BY LARA ARIKAN
larisarikan@gmail.com
*This is the latter part of a two-part piece on Tim O’Brien’s book “The Things They Carried.” The first part is accessible online on Bilkent News’ website.
As the beginning of the first paragraph quotes a passage describing the abuse of an animal, readers may want to use their discretion in choosing whether or not to read that part of the article.
The Things They Carried is not a condemnation of war as I would have expected. Among the truly horrible stories, there was one that really hit me, the story of a water buffalo: “After supper Rat Kiley went over and stroked its nose. He opened up a can of C rations, pork and beans, but the baby buffalo wasn’t interested. Rat shrugged. He stepped back and shot it through the right front knee…He shot it in the hindquarters and in the little hump at its back. He shot it twice in the flanks. It wasn’t to kill; it was to hurt. He put the rifle muzzle up against the mouth and shot the mouth away…He shot off the tail, he shot away chunks of meat below the ribs…All the while the baby buffalo was silent, or almost silent, just a light bubbling sound where the nose had been.” The story was vile to me, the reactions of the other soldiers crowding into my throat: “The whole platoon stood there watching, feeling all kinds of things, but there wasn’t a great deal of pity for the baby water buffalo…We had witnessed something essential, something brand-new and profound, a piece of the world so startling there was not yet a name for it… Mitchell Sanders took out his yo-yo. ‘Well, that’s Nam,’ he said. ‘Garden of Evil. Over here, man, every sin’s real fresh and original.’” And then O’Brien takes a breath, and I take a breath as well as the scene plays in my head. And we begin again, and this time he talks about something different, just a paragraph down. “The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat…it’s not pretty, exactly. It’s astonishing. It fills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not…like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference – a powerful, implacable beauty – and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly.” Here we are again at beauty! It seems to chase me around, or perhaps what it snags onto is not me but life itself, an incredible thing that O’Brien speaks of in the next paragraph: “At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil – everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self – your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it.” I know this sharp aliveness; the concept resonates within me for a different death than war. “In the midst of evil you want to be a good man,” O’Brien continues. “You’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable.”
I am not an American. I was born years and years after Vietnam. My judgments come from observations of secondary sources, the words and eyes of people reacting to the war; I’ve spoken to only two people who would know firsthand, and one laughed at me and said, “Vietnam is nobody’s favorite war.” I should have realized more fully how sensitive this is and how carefully I must pick my words. Perhaps this is exactly how they had felt about Vietnam, the artists and filmmakers, raised as Americans and more intuitive than I can be; their work can be daring but is never exactly raw, always careful to not disturb a wound that may slowly be healing. O’Brien may have felt some of the same: “The Things They Carried” doesn’t cry out its message in the blunt, heated, distinctly opinionated voice used by people young, or hard headed, or, usually, both. But it does murmur this message, with bland statements and a quiet insistence to show that here on this theme there is nothing truly definite: “For the common soldier, war has the feel – the spiritual texture – of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery…You can’t tell where you are, or why you’re there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.” This is a point I’ve repeated throughout this piece, but it’s not the only point O’Brien makes. His quiet first chapter speaks of things carried in the bush, and the second refers back to it, in the context of a visit long after the war: “all the things we still carried through our lives.”
This is what America carries: guilt and pride and tremulous divisions, rejection and confusion. Some soldiers would have thought they were fighting for their own country. Some would have dreamt of helping Vietnam as representatives of America, the great parent of the world, come to liberate her children. Americans at home would have been calling for a universal good, a concept that some believed was deeply separate from war, that couldn’t ever come to be through violence. Some believed it could, and still do believe – the issue is complex and morally debatable and extremely important, thoroughly captivating. This internal conflict become external is what O’Brien has given voice to in his work. “They carried diseases….They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself – Vietnam, the place, the soil – a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky…They carried their own lives.” And the whole book adds to this list the intangibles of stress and disillusionment, of a motherland of isolation, of a war remembered for an arrested, collective disparity of truth and division of opinion – “and for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.”