BY LARA ARIKAN
larisarikan@gmail.com
As November draws to a close, I’m finally, perhaps a little reluctantly, returning to the theme I originally intended for this column: I’d wanted to write opinions on material from the Bilkent Library. And so this time I’m going to talk about a book I read around eight months ago, a book mostly isolated from the main elements of my writing so far – it’s more grounded than poetry, and doesn’t centrally concern beauty, or love or intimacy. “The Things They Carried” is a war chronicle about the one American war most fascinating and terrifying to me, the specter of Vietnam. In his book, Tim O’Brien relates memories that reflect sorrow, horror and detachment; the isolation in his stories is not a loneliness of the heart, but of a soldier in the bush and a veteran come back to America, a person perhaps wholly cruel and perhaps a martyr, perhaps sucked into a war he did not choose and yet regardless of that put down by society for his participation in Vietnam, into which he was drafted; Vietnam, for which he could have volunteered as a war for the triumph of freedom and American ideals; a war he fought, then, for a land that now rejected him and a foreign people he may not have helped at all.
Because of my interest in the Vietnam War, I’ve looked through many sources, most of which have been manifestations of emotions secondary to war itself – movies, murals, protest shots; I’ve imbibed the cultural outcry, which is a little different from O’Brien’s confessional tone as he recounts the experiences of an ordinary soldier in the jungle. However, “The Things They Carried” is no history book. “In many cases a true war story cannot be believed,” O’Brien says, sober and unapologetic. “Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true.” It’s not an artistic liberty that he’s taken, but an effort to create some semblance of the messy concept that was the Vietnam War. He wants perhaps to make the jungle seem to us as it was to him, a place where things could change and blur the thin lines of right and wrong, a state of suspended morality and interpreted truths. O’Brien’s words are not necessarily factual, not because of a conflict of emotion or ideology, but because of his intention to make Vietnam both more and less solid, to simulate the strange confusion of this strange war, with the book settling grave doubts into the heart of its reader – was Vietnam the right thing to have done? How did it change America’s opinion of itself – is the nation harder now, more tormented, is it resolutely against another war like this? O’Brien’s prose weaves into his own anecdotes and those of his friends and commanders some ill-defined uncertainties and doubts, the murkiness of the Vietnam War.
The book is full of emotion, the words coming together with a simple purity that evokes in me a stunning sense of tragedy. “The Things They Carried” is not an easy read, but it is fluid; each sentence rolls down to settle deep in my stomach, each an ounce of lead, holding down my insides like mercury. O’Brien’s writing surrounds me with inaction; I am becoming heavier; I want to do something that I cannot against the animal pull of the jungle, of all this constant, tearing death. But it’s not all just death, and it’s not all life; it’s something so deeply touching and moving that I feel completely
thrown off. There is a story within a story of a patrol of men, headed up into the mountains to listen for the enemy: “I’ll tell you,” Mitchell Sanders says – he is our character telling this story – “it’s spooky…the sounds, man. The sounds carry forever. You hear stuff nobody should ever hear…all these different voices. Not human voices, though. Because it’s the mountains. Follow me? The rock – it’s talking. And the fog, too, and the grass and the goddamn mongooses. Everything talks. The trees talk politics, the monkeys talk religion. The whole country. Vietnam.” This story is particularly eerie to me, eerie in the sense that I feel suddenly and desperately how foreign and lonely it must have been for those men in that jungle. And it might be true and it might not be true, and I don’t know if that bothers me; in the end it doesn’t bother me; “in the end,” O’Brien says, “a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about 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. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”