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.