War Stories.

Everyone deals with death in a different way. Some enter a depression or refuse to accept their loss. Some cope well and strive to remember those who have left this world, while others never say a word about the dead. It is apparent that Tim O’Brien uses stories to cope with the trauma of death. Throughout his novel The Things They Carried, he uses many different techniques in dealing with this difficult but unavoidable subject.O’Brien states in his vignette entitled Love,

“Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a life-time ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”

In How to Tell a True War Story, when Bob Kiley loses his best friend, he writes a letter to his friend’s sister telling her stories of how great her brother was. She never writes back. O’Brien goes on to talk about Bob “Rat” Kiley’s best friend, Curt Lemon; its these stories that make Curt real and make his death that much more significant to us. In the vignette named The Lives of the Dead he writes,

“…Curt Lemon had gone trick-or-treating on Halloween. A dark, spooky night, and so Lemon put on a ghost mask and painted up his body all different colors and crept across the pady to a sleeping village- almost stark naked, the story went, just boots and balls and an M-16- and in the dark Lemon went from hootch to hootch- ringing doorbells, he called it- and a few hours later, when he slipped back into the perimeter, he had a whole sackful of goodies to share with his pals…”

More than this though, the story of a man’s death may tell you something meaningful.

“Right away, Lemon and Rat Kiley started goofing… A nature hike, they thought, not even a war- so they went off into the shade of some giant trees- they were giggling and calling each other yellow mother and playing a silly game they’d invented”… “In the mountains that day, I watched Lemon turn sideways. He laughed and said something to Rat Kiley. Then he took a peculiar half step, moving from shade into bright sunlight, and the booby-trapped 105 round blew him into a tree. The parts were just hanging there, so Dave Jenson and i were ordered to shinny up and peel him off… The gore was horrible, and stays with me. But what wakes me up twenty years later is Dave Jenson singing “Lemon Tree” as we threw down the parts.”

In war, you’re surrounded by death. So much death that it makes you cope in strange ways, sometimes ways you never thought humanly possible. Some soldiers make death less personal through humor, just as Dave Jenson did in the previous quote. For others though, like O’Brien, no amount of humor can take death and make it something its not.

“The place was deserted- no people, no animals-and the only confirmed kill was an old man who lay face-up near a pigpen at the center of the village. His right arm was gone. At his face there were already many flies and gnats
Dave Jenson went over and shook the old man’s hand, “How-dee-doo,” he said. One by one the others did it too…
“Be polite now, Go introduce yourself. Nothing to be afraid of, just a nice old man. Show a little respect for your elders.” Dave Jenson said.”

Despite his comrades urgings, O’Brien could not bring himself to make a mockery of this old man. He was once alive, a real person, and now he was dead.

Comrades.

One usually associates the word comrade with a friend or companion. It originated from the Latin word camara, meaning, “chamber or room” and was adopted into French and Spanish meaning roommate. Whether in the physical or emotional sense, such as the close quarters one shares with a roommate or the emotional connection friends share, the word comrade may be linked to a closeness.
In Friends and Enemies O’Brien writes about two soldiers in his regiment that had sort of a “love-hate-relationship”.  It illustrates how a proximally physical closeness can develop into an friendship. For example, in Enemies O’Brien writes how the two, Lee Strunk and Dave Jensen have a fist fight that escalates Jensen to paranoia. He states,

” One afternoon he began firing his weapon into the air, yelling Strunk’s name, just firing and yelling, and it didn’t stop until he’d rattled off an entire magazine of ammunition…
But that wasn’t the bizzare part.
Because late that same night he borrowed a pistol, gripped it by the barrel, and used it like a hammer to break his own nose.”

The chapter concludes with Jensen confronting Strunk, asking him if this act made them even.

What I believe is truly bizzare is the way in which this incident cause a bond between the two. As O’Brien writes in Friends,

“Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk did not become instant buddies, but they learned to trust each other. Over the next month they often teamed on ambushes. They covered each other on patrol, shared a fox hole, took turns pulling guard at night. In late August the made a pact that if one of htem should ever get totally f***** up- wheelchair wond- they other guy would automatically find a way to end it…”

Its ironic that two people, seemily mortal enemies, are able to become such close comrades. It does show how the etymology of the word links the old definition to the modern.

What makes a Hero?

Traditionally, we think of a hero as one who will sacrifice his own personal desires or safety for that of another or the greater good. In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien considers himself a coward because he can’t muster up the courage to defy the US military draft. He states in pages 56 and 57,

“I remember staring at the old man, then at my hands, then at Canada… I could’ve jumped and started swimming for my life… I couldn’t decide, I couldn’t act, I couldn’t compose myself with even a pretense of modest human dignity… I would not be brave. The old image of myself as a hero, as a man of conscience and courage, all that was just a threadbare pipe dream…“

Traditionally, he would have been considered heroic for choosing to go to war, but from his point of view it was the opposite. Because he chose not to follow his gut instinct, because he chose not to escape the draft, he saw himself as a failure. The reason being, he simply did not believe in the motive behind the war. He thought his life was more important than the cause. He may very well have been right. He stated in page 44,

“There were occasions, I believed, when a nation was justified in using military force to achieve its ends, to stop a Hitler or some comparable evil, and i told myself that in such circumstances i would’ve willingly marched off to the battle. The problem though, was that a draft board did not let you choose your war.“

Furthermore he explains, “Beyond all this, or at the very center, was the raw fact of terror. I did not want to die. Not ever. But certainly not then, not there, not in a wrong war.”

Here we see a dilemma that many faced during the Vietnam War. A moral split. Many felt disconnected from the motive fueling this war and therefore wanted nothing to do with it, unless it involved extracting all military aid from the area. Who’s to say whether Tim O’Brien was a hero for going to war, or a coward for desiring a way out?

In this section of the story, O’Brien aims to twist the mood of the story. He wants us to feel torn for him; to be against his deployment to Vietnam, to feel his entrapment. O’Brien does this by appealing to our emotions as well as human logic.He describes the moral struggle he faces with such detail, that we can almost feel the shear force of his affliction. He expounds in pages 44 -46,

“I feared the war, yes, but i also feared exile… I feared losing the respect of my parents. I feared the law. I feared ridicule and censure…it was a war to stop the Communists, plain and simple, and you were a treasonous (pansy) is you had second thoughts about killing or dying for plain and simple reasons.”

Furthermore, his image aside, he argues,

“I was drafted to fight a war I hated…Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons. I saw no unity of purpose, no consensus on matters of philosophy or history or law…America was divided on these and a thousand other issues… and smart men in pinstripes could not agree even on the most fundamental matters of public policy. The only certainty that summer was moral confusion. It was my view then, and still is, that you don’t make war without knowing why.”

These facts alone tug at our logic. Why go to a war when you don’t even know what you’re truly fighting for? Through his commentary Tim fundamentally states that the war he’s been drafted into is futile. As history played out, we know that this war indeed made no progress to halt communism, and so did O’Brien. This endorses his argument as valid and causes us to feel empathetic towards his situation.

Courage is defined as the ability to face your fears with bravery, confidence and a resolution of spirit. Heroism is conducting one’s self with courage and bravery. In some aspect, O’Brien’s decision was heroic. His decision and the commentary surrounding it manifests within the reader a solid compassion for him. Figures of his past flash before his eyes: himself, his family, his friends which morphed into figures of his future and grew to include a conglomerate of historical figure such as Abe Lincoln and LBJ, and various people he knew or would know throughout his life. He paints a picture of these people, some lining the Canadian shore and some lining American, all calling out to him.

“It was as if there were an audience to my life, the swirl of faces along the river, and in my head i could hear people screaming at me. Traitor! they yelled. Turncoat! (Pansy!) I felt myself blush. I couldn’t tolerate it. I couldn’t endure the mockery, or the disgrace, or the patriotic ridicule. Even in my imagination the shore was just twenty yards away, I couldn’t make myself brave. It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that’s all it was.
And right then i submitted.
I would go to war- I would kill and maybe die- because i was embarrassed not to.
That was the sad thing. And so i sat in the bow of the boat and cried.”

Although O’Brien convinces himself he is a coward. I believe he is too hard on himself; after all it takes courage to go to war as well as to avoid it. But then again, that’s the mood O’Brien strives to create.