of pity when he returned from the war.
Fast-forward to when the woman was in high school and assigned to read “The Things They Carried.” She brought the book home, and her father picked it up and started to peruse it.
As she revealed in her letter to O’Brien:
“A conversation began by the fortuity of a book lying on a coffee table, and it hasn’t ended yet. We’re still talking. My mom and dad are talking,” she said.
“That book didn’t save them. They’ve still got big trouble. But they wouldn’t be together, I think, if that book wouldn’t have been lying there that day.'”
O’Brien admitted that he, like the father, sometimes still is stricken with silence.
“One lesson from this story that I hope will endure, at least this much, is that wars do not end when we sign peace treaties,” he said. “They go on and on and on and on, not just in the lives of soldiers or former soldiers, but in the lives of their children and their wives, and their moms and dads, and their friends and the people they work with.”
The ambush
From “The Things They Carried,” O’Brien devoted 10 minutes to reading a chapter called “Ambush.” In the story, the narrator reflects on how he threw a grenade that killed “a short, slender young man of about 20,” and how he attempts to cope in the aftermath.
“It didn’t happen. Not that way,” O’Brien said. “But it comes out of dozens and dozens of ambushes, and dozens and dozens of deaths just like it. It’s a way of taking a lot of Vietnam and a lot of ambushes and a lot of dead people, and a lot of guilt and a lot of horror, and putting it into five pages and letting that be the war inside ‘The Things They Carry.'”
He then told the true story of a July 1969 ambush in which he was involved. During one point, his Army unit ended up unleashing massive firepower on three figures silhouetted against the predawn sky.
In the wake of the carnage, the soldiers found just a single fatality, a boy of about 16 or 17.
“Like the character in my story, I still bear with me a sense of responsibility. I will never know if a bullet from my weapon struck that young man,” O’Brien said. “It’s hard going to sleep some nights, maybe most nights, without the thought going through my head: Did I kill that kid, or did I help kill him with a bullet?
“And the answer has to be yes. I was there. I pulled the trigger. I was in Vietnam, was a soldier, was in a war. And you can’t absolve yourself from responsibility by saying, I don’t know. That’s cowardly. You have to take that responsibility.”
The girl
Also in July 1969, O’Brien was involved in a massive exchange of firepower with Viet Cong soldiers. No one in his unit was hurt, he reported, and the Americans started in the direction of enemy artillery to look for casualties.
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Tim O’Brien signs a copy of his book “Northern Lights.”
“I walked by a little girl of 9, 8, somewhere in there, dead,” O’Brien said. “What do you say to yourself when you see that? One of the things I said was, well, the world must be a better place. Because that’s what wars are for, right? Make the world better. That’s why we fight ’em. We don’t fight ’em to make the world worse.
“But as a 22-year-old kid looking on that body, the world didn’t feel better,” he reflected. “It felt like I had made it worse by being part of it, and that maybe all of us do when we start killing people. It felt that I had dipped my soul in evil.”
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Peters Township High School graduate Val Williams provides musical accompaniment prior to Tim O’Brien’s talk, performing her Vintageous Productions show focusing on songs of the 1960s and early ’70s.