Vietnam veteran Tim O'Brien on fictionalizing his war stories
WARNING: This audio contains discussion of suicide.
This fall, as Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33 year run, we're revisiting episodes selected from the show's archive. This interview originally aired January 15, 1995.
Tim O'Brien was just 22 years old when he was drafted into the U.S. Army to serve in the Vietnam War. Although O'Brien contemplated making a run for Canada, he says cowardice and the fear of not being loved compelled him to go to war. He spent a year in Vietnam in 1969 and won the Purple Heart. When he returned to the U.S., he enrolled at Harvard, but soon dropped out to write books, many of which explore the effects of the Vietnam War on young soldiers like himself.
O'Brien won the National Book Award for his 1978 novel, Going After Cacciato, and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for his 1994 title, In the Lake of the Woods. But he's perhaps best known for The Things They Carried. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, it was named a Best Book of the Century by the New York Times.
Published in 1990, The Things They Carried chronicles the thoughts and experiences of foot soldiers in Vietnam through a series of linked short stories. In the title story, O'Brien lists the things the men carry – physical items such as chewing gum and M-16 assault rifles, but also "grief, terror, love, longing," and "the common secret of cowardice."
O'Brien spoke to Eleanor Wachtel in Toronto in late 1994. He had recently gone back to Vietnam for the first time in 25 years.
On serving in My Lai, a year after the massacre
"In 1969, when I was a foot soldier over in Vietnam, we knew nothing about the My Lai massacre.
"It was our area of operations and on a daily basis we'd walk through the village of My Lai and the adjacent villages. It was an extremely hostile place, much more so than any other part of Vietnam that we'd worked in, but we had no knowledge of why we were hated so much.
"And then, about nine months into my tour, the story of the massacre broke in the newspapers, and suddenly we realized why these people despised us so much.
We didn't cross that line, though, between murder and rage. We managed to comport ourselves with some sort of virtue.- Tim O'Brien
We had lost a lot of men in that area — there were a lot of snipers and land mines — and we felt the same sorts of frustrations and anger that Charlie Company had felt. We didn't cross that line, though, between murder and rage.
"We managed to comport ourselves with some sort of virtue. To contain the rage and to contain the frustration. And thank God we didn't cross that line."
Returning to Vietnam 25 years later
"I'm glad I did it. It was an extraordinary revisiting, in the sense that the horrid memories remain, they'll never go away. But alongside those terrible pictures, there are now other pictures. Pictures of peace. I remember a rice paddy 25 years ago literally bubbling with machine gun fire.
"And now that same rice paddy lives in my memory in another way — it's just so gorgeous, and the golden sunlight is striking it and there's a water buffalo, and a little boy walking across a paddy dyke. So side by side with those images of horror, there are now images of peace.
"It's nice to have that balance back."
How war stories help us understand life at home
"My purpose in writing books is not to do nonfiction. I'm not writing about bombs and bullets and military manoeuvres. My purpose is to write about the human heart, and the human intellect, and the pressures that are put on the heart and on the brain.
"There's a desire to use the materials life gives us to examine that which is important, and what's important, I think, is that human struggle of good against evil. War has a way of presenting characters with incredible choices.
"Do I keep walking, or do I lie down and quit? Do I go to a war, or do I not go to a war? Do I pull a trigger or do I not? Do I run or do I stay? Those are big choices, and they're made on a daily basis in a war.
My purpose is to write about the human heart, and the human intellect, and the pressures that are put on the heart and on the brain.- Tim O'Brien
"But similarly, in life we're confronted with the same kinds of choices. Do I marry her or not? Do I stay married or not? Do I forgive or not? How do I forgive? Can I forgive?
"Whatever materials we run across in our lives, I think as writers we have to use them to explore those struggles of the human spirit."
Tim O'Brien's comments have been edited and condensed.
If you or someone you know is struggling, here's where to get help:
- Talk Suicide Canada: 1-833-456-4566 (phone) | 45645 (text between 4 p.m. and midnight ET).
- Kids Help Phone: 1-800-668-6868 (phone), live chat counselling on the website.
- Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention: Find a 24-hour crisis centre.
This guide from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health outlines how to talk about suicide with someone you're worried about.
