Things They Wanted

Why a war story?

“In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.” (O’ Brien, 78)

In one version of the Vietnamese history textbook, the one I was taught with, there was a story similar to that of the four soldiers and the grenade. Except that the hero was a Viet Minh during French Indochina War and he saved a platoon from losing an anti-aircraft cannon they were humping along the hills overlooking Dien Bien Phu valleys where the French positioned. He ran to where the cannon was, used his body like a wedge, and stopped the cannon from falling off the trail. He died, they said. I can’t remember what became of the cannon. I’d like to say it served its purpose afterwards but I can’t, cause there’s this part in me that’s afraid someone would fact-check me and call me out cause To Vinh Dien's story was as real as Curt Lemon's or Rat Kiley's. I can’t let myself be O’Brien, cause I’ve never been to war.

So what’s the moral?

O’Brien would tell us it’s all made-up, all these war stories of his (O’ Brien 81). He would tell us true war stories are true cause they suck us in like vapors and blur the line between ambiguity and certainty (78), that they don’t depend on any absolute truths (79-80). That’s war story’s moral. Mitchel Sanders, or shall I say O’Brien cause frankly Sanders could simply be a mouthpiece for all we know, [renounced]** his belief in sarcasm as a defensive mechanism against this heart of darkness and resorted to the haunting, living, breathing silence of the land derogatorily called Nam as the ultimate morality (13 vs.74). A kind of morality that subsumes generalizations of facts and feelings of any kind. A kind of morality that can only  be put on paper in streams of consciousness so that it can participate, but never explicitly says if it agrees or opposes, the literary tradition on war and humanity that started with Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now, Fullmetal Jacket and the likes. That’s what O’Brien character thinks of war in this O’Brien book; in the silence amidst the chaos, there’s this “aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference” (77). In this way he’s much like Felix Hoenikker the Father of the atom bomb. They don’t care what we do with ourselves after we get the stories from them, so long as we let them get at truth the way they’ve always done. They just want to see themselves in us, to see this big chunk of moral indifference that confuses us long after the fact. They want to affirm their influence in our silence. That’s their kind of morality. That’s the moral.

Now, not knowing what became of the artillery, I think it’s fair to elucidate on what happened of the story of Vinh Dien. Obviously the story became textbook classic. But kids knew about it even before they came across it again in the textbook. So you can say I was San Lorenzan until this day when I say I was.

**: (the assumption that the stories are put in chronological order is most likely to be wrong, so I put the verb in bracket)