Daily Times

The Things They Carried

By Tim O’Brien

Broadway; Pp 246

“To generalise about war is like generalising about peace. Almost nothing is true. Almost everything is true. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel — the spiritual texture — of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truth no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapours suck you in. You cannot tell where you are, or why you are there, and the only certainty is the overwhelming ambiguity.” Truer words were never said, and these words are from Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried. Recipient of the National Book Award (1979 for Going after Cacciato), and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize, the American best-selling author Tim O’Brien presented a literary masterpiece when he wrote The Things They Carried. O’Brien fought in the Vietnam war and it took him almost twenty years to come to grips with the enormity of the emotional toll the seemingly purpose-less war took on him. And the result of this awareness is this book written in 1990, which has as much relevance today as it had back then. Ironically, the fact that the US was embroiled in fighting in the Middle East and Afghanistan then, and today trying to wriggle its way out of the almost same kind of mindlessly mismanaged war in those same areas is horrific and unreal to say the least. What should have been an eye-opening lesson for generations to come, somehow, has managed to have little or no impact on the policy makers in the US. They have continued to produce repeat performances of the country’s ill-planned, illogical, and inane military misadventures all over the world.

The book is a compilation of 22 stories consisting of the same characters interconnected in a way that it takes the form of a novel. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, O’Brien presents a unique ‘faction’, leaving you spellbound and speechless with his brilliance and profundity of narration. The horror of the war observed, experienced, and lived through the eyes of the narrator — Tim O’Brien himself — and his comrades in arms/characters, is described in terms so commonplace they hit you with a force that leaves you wondering and marvelling at the capacity and tenacity of the human spirit to experience and yet survive. The terrible and the grotesque — the physical hardships, emotional and nervous breakdowns, accidents, deaths, ‘supernatural’ happenings — are part of their quotidian routines, forcing them to go through each day like an automaton, losing all sense of reality in a war-torn country, where the landscape seems haunted, cold, and at times, even ghost-ridden. They carry out their assigned missions without full comprehension of the purpose of their being part of a fight in a country so far away from their own that back home most of them would have been clueless on how to locate it in an atlas. These characters based on real soldiers are uniquely defined — each one leaves his own individual mark on the reader through his actions and the things he carried. The things they carry describe a character/soldier in the book as clearly as it was possible for a man who served with them, and then relied on his consistently undependable memory to recreate them two decades later. Apart from the ammunition and the basic necessities they all had to carry on their backs, all of them carried one thing or the other which coincided with their individual personalities. Whether it is Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and the letters from a girl he knew, Ted Lavendar and his tranquillisers, Norman Bowker and his diary, Rat Kiley’s comic books, Kiowa’s New Testament or Henry Dobbin’s girlfriend’s stockings, the things they carried shows they were ordinary young men caught up in an extraordinary event. The mementos manifested their backgrounds, their attachments, longings, superstitions, fears, dreams — slivers of their inner selves. In the course of the narration, friendships are formed, hearts are hardened, minds are corrupted, and lessons in the survival of the fittest are learnt. Innocence is lost, cynicism and scepticism rule. In My Khe, then Khe, Batangan Peninsula, the clean-cut young American boys turn into complex, war-hardened, jaded old men. The description is heartbreaking and mind numbing to say the least.

The straightforwardness of O’Brien’s language is prominent throughout the book. The sheer simplicity of his words while describing the most awful of things makes you sit up. It makes you uncomfortable; it makes you gasp; it makes you smile; it makes you wonder; it makes you scared; it makes you cringe; it forces you to think; and most importantly, it makes you feel small, ashamed of being a human being. There are no tricks in his writing, no artificial subtlety, no over the top ‘artistic’ gymnastics. There are elements of poetic realism and comic fantasy making his writing individual and one of a kind. The strength of his writing is that the things he sees, experiences, and then recaptures on paper as reality meets fiction are so big in their impact on the psyches of his characters that only the very basic words, the very small and ordinary ones would do justice to them. This book is important because it does not try to define or understand war; rather his heart-wrenchingly poignant stories are all longings for peace, aiming at human understanding of this surreal and larger than life reality of our world — war. All I would say to anyone reading this piece is to read this awesome book ASAP! But keeping in mind the words of my current favourite writer, Tim O’Brien. A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behaviour, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war start you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you.

The reviewer can be contacted at mehrt2000@gmail.com