About midway through Tim O’Brien’s autobiographical, potentially-fictional memoir The Things They Carried, the author of this first-person account of his tour in Vietnam includes a chapter titled “How to Tell a True Story.” The first sentence in this chapter reads, simply, “This is true.” O’Brien’s book, like most war memoirs written by those who fought and survived, is invariably filled with instances of suffering and death, as well as with examples of young men, boys, really, torn violently from childhood and thrust into surrealistic settings far from home where thousands, or even millions, of foreign people are determined to kill him and his friends. In war, there are countless acts of nobility and sacrifice, but the endeavor is inherently tragic. Addressing the difficulty of writing a true war story with a happy ending or with a moral, he writes the following in “How to Tell a True Story”:
“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue.”
Later in this chapter, O’Brien tells of the death of one of his fellow soldiers, Curt Lemon, killed when a foolish game played with smoke grenades goes horribly awry. “It’s all exactly true,” he writes before providing the details leading to Lemon’s death. It is the surrealism inherent in war, and Vietnam was certainly no exception, that leads to O’Brien’s tortured discussion of the often slim distinctions between true and false. As O’Brien again suggests, the more unbelievable the occurrence, the truer the description:
“In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. It's a question of credibility. Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn't, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness. In other cases you can't even tell a true war story. Sometimes it's just beyond telling.”
As this chapter progresses, O’Brien continues to relate stories of horrific deaths among members of his company. In each such story, he again emphasizes the fundamental truth of his words while reminding the reader, and himself, of the difficulty of writing a false narrative about such tragic events even though the very realism of these examples begs the reader to disbelieve. In a very brief section of his book titled “Good Form,” O’Brien again attempts to articulate the reason for his seeming indifference to the distinctions between truth and fiction. And, again, the horrors endemic in war make the most factual recitations of atrocities seem unbelievable, while fictionalized or partly fictionalized accounts allow for a greater level of believability. In “Good Form,” the author explains the banality of everyday occurrences in a war.
“It's time to be blunt. I'm forty-three years old, true, and I'm a writer now, and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier. Almost everything else is invented. But it's not a game. It's a form. Right here, now, as I invent myself, I'm thinking of all I want to tell you about why this book is written as it is. For instance, I want to tell you this: twenty years ago I watched a man die on a trail near the village of My Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt enough. I remember his face, which was not a pretty face, because his jaw was in his throat, and I remember feeling the burden of responsibility and grief. I blamed myself. And rightly so, because I was present. But listen. Even that story is made up. I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief. Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him.”
O’Brien’s refusal to simply relate in a straightforward and honest manner his experiences and observations during his tour in Vietnam—a war defined as much by the murkiness of the battlefields, in which identifying friend from foe could prove enormously and sometimes tragically difficult, as by the opaqueness of the objectives for which men were being killed and being turned into killers—is testament to the incomprehensibility of his experiences in that divisive conflict. By blurring distinctions between fact and fiction, he is able to confess his sins and unburden his soul without fully purging himself of the weight of responsibility for his actions.
In the book’s final chapter, titled “The Lives of the Dead,” O’Brien again begins his discussion of his experiences in the war. “But this too is true,” he begins his discussion of his memories, decades after the war has ended, of the deaths of his friends, as well as of the “slim young man I killed” and of the anonymous dead he loaded into the back of a truck. O’Brien ends his book largely as he had begun. He leaves the reader entirely uncertain as to the author’s veracity. Was any of this memoir true? In a very important way, and this was Tim O’Brien’s point, the ugliness he describes, the endless tragedies of friends torn apart by bullets and shrapnel, and innocent civilians killed as what is called “collateral damage,” are essential truths of war. All of these events or incidents actually do occur in all wars; whether they occurred in Tim O’Brien’s war is immaterial. His is a book about war, and the essential underlying truths are there.
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