Until I started teaching, it didn’t occur to me that The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien was more than a single short story by the same name. The first chapter appears in anthologies and writing guides like Alice LaPlante’s The Making of a Story. It is a staple in the high school American Literature Curriculum. For a long time, I figured that The Things They Carried was just that: a short story about the things that Vietnam soldiers physically carried woven with the psychological burden of war, thus making it a vehicle for studying metaphor. I soon realized there was more to O’Brien’s narrative, so it found a place on my “I should have read this by now” list. I’m glad I did because it made me think about the nature of truth, storytelling, and the limits of fiction.
Story and truth are two concepts with which O’Brien is concerned in the book. The words “A Work of Fiction by Tim O’Brien” accompany the title on the front page. I found this curious, considering that the book is dedicated to the men of the Alpha Company, who are named by name or pseudonym. Therefore, the story must be true in the sense that it is based on factual events. O’Brien indicates this by including these words from John Ransom’s Andersonville Diary: “This book is essentially different from any other that has been published concerning the ‘late war’ or any of its incidents. Those who have had any such experience as the author will see its truthfulness at once, and to all other readers it is commended as a statement of actual things by one who experienced them to the fullest” (5). The “late war” referenced here is the American Civil War, not Vietnam, and John Ransom is a former Union prisoner of war. So why make a point to call the book a “work of fiction?” My only guess is that Anderson’s introductory words resonate with O’Brien’s examination of the nature of truth in a narrative. Whether or not the events recorded in the narrative are factually accurate or completely fictional, the “truthfulness” of the story lies underneath those events.
In English class, we would call this “truthfulness” the theme. It would serve as a moral to the story. However, early on, O’Brien makes it clear that there is no moral to the story of Vietnam through Mitchell Sanders, who while staring down at the corpse of a Viet Cong boy, says ironically, “there’s a definite moral here.” Sanders can’t specify what the moral is, only that there is one in a dead boy of about fifteen or sixteen clothed in shorts and sandals and outfitted with a rifle, some extra ammunition, and a pouch of rice. Ultimately, there’s no sense to a young boy ready for war, no sense other than the inevitability of his death.
O’Brien explodes the idea of a moral by considering its adjectival definition, that of the judgment between right and wrong. “A true war story is never moral,” he writes in his chapter entitled “How to Tell a True War Story,” as he tells the story about how a mine obliterated Curt Lemon and how his Rat Kiley, Lemon’s best friend, subsequently unloaded his rifle into a baby buffalo (78). The truth isn’t in the details of how things happened, since O’Brien writes that it doesn’t matter if there was a Lemon, a Rat Kiley, a baby buffalo, if “beginning to end, it’s all made up” (97). The war story was never in those details but in the nature of the telling of a “love story”: two best friends for whom the war all but disappeared when they were together; two young men who helped each other remember what it’s like to be innocent as children. The true war story is “about sunlight… the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do” (97). It’s not about the facts of the war itself but about the humans caught in the thick of it: the VC boy and Curt Lemon, blown up into a tree and retrieved piece by piece by his fellow company men. A true war story is about “truthfulness,” as Ransom puts it; in other words, the fullness of truth, separate from the person telling it.
That’s at least part of what O’Brien grapples with when putting a story about his personal experience with war on paper. He says that “by telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others” (173). By doing so, the author may not find a moral or a theme. But they “make the dead talk” (240). They animate the people who were part of that time; the people who were perhaps the only true part of the story.
A true war story has no theme the way that stories do. The moral evaporates as soon as you put a finger on it. It is both truth and fiction at the same time, while never fully committing to either. If anything, a war story's only commitment is to the people represented in it, to their actual experience, making a story about war a sacred telling that transcends the trappings of fiction.
O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Mariner Books, 1990.