Tim O'Brien and the Art of the True War Story: "Night March" and "Speaking of Courage" - Critical Essay

John H. Timmerman

The Vietnam war story is not simply about the rise and fall of nations (South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Laos, China, Thailand, the United States, the Soviet Union). Rather, it is about the rise and fall of the dreams of individual soldiers--their hopes riddled by disillusionment, their fantasies broken by shrapnel-edged realities. In his Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War, Don Rignalda observes that Washington engaged in the war as a clinical and statistical commodity: "We imposed a carpentered reality on a country (South Vietnam) that wasn't a country at all, but merely a recent, diplomatically created abstraction run by a series of corrupt puppets. Oblivious, Americans became 'cartomaniacs' in Vietnam" (14). Having reduced the Washington-created enemy to ciphers, the cartomaniacs did precisely the same thing to the American soldier. In a war fought according to statistics, and where ciphers are thrown against ciphers, who is left to tell the true war story? Who enters the lives and uncovers the dreams, the dark secrets, the fears and the hopes that bestow personality back on the cipher?

Certainly it is possible to engage the experience of war exclusively on scholarly and academic terms, to configure the experience according to statistics and historical accounts. Every time human experience is rendered as fact, however, the human place in war becomes more abstracted and more simplistic. In "We're Adjusted Too Well," Tim O'Brien voiced his dismay that the nation's hope for everything to slide back into some vague state of being "normal"--or "adjusted"--has been fulfilled all too well. For his part, O'Brien says, "I wish we were more troubled" (207). If American society is no longer troubled, if it has exorcised a segment of our historical past, it has also occluded something of our human nature. War stories must evoke the dreams and lives of individual soldiers, as opposed to giving a statistical or historical accounting of data.

This telling raises several aesthetic questions. Can one capture the reality of the event in such a way that the reader imaginatively participates in it? Is there a point where the imaginative life evokes a greater reality than the factual accounting, so that the reader understands not only what happened but also why it happened and how it affected the soldier? Furthermore, as the war recedes into the past, can the writer preserve an authentic memory of it, free from romantic idealism or bitter cynicism? Or are we better off letting it slide, as two of O'Brien's characters (the fathers of Paul Berlin and Norman Bowker) suggest?

A gap inevitably opens up between the imaginary casting of an event (the fictive event) and the factual details of that event (the historical chronicle). That forces of the First Cavalry Division, for example, combined with CIDG soldiers to kill 753 NVA regulars near Fire Base Jamie on December 6,1969, is the historical chronicle. What happened in the hearts and minds of the soldiers who fought that battle is not conveyed by clinical data. To uncover that is the task of fiction.

This is precisely the task that Tim O'Brien undertakes.

The essential dialectic of the war story lies in this interplay between reality as data and the reality of the human spirit. O'Brien aims for nothing less than resolving this dialectic into an integrated whole, often by means of a metafictional discourse in which his characters and narrators engage in the dialectic themselves. Two notable examples are his companion short stories "Night March" and "Speaking of Courage," both of which pose a fundamental distinction between the fact of what "actually" happened and the reality experienced by the individual.

Examining these two works also raises questions about how the true war story can be told. Is the disparity between personal experience and the historical facticity of war irresolvable? Or is it possible to achieve some integration, and if so, how? Such questions further define the complementary and conflicting elements of these two stories. After examining the stories, therefore, I will consider what in general constitutes the true war story for Tim O'Brien.

"Night March" is O'Brien's most widely anthologized story. It first appeared in Redbook in May 1975 under the title "Where Have You Gone, Charming Billy?" and was revised to become a chapter of Going After Cacciato in 1978. It still stands independently, but in Going After Cacciato it is woven seamlessly into the rather wide-ranging plot of one man's imaginary long walk away from war. All the stories in Cacciato stem from Paul Berlin's reflections while on observation post. Past horrors and present dreams (echoing the book's epigraph from Sassoon) buckle together at the moment of "observing." But at that moment, Paul Berlin's actual goal, we are told, is simply to live long enough to escape to the real world. What constitutes the real world is the essential issue.

The internal tensions of the war story "Night March" may best be understood by comparing it to O'Brien's postwar story "Speaking of Courage." First published in the Summer 1976 issue of Massachusetts Review and then in Prize Stories and The O. Henry Awards in 1978, "Speaking of Courage" finally became a part of O'Brien's 1990 work The Things They Carried. The two stories are connected in several ways. For example, the 1976 version of "Speaking of Courage" reprises chapter 14 of Going After Cacciato, where Paul Berlin thinks he could have won the Silver Star if he had rescued Frenchie Tucker. In "Speaking of Courage," Norman Bowker thinks he could have won the Silver Star if he had rescued Kiowa. But neither Berlin nor Bowker rescued, and neither won. Like men on plastic ponies at the carousel, they hang suspended, bouncing up and down between reality and fantasy.

More pointedly, however, both stories address a conflict between the reality of war and the reality of normal, civilized life. In "Night March," Paul Berlin tries to deny the reality of the war he is in so that he can survive. He endures his war life by a daily pretending, a fantastic escape not unlike Cacciato's imaginary trip to Paris. He insists that his primary reality lies elsewhere, in what the infantrymen in Vietnam called "the World." The World is a state of mind--an absence of fear and conflict, an idealized place that really exists nowhere. For Cacciato the imaginary utopia is Paris; for the average infantryman like Paul Berlin, it is simply the United States.

This displacement of reality through insistence on the unreality of the war becomes necessary to survive. Each individual is forced to supply his or her own reasons for personal actions and the personal meanings of those actions as well. For example, The Things They Carried first introduces a young Vietnamese soldier in "Spin," and then, nine chapters later, in "The Man I Killed," the narrator details killing this soldier and creates a short hypothetical biography for him--a "past" used to escape the reality of his death. The next chapter, "Ambush," suggests that perhaps the man is not really dead after all. Finally, near the end of the book and after three more variations of the event, the narrator's nine-year-old daughter beseeches him, "'Daddy, tell the truth.... Did you ever kill anybody?'" The narrator reflects that he "can say, honestly, 'Of course not.'" But then again, he "can say, honestly, 'yes'" (204). The tension is unnerving. There are too many vagaries in war. How then does the writer work towa rd the "true" war story?

In an interview, O'Brien reflects on the dialectic between reality and fantasy as an essential state of the war novel. The war novel contains an element of surreality in order to deny the horror. O'Brien observes that

In war, the rational faculty begins to diminish ... and what takes over is surrealism, the life of the imagination. The mind of the soldier becomes part of the experience--the brain seems to flow out of your head, joining the elements around you on the battlefield. It's like stepping outside yourself. War is a surreal experience, therefore it seems quite natural and proper for a writer to render some of its aspects in a surreal way. (qtd. in McCaffrey 135)

Moreover, citing The Red Badge of Courage as an example, O'Brien adds that "Every war seems formless to the men fighting it" (135). So soldiers dream; they pretend and deny in order to diminish the horror. Precisely because it captures that human reality in the midst of war and unbelievable horror, O'Brien claims that " Cacciato is the most realistic thing I've written. The life of the imagination is real" (142). The life of the imagination is real precisely because it embraces the experience, moving beyond factual data.

"Night March" is an "interior" war story--the story of a combat participant immediately involved in the war. From the outset, the story is couched in denials and pretending. Reality, after all, lies in that ambiguous other place, the World. As the "Night March" platoon moves in "the dark, single file," as if in an actual nightmare, the pattern of negation intensifies: "There was no talking now. No more jokes" (Cacciato 186). At the same time, Paul Berlin's denial of the fact of war intensifies: "He was pretending he was not in the war. And later, he pretended, it would be morning, and there would not be a war" (186). The negations develop through the early stages of the story, often closing off a paragraph of objective description by the omniscient narrator, as if each stab at engaging the fact of war is deflected by an act of will. The mind of Paul Berlin clutches on the negatives: "There was not yet a moon" (187); "So he tried not to think" (187); "He would not be afraid ever again" (188).

The reality of war that Paul Berlin struggles to avoid, however, will not disappear. O'Brien lets it slip into the first paragraph almost accidentally, as if flitting momentarily through the gates of denial erected in Berlin's mind: "Pretending he had not watched Billy Boy Watkins die of fright on the field of battle" (186). Historical fact keeps leaking through, even as the denials mount. It even comes as snatches of a song: "Where have you gone, Billy Boy, Billy Boy." Bits and pieces of the grim fact keep intruding: this is war; Billy Boy Watkins died.

Denying Billy Boy Watkins's death, however, is necessary in order for Paul Berlin to deny his own relentless fear. Soldiers are supposed to be brave, after all. And Paul Berlin tries mightily to keep the pose of bravery: "He would laugh when the others made jokes about Billy Boy, and he would not be afraid ever again" (188). But like the darkness, fear envelopes him. "The trick," Paul Berlin reflects, "was not to take it personally" (188). But such a trick is impossible.

Paul Berlin wishes that some day he may be courageous enough to laugh at death. Through laughter he might be absolved of fear. It is not coincidental that tragicomedy has surfaced as a subgenre in war literature. Tragicomedy as a literary mode essentially sees the world as an evil place; the necessary human response to it is laughter, for laughter holds evil in abeyance and demarcates the wholeness of the individual human. A good description of the genre arises in Ken Kesey's tragicomic novel One Flew over the Cuckoo Nest where the embattled Randal Patrick MacMurphy, who, incidentally, led an escape from a prison camp during the Korean War, exclaims, "When you lose your laugh, you lose your footing" (65).

A tragicomic scene in "Night March" offers contrasting reactions to the reality of war. A "child-faced" soldier (Cacciato), smelling of Doublemint gum--that keen reminder of the World--creeps up to Paul Berlin and offers him a stick of gum. As Cacciato and Berlin relax and chew their gum, Cacciato begins whistling tunelessly. He isn't even aware of his whistling. The whistling is contrasted to Paul's giggling. Whereas Berlin is painfully aware of his own giggling, Cacciato is oblivious to his whistling. While Berlin fights, and fails, to escape the present fact of war, Cacciato seems to do so naturally. He seems to have escaped to his imaginary reality.

The question of time arises. Neither Berlin nor Cacciato has a watch. Cacciato says "Time goes faster when you don't know the time" (215) and remembers that Billy Boy Watkins owned two watches. But Billy Boy is dead. Even with two watches he doesn't know the time. The irony wrenches the two soldiers into a confrontation with the fact of Billy Boy's death.

This was no ordinary death. All along Paul Berlin has been fighting his personal fear, but Billy Boy actually died of fear: "A heart attack! You hear Doc say that? A heart attack on the field of battle, isn't that what Doc said?" (192). The very fear they feared most had, in fact, gripped and killed Billy Boy Watkins. Dozens of horrible ways to die, and he died of fear.

Suddenly Paul Berlin begins to giggle--suffocating, spasmodic laughter that has him helpless in the grass:

He giggled. He couldn't stop it, so he giggled, and he imagined it clearly. He imagined the medic's report. He imagined Billy's surprise. He giggled, imagining Billy's father opening the telegram: SORRY TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON BILLY BOY WAS YESTERDAY SCARED TO DEATH IN ACTION IN THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM. Yes, he could imagine it clearly.

He giggled. He rolled onto his belly and pressed his face in the wet grass and giggled, he couldn't help it. (193)

To survive his own fear Paul Berlin battles it with laughter. But it is laughter on the verge of hysteria; since nothing makes any sense, all one can do is laugh.

As he lies giggling on the grass, now watching the clouds pass over the moon, marking the passing of time and the nightmare, Paul Berlin now imagines himself talking with his father. As in "Speaking of Courage," the absent father is one of the most important characters in this story. He represents both a confessor figure and also an incarnation of personal and moral values in a war without apparent purpose or value. And now Paul Berlin finds a way to respond to this father:

Giggling, lying now on his back, Paul Berlin saw the moon move. He could not stop. Was it the moon? Or the clouds moving, making the moon seem to move? Or the boy's round face, pressing him, forcing out the giggles. "It wasn't so bad," he would tell his father. "I was a man. I saw it the first day, the very first day at the war, I saw all of it from the start, I learned it, and it wasn't so bad, and later on, later on it got better, later on, once I learned the tricks, later on it wasn't so bad." He couldn't stop. (194-95)

The moon clouds up again. The column moves on. Cacciato--to this point unnamed, a scarcely seen visitant called "the boy"--hands Paul Berlin a stick of Black Jack gum--"the precious stuff." And then we learn the boy's name with his ironic jest: "'You'll do fine,' Cacciato said. 'You will. You got a terrific sense of humor'" (195)--ironic in that it was fear, not humor, that provoked Berlin's uncontrolled giggling.

The moral argument that the horrors of war so threaten human sensibility that they must be escaped by fantasy or fought by laughter (both of which Berlin does with only limited success) is precisely reversed by the conditions of the postwar story. Having now arrived back in the World, the ideal world always dreamed of during the war, the veteran discovers that he carries with him the undeniable fact of war. He cannot escape the memory. Oddly, the present world now becomes the fantasy; the past war has become the reality. The fantasy is engendered by the simple fact that people in the world have chosen to deny the reality of the war; they don't want to hear about it. Least of all do they want to hear about it from the returned veteran, which would make their abstracted, statistical notions of war altogether too real.

Other thematic patterns of "Night March" survive intact in "Speaking of Courage." Norman Bowker was originally Paul Berlin. Like Paul Berlin, he has struggled with courage and cowardice. He too seeks a confessor-father into whose ears he wants to pour his story. But in this carefully crafted tale, all of civilization seems to block the telling, and thereby to deny reality to Norman Bowker.

Such a story requires a different sort of telling. The nightmare of the observation post and the circling memories are now replaced by the tranquillity of the home town and Bowker's circling drive around the lake, encapsulating the weary circularity of his own life and mind. Paul Berlin's desperate effort to escape time in "Night March" is replaced by Bowker's uncanny ability to tell time from the feel of the day--or night. Paul Berlin in fact shares Norman Bowker's preternatural ability to "feel" the time. However, during the conflation of memories that occurs during his stint on observation post duty from midnight to 6 a.m., time itself seems suspended as the surreal images glide in and out of his mind. Norman Bowker is never separated from the consciousness of time, now that he has nothing to do, nowhere to go, little to fill up the hours except aimless traveling. While Paul Berlin sought to deny time, Bowker seems trapped in a psychological clock, ticking off meaningless hours.

The difference in how one apprehends time also mirrors the difference between fact and fantasy. Eric Schroeder makes a distinction "between time past and time present and ... this becomes complicated by the introduction of another temporal dimension: time imagined." The result, Schroeder points out, is an indeterminacy about "not only when a particular event happened, but whether it happened" ("The Past and the Possible" 124). Just as Paul Berlin imagines life in the World occurring simultaneously during his six hours on observation post, so too Bowker attempts to reconstruct his present in the World by conflating past realities and imaginary time--what might have been.

We see, then, several points of comparison developing between the two stories. "Night March" shows a soldier, Paul Berlin, during the war; "Speaking of Courage" shows a soldier, Norman Bowker, after the war. Paul Berlin attempts to escape the reality of war through fantasy, particularly that of the World; Norman Bowker finds that even though he is in the World, he cannot escape the reality of war. Both characters attempt to escape time; both develop a preternatural ability to "feel" time; and neither can fully escape time imagined--that is, the reality of personal events that shape the entirety of their lives.

Furthermore, Paul Berlin reacts to his immediate world of war by trying to drive back fear with laughter, even though it borders on hysteria. Norman Bowker finds himself in a grim, absurdist world where nobody listens to what he has to say. The Things They Carried is very much a novel about telling one's story into an apparent abyss. How does one tell the truth about war when no one wants to listen? Here lies the essential issue for the writer of the true war story. The issue is complicated, however, by the very question of whether language and narrative are adequate to tell the story. Thus the narrative in both stories is roughly circular, replaying events, lurching into indecision, in an effort to get the true story woven into a whole.

"Speaking of Courage" opens on Norman Bowker cruising around the lake one Fourth of July: "The war was over and there was no particular place to go" (The Things They Carried [TTC] 157). Whereas in "Night March" there is a denial of place, in this story there is no place to go. The World is everywhere the same as Bowker remembers it, but it is now perceived as flat--the sameness becomes empty, for all of it is seen through memory shaped by war. Aimlessly, like a patrol without direction, he wheels his father's "big Chevy" on its seven-mile loop around the lake. The lake itself is flatly prosaic--a nondescript midwestern lake that was "a good audience for silence" (158). Thus the central metaphor is established--an aimless, circular traveling around a vast silence. Readers of O'Brien's If I Die in a Combat Zone will recognize the same pattern in chapter 3 of that work, where O'Brien recalls driving around the lake before being drafted, weighing his own options, "moving with care from one argument to the next" (25). In "Speaking of Courage," the "smooth July water, and an immense flatness everywhere" (TTC 159) suggest the same uncertainty in the returned veteran's life.

As he travels, Norman Bowker's mind aimlessly circles around patterns of recollection. The first involves his prewar memory, imaged specifically in his boyhood sweetheart, Sally Kramer, now Mrs. Sally Gustafson. Norman spots her working in her yard and almost pulls over "just to talk." But knowing "there was really nothing he could say to her" (159), he accelerates past. Sally represents things lost, the way things might have been, and also, perhaps, a measure of Norman's internal change.

So too Norman measures the town by the huge psychological distance he has grown from it. The town is home, but "The town seemed remote somehow. Sally was married and Max [his boyhood friend] was drowned and his father was home watching baseball on national TV" (159). While the World falls into its holiday routines, Norman Bowker wanders slightly apart from it all. He is the Prufrockian man, alone in a world undisturbed by his anguish, and like Eliot's Prufrock, he also finds that "It is impossible to say just what I mean." What he says is that tired phrase that passed the lips of countless Vietnam soldiers when faced with yet one more impossible task--a polite, meaningless phrase rippling with undertones of anguish: "'No problem,' he muttered" (159). No problem: it was an act of denial in order to survive--a lie then, a lie now. His aimless circling works then to demonstrate Norman Bowker's inability to settle back into the routine of the World and exemplifies the psychological distance between his former an d present selves.

The second pattern evoked by his aimless wandering is the recollection of war. The imagined meeting with Sally initiates a recollection of Norman's war experience, but like Paul Berlin's, this experience is couched in terms of denial: "He would not say a word about how he'd almost won the Silver Star for valor" (160). The need to speak of it, however, is nearly overwhelming, so Norman Bowker invents a conversation with his father: the way things should have been. The third pattern in the story, then, develops the imaginary confession. The war story is spoken into unhearing ears, signaled by the change in verbs: they all become "might have" or "would The discourse takes place wholly in the fantasy world.

What people would have heard, if only they had listened, was Norman Bowker's story of how he had courage, of how he almost saved his friend Kiowa, except for the terrible stink of the shitfield. His father was the appropriate one to initiate the hearing, for his father also knew the truth of war: "that many brave men did not win medals for their bravery, and that others won medals for doing nothing" (160). But his father is a disappeared self for Norman Bowker--the person who, himself having had no one to listen, has buried the stories and adopted the routine manners of the present by no longer listening. Norman Bowker's father is immersed in his own pointless circularity, watching players on TV circle the bases in the great national pastime.

Nonetheless, Norman Bowker mentally relates his story to the imagined confessor-father. Recounting the experience in the muck field, he pauses before the worst parts:

"Sounds pretty wet," his father would've said, pausing briefly.

"So what happened?"

"You sure you want to hear this?"

"Hey, I'm your father." (162)

This father murmurs, "Slow and sweet, take your time," and Norman slows the big Chevy, the mechanical replacement for his father, on the circular road. He observes the fireworks under preparation for the Fourth of July celebration. Stories start to converge. As he nears the actual fireworks the remembered story of the mortar attack in the muck field intensifies. Oddly, Sally Kramer-Gustafson momentarily intrudes as the imagined listener. But she is too much of the present. She couldn't listen, Norman Bowker realizes, for the reality of war is too powerful, too overwhelming, too truthful. She would wince even at the language. But his father, were his father here listening, would understand "perfectly well that it was not a question of offensive language but of fact. His father would have sighed and folded his arms and waited" (165). It is a matter of how to tell a true war story; the facts themselves are offensive, not the language that directs the facts. Finally Norman Bowker, after recollecting Kiowa's death , realizes: "A good war story,... but it was not a war for war stories, nor for talk of valor, and nobody in town wanted to know about the terrible stink. They wanted good intentions and good deeds. But the town was not to blame, really. It was a nice little town, very prosperous, with neat houses and all the sanitary conveniences" (169).

After his seventh circle of the lake, Norman Bowker pulls into a drive-in restaurant for something to eat. Ironically, he is as ignorant of procedures at the drive-in as the patrons there are of his war. The conflict of realities is almost perfectly, heart-breakingly, completed. He honks his horn for the car-hop girl: "The girl sighed, leaned down, and shook her head. Her eyes were as fluffy and airy-light as cotton candy" (170). Condescendingly she points to the intercom and asks, "You blind?" Yes. Indeed. By virtue of his war experience, Norman is now blind to the ways of the world. He'll never see straight again; it will always be circular, through the crooked paths of a memory he can neither deny nor express.

The irony intensifies, for the abstracted voice over the intercom rasps at Norman in field communications from the war. The phrases clip out: "Affirmative, copy clear." "Roger-dodger." "Fire for effect. Stand by." The gulf between the intercom voice and Norman's sensibility is nearly overwhelming. The war reality is reduced to a game.

Nonetheless, the very abstractedness of that voice stirs Norman. It is just a piece of metal and some strange electronics next to the Chevy window. Still, through it a voice asks, "Hey, loosen up.... What you really need, friend?" And for a moment, in this weird electronic confessional, Norman almost tells:

"Well," he said, "how'd you like to hear about--"

He stopped and shook his head.

"Hear what, man?"

"Nothing." (171)

He cannot get it out, not even to this depersonalized voice over the inter-com, which, oddly enough, mimics the listening father Norman longs for.

Norman drives slowly away, the longing to tell now a deep, pervasive ache inside:

If it had been possible, which it wasn't, he would have explained how his friend Kiowa slipped away that night beneath the dark swampy field. He was folded in with the war; he was part of the waste.

Turning on his headlights, driving slowly, Norman Bowker remembered how he had taken hold of Kiowa's boot and pulled hard, but how the smell was simply too much, and how he'd backed off and in that way had lost the Silver Star.

He wished he could've explained some of this. How he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to be. The distinction was important. Max Arnold, who loved fine lines, would've appreciated it. And his father, who already knew, would've nodded. (172)

The longing is buried, however, deep in memory. As the war story coils back inside his brain, he stops the Chevy, walks out into the water of the lake like one trying to baptize himself into a new reality, then stands and watches the fireworks, the town's own little fantasy battle. "For a small town, he decided, it was a pretty good show" (173).

"Night March" and "Speaking of Courage" represent two angles of vision on the Vietnam war experience. One a war story, the other a postwar story, they are juxtaposed in patterns of denial and affirmation. From the perspective of Paul Berlin, the immediacy of war must be denied in order to retain the reality of a world where sanity and peace still hold sway. From that of Norman Bowker, the world to which he has returned is deaf to his war experience. But the stories are also very much about the literary art of telling a true war story. Examination of the artistry of the stories is incomplete without consideration of the larger aesthetic issue toward which all the elements point. In fact, each story becomes a metafiction: they are about the process of telling war stories as much as they are war stories themselves. This is a fundamental issue that O'Brien has grappled with and cogently defined during the development of his career: how to tell the true war story.

The Vietnam war was different from earlier wars, and so posed challenges to the writer that often pushed him or her beyond the limits of conventional literary stereotypes. Dennis Vannatta remarks that "part of the problem that fiction writers have had is trying to build an artistic structure around a war that lacks the familiar geometry of clearly established battle lines, troop movements, and advances and retreats" (242). Steven Kaplan observes that "almost all of the literature on the war ... makes clear that the only certain thing during the Vietnam War was that nothing was certain" (43). Oddly, the very uncertainties also provided a certain liberation for the fiction writer. It was possible to speak more freely of courage, of cowardice, of fears and fantasies.

The combat veteran who writes of combat writes from both inside and outside the experience. Chapter 30 of Cacciato provides an interesting gloss on this fact, for by that point in the book, the reader understands that the term observation post is multidimensional in meaning. Literally it is the elevated spot one climbs to in order to observe possible enemy action. But during the long night hours it is also a spot for reflective observation on the war itself. And the observation post is also a self-reflective place. In chapter 30, Berlin had been fiddling with the optics on the night-vision goggles but now is playing a time-guessing game. Vision and time unify all the reflections of the observation post. Now Paul reflects: "It was a matter of hard observation separating illusion from reality. What happened, and what might have happened" (247). He goes on to wonder why evil things happen, and never the pretty things, and then agrees with Doc Peret's view "that observation requires inward-looking, a study of th e very machinery of observation" (247-48). Insight and vision, and Paul wonders, "where was the fulcrum? Where did it tilt from fact to imagination?" (248). The writer undertakes such observation, trying to balance the outside and inside vision, fact and imagination. Such is also the basic strategy for O'Brien's linking independent stories into the thematically unified novel.

The process of the inside and outside vision bears particular significance for O'Brien's The Things They Carried, for here the writer is very much aware of himself writing fiction about a historical reality he himself experienced. The writer abruptly introduces himself into the text--"I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, and the war has been over for a long while" (36). Of course, this may be construed simply as a narrative pose. As Catherine Calloway has pointed out, substantial biographical details of the author differ from those of the narrator (250). Furthermore, in the concluding notes to The Things They Carried, O'Brien again introduces himself as the forty-three-year-old writer, but tells us that "almost everything else is invented." But he insists "it's not a game. It's a form" (203).

Maria S. Bonn points out that "The dizzying interplay of truth and fiction in this novel is not solely aesthetic postmodern gamesmanship but a form that is a thematic continuation of the author's concern throughout his career with the power and capability of story" (13). While soldiers carry many things into battle, as the book's initial chapter details, they also carry many things from battle. In this case, the writer carries stories, sometimes "odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end" (TTC 39), which, like the fragmented war itself, he seeks to place into some kind of order. The writer observes:

Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime 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. (40)

While bits and pieces of the writer flicker in and out of the narration, at one point O'Brien stops the narration altogether and addresses the act of writing itself in "How to Tell a True War Story" (TTC 73--91). He establishes several qualities of the true war story, but the first one seems to contradict what he has said elsewhere about the story's engagement with philosophical and moral substance. In one interview, for example, O'Brien claims that "The writer needs a passionate and knowledgeable concern for the substance of what's witnessed, and that includes the spiritual and theological and political implications of raw experience" (qtd. in McCaffery 137). And in another interview, he points out that "My concerns have to do with abstractions: what's courage and how do you get it? What's justice and how do you achieve it? How does one do right in an evil situation?" (qtd. in Schroeder, "Two Interviews" 145).

But there is a difference between exploring the moral meanings of humans confronting battle and the didactic reduction of that confrontation to moral precept. The true war story, O'Brien says, "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" (TTC 76). Truth to experience is a higher aesthetic value than moral precept. Moral lessons are not given by the writer. Rather, the writer's task is to represent experience authentically so that others understand the event, and from that understanding they may, if they choose, adduce their own moral lessons.

This is particularly true regarding courage, the vexing issue before Paul Berlin and Norman Bowker. What actually constitutes courage? Perhaps that's the wrong question because it's too easy to give categorical responses. Either Paul or Norman might have won the Silver Star--a physical representation of an act of courage. Much harder is to assess courage as a quality of human nature itself, yet that is the task O'Brien sets for himself. In an interview, O'Brien says that "Courage interpenetrates the whole fabric of a life. To take a strand out and say this is courage and this is something else violates a central humanness" (qtd. in Naparsteck 4). If there is an ethics of writing for O'Brien, it assumes that the highest moral imperative for the writer is an authentic revelation of human nature.

A second challenge to the writer of the true war story arises precisely out of that effort toward authenticity. Every event is recalled by the intellect and as the emotions experienced during the event; writing involves, as Hemingway understood, the head and the heart. O'Brien puts the challenge like this: "In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed" (TTC 78). The difficulty is precisely enacted through Paul Berlin in Cacciato. The story is as much about the fantasy of war as it is about the so-called reality. Soldiers are dreamers: that dreaming is a part of their reality, what O'Brien calls "that surreal seemingness" (Cacciato 78). Paradoxically, as Steven Kaplan has observed, the war fiction becomes "more real than the events upon which it is based" (46) when the life of the imagination arranges the experience of the facts. Liter ary art is never straightforward fact; rather, it arranges facts to communicate what the author wishes to seem true for the reader.

A third trait of the true war story, according to O'Brien, might be called its fundamental inconclusiveness. "You can tell a true war story," O'Brien writes, "by the way it never seems to end. Not then, not ever" (TTC 83). Vietnam gave the lie to tidy endings. It lingers yet in the minds of veterans, sneaking up during unprotected moments. It lingers for them precisely as it does for Norman Bowker. Thus, the true war story resists reduction to generalized moral statements. As O'Brien observes, "In the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe 'Oh'" (TTC 84).

The true war story tells the things that happen to real people. They might, out of abject fear and loneliness, dream away the hours on observation post, delighting, as Cacciato does, in a stick of Black Jack gum. Or, stricken by the inconsolable loneliness of having a story that no one wants to listen to, they might drive in endless circles around an unruffled lake. Late in The Things They Carried, Mitchell Sanders exclaims, "'Hey, man, I just realized something."' Then, very deliberately, "He wiped his eyes and spoke very quietly, as if awed by his own wisdom." It is the wisdom also conveyed by the true war story. "'Death sucks,' he said" (271).

JOHN H. TIMMERMAN is professor of English at Calvin College. In addition to many articles on aesthetics and American literature, he has published 17 books, including T S. Eliot's Ariel Poems: The Poetics of Recovery. He is a Vietnam veteran, 1969-70.

WORKS CITED

Bonn, Maria S. "Can Stories Save Us? Tim O'Brien and the Efficacy of the Text." Critique 36 (Fall 1994): 2-15.

Galloway, Catherine. "'How to Tell a True War Story': Metafiction in The Things They Carried." Critique 26 (Summer 1995): 249-57.

Kaplan, Steven. "The Undying Uncertainty of the Narrator in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried." Critique 35 (Fall 1993): 43-52.

Kesey, Ken. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. New York: Viking, 1962.

McCaffery, Larry. "Interview with Tim O'Brien." Chicago Review 33 (1982): 129-49.

Naparsteck, Martin. "An Interview with Tim O'Brien." Contemporary Literature 32 (Spring 1991): 1-11.

O'Brien, Tim. Going After Cacciato. New York: Delta, 1978.

-----. If I Die in a Combat Zone. New York: Dell, 1972.

-----. The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton, 1990.

-----. "We're Adjusted Too Well." The Wounded Generation: America After Vietnam. Ed. A. D. Home. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1981. 205-07.

Rignalda, Don. Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994.

Schroeder, Eric James. "The Past and the Possible: Tim O'Brien's Dialectic of Memory and the Imagination." Search and Clear. Ed. William J. Searle. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State UP, 1988. 116-34.

-----. "Two Interviews: Talks with Tim O'Brien. and Robert Stone." Modern Fiction Studies 30 (Spring 1984): 135-64.

Vannatta, Dennis. "Theme and Structure in Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato." Modern Fiction Studies 28 (1982): 242-46.

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