If
O’Brien is to be believed, the effects of Vietnam on the mind could almost be
likened to the all-pervading grip of ice-nine. After being exposed to a seed,
you’re enveloped in the dangerous, often fatal grip of Vietnam. If you do
survive, you live in a post-exposure world, one in which you view everything
through a different lens, one that alternately sharpens and obfuscates the
images you’re presented with. Perhaps after witnessing unspeakable atrocities
in the jungles, paddies, and villages of Vietnam, you might find the most
mundane of things divine in their simplistic, life-affirming beauty. On the opposite
end of the spectrum, you might wind up like Norman Bowker, going in circles,
silently gasping for help until one day, death, the very thing you tried so
hard to avoid in Vietnam, looks friendly compared to the pain of continued
existence.
I’m reminded of Mona’s
suicide amongst the frigid effigies of her fellow San Lorenzans when I think of
Bowker hanging himself. He must have felt an inversion of this imagery, he
being frozen, stuck, everyone else surging forward at unprecedented speeds,
much too quickly for him at least. The sections of The Things They Carried devoted to Bowker are in my opinion, the
most poignant. Whereas Tim and the others who made it out alive found a way to
vent their sorrows, Norman Bowker sat in an echo chamber, the worst moments
from his time spent in Vietnam projected onto one of its bare walls. Norman
Bowker sat there, watching Kiowa get sucked into the shit field over and over,
watching Ted Lavender fall—“Boom-down,”—“Like cement,” (6) before eventually
deciding to hang himself with a jump rope at the YMCA. Now, let me ask you a
question. Who gives a fuck if it’s real or not?
I agree, I think that it doesn't matter if the stories are real or not. The story of Bowker is so memorable because you want to think that the soldiers that made it back alive are just going to continue their lives normally. However, this is not the case. The war follows the soldiers back with them because it is so difficult to just forget the traumas. The emotions, morals and underlying facts are the important part of O'Brien's novel and those are the parts that stick with the reader the most.
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