The Essence of Vietnam

When I sat down to write this blog about Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, I started out by brainstorming ideas. I listed possible thematic topics and the main things I remembered about the story, just like we always do in class. Here is my list of things that I remembered.

• “His jaw was in his throat, his eye was a star-shaped hole.”
• The sucking noise as Kiowa is pulled under the shit field
• “Mellow man. We got ourselves a nice mellow war today”
• The pantyhose of Norman Baker’s girlfriend that he tied around his neck as a good luck charm
• Someone singing “Lemon Tree” as as they were throwing Curt Lemon’s body parts to the ground
• Rat calling his dead best friend’s sister a dumb cooze

I tried to remember what I considered the really important quotations. These really important quotations were specific statements about stories because I recalled Wasowski saying that storytelling was the main theme of this novel. The only one I could think of, however, was from the last chapter that I had just read. It was something about stories keeping the dead alive, and ultimately unhelpful.

I was stumped. None of the things on my list related to a specific thematic topic, and all of them seemed completely unrelated and unimportant. They were just things that I had found interesting and that my brain decided to randomly store away. I sighed and looked at my list again, closer and more critically this time, and I almost laughed at the irony of it. My list illustrates the same exact things about memory, purpose, war, and stories that O’Brien is trying to say throughout the entire novel.

To begin with, this list is full of embellishments and inaccuracies. I have no idea why I thought it was Norman Baker who carried his girlfriend’s pantyhose, but it was not him; it was Henry Dobbins. Maybe it was because I imagine someone with the name Norman Baker to be a gentle and sentimental, the very type of person who would carry his girlfriend’s pantyhose across the world to war. Additionally though, Rat Kiley never called his best friend’s sister a dumb cooze. It was the O’Brien who expressed this, Rat was just sad and angry. Finally, never was the noise described when Kiowa was pulled under the shit field. The narrator described the rain, the mud, the stench, the way the earth seemed to just swallow Kiowa, but never the sound. I was the one who added that extra detail, and it was this detail that was never really there that stuck with me.

While all these things technically are not true, they are what I remember the story as. They were the “truth” of the story for me, and if anyone had asked me what The Things They Carried was about, those are things I would have told them. The thing is (besides just blatantly naming the wrong character) none of these inaccuracies or embellishments really detract from the story; in fact they add to it. By having it be Rat who called the sister a dumb cooze, the reader can more easily comprehend the depth of his anger toward her for never writing back after pouring his heart out to her. Emphasizing the sound of the earth sucking Kiowa into it conveys the horror and helplessness everyone involved would have felt. Just like O’Brien, I unconsciously “wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would fell exactly what he felt.”

Furthermore, this list is also not super connected, and does not seem to have a theme or purpose connecting it. Sure all of them can be traced to the death of someone, but this is a book about the Vietnam War, everything can be traced to someone’s death. This lack of connection and purpose is the whole point of the novel though. War does not have a moral or a purpose; it is senseless. The things we remember from do not have rhyme or reason. They represent what we felt and what influenced us the most. “There’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe ‘Oh.'” It does not need to make sense. It does not need to have a purpose because war does not.

O’Brien’s stories are not super important stories about big battles and life-changing events. They are small, seemingly unimportant, and probably inaccurate and embellished upon, but they are the essence of what Vietnam was for Tim O’Brien, just like how my inaccurate and arbitrary list is the essence of what The Things They Carried meant to me.