Wrecked
I sort of get what O’Brien is trying to do in
this book. Or maybe I don’t get it, because I’m not a veteran of the Vietnam
War and so I can’t possibly begin to understand O’Brien’s experiences. But I
think he’s trying to convey what he defines as the real “truth”—the feelings of
the war, the levels of terrible and heartbreaking and disorientation that
non-veterans are unable to relate to—by throwing away “happening-truth” and
telling us fake stories.
Here’s how he does it. You become engrossed in
O’Brien’s stories. Once you’re inside, they chew you up and wreck you
emotionally. Then you’re spit out feeling confused, disoriented, and all kinds
of angry when O’Brien tells you hey, by the way, I made that up. Like, how can
you make up a story about your best friend Kiowa drowning in poop? How can you
talk about these really sentimental moments with your daughter Kathleen, when
you really don’t have a daughter named Kathleen?
Take “Good Form,” for example. It comes right
after the story about Kiowa and the shitfield. O’Brien tells us that aside from
a few things, “almost everything else is invented.” Then there’s a short bit
where he says wait, the story about the slim, dead, dainty young man is
partially true because I was there when he died. And then immediately after
he’s like lol jk, “even that story is made up.” What the frick, Tim?
This confusion, disorientation, and anger that I
felt after finishing this book is what O’Brien wants. I think he’s saying, this
is how the war makes you feel. You’re confused, because you wonder why you’re
even fighting a war in Vietnam. You’re disoriented, because you’re in unknown
territory with shots ringing in your ears and shrapnel flying everywhere and no
idea if or when you might suddenly die. And you’re angry, because you lose your
friend who didn’t deserve to die and when you go home, no one understands what
you’ve just gone through and you can’t talk about it because no one wants to
hear the gruesome details.
You know what, maybe this book IS the Vietnam
War. Maybe O’Brien is trying to say that the war is just all these disjointed
stories with no real meaning—there’s nothing heroic about it, it just happened
and didn’t amount to anything. Idk man. Whatever it is, he makes you realize
that everything wasn’t stars and stripes and cinematic acts of bravery.
If we put together all the "war stories" within this book--some of them just short anecdotes within larger stories, some passed around among soldiers, some based on the author/narrator's first-hand observations--we do get a cumulative portrait of US involvement in Vietnam as confused, misguided, and absurd. Guys "humping" huge amounts of equipment around the jungle with no destination or clearly defined strategic purpose, torching villages at will, with comrades dying meaningless violent deaths. Our confusion and disorientation mirrors the experience of the soldiers, and this book utterly refuses to make Alpha Company's work along the Song Tra Bong seem heroic or meaningful or strategic in any coherent way. The enemy exists only as "ghosts."
ReplyDeleteLooking at this book as an album of momentary ideas and feelings caused by and experienced during the war I think really works as an interpretive model. Everything Tim O'Brien does throughout the stories as an author is somehow both creative and destructive; he makes all this stuff up and then he tears it down (as well as, it would seem, deliberately incurring his readers' anger). However, some of the stories really do have a clear plot while others are more mixtures of emotion and vivid imagery. "Ghost Stories" for example is very plot driven, while the story about the guy that Tim (didn't actually) killed is very flighty and improvisational. But that's kind of how memory works--some stuff stands out and other stuff fades away but you're left with a feeling or a "vibe" associated with the memory and I think O'Brien conveys this emotional atmosphere very well, but as you said how would any of us be able to tell, we're not Vietnam veterans.
ReplyDeleteThis post articulates a lot of things I think we were moving toward at the end of discussing the stories. We didn't like the stories because they made us angry, but I'm pretty sure Vietnam soldiers didn't like the war either. Or maybe they did, but I couldn't have been the only one who had a sick fascination and appreciation for the way O'Brien was able to draw me in, make me feel super strongly about these stories, and then tear it apart before my very eyes.
ReplyDeleteI really like this post, and you do a great job encapsulating exactly how I felt while reading this short story book. I was constantly frustrated towards O'Brien for all his fictional truths, even the ones he didn't reveal in the book like Kathleen the fake daughter!! It didn't make much sense to me, but your comparison between the reader's experience and a soldier's overall war experience (at least a very small glimpse of it) really put things into perspective and makes me less angry.
ReplyDeleteYour post has successfully put into words many of my frustrations with the ending of O'Brien's book. As I progressed, I also became more and more frustrated by his breakage of the fourth wall. Do you think any one story may sum Vietnam up the best? Which story is the best example for the narrative O'Brien creates in his entire book. You make several good points, and you are right. We will never understand the experience like the Vietnam vets. Even if we go to war today, as we learned with the soldiers in that peculiar short story on the train, war has changed a great deal and the experiences change with it.
ReplyDelete"What the frick Tim?" resonates with me. But I also agree with what you said here. Everything O'Brien does seems to simulate the war on many different levels. On one level, there's the truth of the stories themselves, on another, it's the truth of Tim's life and his storytelling, and on even another level it's the truth in us reading the stories that O'Brien the author has told about Tim the author and the soldier. Meta. Anyway though, you kind of have to question O'Brien's character if he truly is looking to make the reader mad. Does he have no mercy? Why can't he make things simpler for us? Maybe, like you said, it's because the war didn't have mercy on him, and it didn't make things simple for him.
ReplyDelete