My Own War

Tim. Timmy. O’Brien.

A narrator. A child. An author.

A forty-three year old man. A nine-year old boy. A forty-three year old man.
A man with a daughter. A boy with a girl. A man with nothing and everything, bound in his own spell of memory and imagination.

A man imagined. A boy imagined. A man imagining, imagining that the first would save the second, with a story.

I could go on and on, rambling about contradictions and parallels, trying to persuade you of this abstract, fuzzy argument I came up with a while ago about this body of text, or more like a tool for O’Brien to reconstruct his being, to formalize his ways and words, to confront his happening past by drowning himself in story past, to no longer be a coward.

But I read and read and read, and I tried to fit this scramble of a rhetoric with the relevance of a war story, with how war stories and love stories are two things, with how this body of text ends with a love story despite the assumptions we’ve made along the way that all evidence should point to the contrary. And I lost myself to logic.

The blurring of narrative frames (writer, narrator, character). The proxies of vantage points (first person within third person, third person within first person and their various derivatives). The gore in one page and the bliss on the next. It was, I admit, excruciatingly tough to keep a coherent train of thought throughout this bloated “objectified” experience. I can’t even muster a tiny weeny bit of confidence to argue who was it exactly that said “you objectify your own experience.” (152) I’m afraid to be wrong, not because there’s this part of me that thinks to be wrong is to be weak, to be intellectually compromised. I just don’t want to lose my grips on this text.

When I first picked up this text I decided to put my nationality out of the way. What I was born into, I thought, was too complicating a factor. Potential for conflicts of interest was high. So I wasn’t Vietnamese. The war that took place in the text could have been anywhere else. It was meant to be a primitive, uncivilized backdrop against which amorality came to a head. Many places could fit that description. I shouldn’t feel offended. So I left my nationality out of the way. In hindsight, because logic alone didn’t guide me to shore,  that was probably not a good idea. I was paralyzed, like that character on that boat that tried to swim to Canada to dodge the draft but couldn’t because his sense of courage was at a tug of war with his social conditioning. Only difference in my case is that all the neurons that are dying by the second inside me are put against the regret of such impersonal choice of MO.

So at this point late into the night I’m trying to regain my autonomy as a living, breathing entity with roots, full of hopes of whatever miracle  it brings in trying to understand the nature of existence of characters that live and die and are hauntingly realer than real. But what I’m getting is no truer than the feelings I got when listening to mother’s stories about stray bullets and rains that breathed fire and that kept Quang Ngai hurt and awake for as long as her eleven year old self could remember. But then what do I do with them? And is anyone of them even a sign of a subconscious awareness of how war stories and love ones aren’t one and the same? And why does it matter? So what if O’Brien is making me creating my own war?