Understanding

The narrator in this story is thinking back and remembering his time in the Vietnam War. That is the only absolute fact we can rely on, and whether or not the instances are accurate or realistic is another story within itself. O’Brien’s language is imbedded with subtleties and the way the novel is structured allows us to take a guess about how we are supposed to read it.

The first time I read through this novel, I do not think I understood what he was going for. I thought it was a well-written war story; yes, the parallelism between the narrator and the author was a bit unsettling, but I took each story at face value, not stopping to realize I was no better than the old woman who did not usually enjoy war stories. I did not see how the passage about the baby water buffalo was about love, I do not know if I even now fully understand even though I know the narrator’s intention. I think the understanding or, rather, the lack of can be based on the idea that only those who have lived through war can understand it. I think that maybe people who fought in the Vietnam War, or even the current war, would understand the emotion and meaning behind the metaphors, morality or immorality, and why things simply are accepted because it was, or is, war. There was no other option, no other way to pass the day or deal with guilt. We know that the story is fiction, and he reminds us in a later chapter, but the ideas are still present and we feel the same guilt, fear, and sadness the foot soldiers do because by reading into these stories, we are closer to understanding and then holding the burden.

And then, there is the whole idea about trying to get the story across right, and if it is even true or just modified by our memory. When you are involved in a car accident and you are asked to review exactly what happened after, scenes and clips are missing. There is no way to know exactly how one reacted or what occurred. We modify what happened based on assumptions- based on a simple picture we cannot remove from our minds. In the text the narrator informs us that these stories have been told and retold countless times and we can ask why. He even repeats the picture that he cannot remove from his head, like Kurt Lemon’s body in the trees, or the star-shaped hole. The rest, and what happened in between snapshots is up to our minds and our memories. We can continue a story even if the characters are dead because we know what they could have done, or what they would have said at a particular moment. And just because it may not have physically happened, the idea happened, the thought occurred, which keeps the memory and story of these people alive and true. The details are not what are important—it is emotional connection we make that lasts. The stories just help us ground these emotions.

"The trees are alive. the grass, the soil---everything"

“To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life” (O’Brien, 77)

This quote in the The Things They Carried really caught my attention. The first line of the quote still confuses me days after I have thought about what it could mean. The second part I believe is a true emotion that soldiers do have while on the battlefront. Preparing for war, although I have not experienced it, must be the biggest emotional test of one’s life. You can hold it together, or you can break. Be intimidated by the duty of putting your life on the line for the good of your country, or embrace it and fulfill that duty wholeheartedly. To the general population, going to war, especially Vietnam is way to move on from this world we live in. However, for a soldier who witnesses the death of another on the battlefield or just the pure adrenaline of literally fighting for your life, now has the ability to look back and honestly understand the value of life. This emotion is phrased perfectly by O’ Brien, “that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life”. When you return to that tent at night, and pull the sleeping back over your head, you realize the value of breath, warmth, and life. The thought keeps floating through your head, why wasn’t that me who took the bullet today?

I think we unfairly characterize veterans. Whenever veterans are discussed, it seems as if a majority of the conversations are about the memories and thoughts they have that they must cope with every day. Soldiers do not only return home with the emotional and physical burdens they carry, they return home with a stronger, more genuine appreciation for the simple things in life. Perhaps they return home stronger and more complete of a being then we are, after having been living on the edge for months at a time. This gratefulness of life is the fine print of war, the part of the experience that nobody can witness as passionately as a war veteran.

A True Story?

I believe that it is almost impossible to tell a “true” story. To tell a story in such a way that others experience the events in the story in the same way that the storyteller did, he/she must add details (that he/she may have in reality forgotten) to convey the emotions involved in the situation. It’s very difficult to remember all the details about something you did or something that happened to you and therefore storytellers must invent some of these details (often subconsciously) to convey meaning. If I were to tell a story about how I played in my tennis matches this past weekend, I know that I could not explain every point I played in full detail. But I can remember how I felt and I could tell a story about how my matches went in general. I’m sure that even though I may think that I am explaining things exactly as they happened, some details would be lost in translation and some would be created in my mind to convey how I felt at that particular moment in my match. But just because I remember details a little differently than they actually “truthfully” happened during my match, doesn’t mean my story doesn’t have validity. I don’t exactly remember the feel of the court under my feet, I don’t exactly remember the sound my sneakers made as I stretched out wide for a ball, and I don’t exactly remember the look on my opponent’s face as she hit a winner down the line, but adding in these details as I think I remember them would make for a much better, a much more engrossing story than just the cold hard facts would. If I just told you the scores, the entire emotional side of the story would be lost. In fact it wouldn’t be much of a story at all.

In “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’ Brien may have written a fictional story, but I’m sure that the emotions are real. By writing a fiction, it was probably easier for him to convey the actual experiences he and others had during the war. I can imagine that during war, the line between reality and fiction is blurry and that it is hard to remember events exactly as they occurred. But the emotions stick with you and to convey these emotions to others who learn your story, you must add in those forgotten details as you believe they happened or so that they best convey the true feelings of the events described in your story. In the beginning of “The Things They Carried” Tim O’Brien dedicates the novel to some of its characters. This signifies to me that, although the characters themselves may be fictional, the emotions and values they represent and the things that they experience in the novel have truth.

Re-membering

This was something I learned in Psychology and I thought of it when we talked in class about the process of re-membering. It was a chapter on episodic memory and we talked about how memory is not actually an entity but a process. Pieces of information from past events get stored in different parts of the brain and when we try to recall an event, they essentially act as building blocks that we assimilate to construct a memory. Details from different events merge in these ‘storage units’ in our brain and often times, when we try to create the memory of one incident, it is interrupted by details from others. There is evidence that people sometimes have very vivid memories of what they were doing on significant dates, 9/11 for example, down to details such as the color of their shirt they were wearing. Many times these details turn out to be inaccurate. However, the people who report these details are usually very convinced of their memories.

It is the way we are wired- for some reason, we are not meant to remember everything. And it’s probably always the details that we get wrong. Details cannot be trusted. We talked in class about how the minute details in the chapter “The Man I Killed” in The Things They Carried and those in An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge makes us suspicious about the accuracy of the stories we are being told. Yet, I feel like details are essential because ironic as it is, they are supposed to reinforce a story. It’s like the author is trying to recreate the exact moment for us or make us see the picture is in his head, so that we feel what he is feeling. After all, in real life or in writing fiction, that is the whole point of storytelling- eliciting from your audience the emotion that you felt, or at least making them understand why you felt so. And details make your readers feel emotionally invested, even if it something completely irrelevant, like the color of the shirt you were wearing. Details are important to us- they make a story real. So even when we are trying to recollect a memory, we need those details. And if we cannot remember it, maybe our brain just pulls a piece of detail from another incident and snaps it into the puzzle to make our memory complete. It doesn’t matter if it’s not true; that completion makes it feel right. Seems like once again, it’s that trade-off between accuracy and getting it right.

The idea of constructing a memory makes me think that every time we try to remember something, we are actually creating a mini-fiction for ourselves. Isn’t that what fiction is? Fragments of experiences of an author molded into a meaningful story. Metaphors are just embellishments; at the very core, every fiction is just a summary and conclusion of an author’s real life experiences. By the same reasoning, every memory is like a fictional tale printed in our brain. Every memory is as illusive as a piece of fiction, and every piece of fiction is as valid as a real memory.

A Memory, A Story

“I’m young and happy. I’ll never die. I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story” (233).

If I could slip into the folds of time and tell myself a story about myself, a story that could convince me to believe, a story that needed to be heard, it would be a story about the good ol’ days when I was a child free of the responsibilities that come with age. In fact, it wouldn’t even have to be a complete story told to meet Sanders’ standards or one. It would just be a vignette-ish mass of words that could make me feel warm and sentimental and temporarily bring the dead to life.

It would sound along the lines of this:

My mother first met Grandpa Milton when she wore her hair in oversized, overpermed fluffs and curls. He made sure that her papers were free of awkward English, and that, she claimed, was how she passed her classes with high praise. In a picture of them together, taken right after her college graduation, they’re under the shade of a flowering tree, he’s wearing a pair of aviators and she’s still in her cap and gown. He’s beaming with pride and they look just like father and daughter, save for the differences that were only skin deep.

She called him Poppy, like the seeds on bagels, but that wasn’t why she called him that. It was Poppy, like an affectionate British slang for “Pops.” And with no daughter of his own, there was nobody else to call him Poppy or Dad or Father.

“When you were born, he was there right away ready to hold you. Then, for you birthday, the fourth one…or maybe it was the fifth…you said you wanted to wear the blue dress, the one with the pink ribbon because you knew he was coming to visit your class. You were so excited and told all of your friends that your grandfather was coming. Don’t you remember?”

I don’t, but there’s a picture with creased corners dated '97 tucked away safely in a photo album that proves my mother right (like usual).

Grandpa Milton was family. He gave me lucky money in used red envelopes that were so old that they were creased and crusty at the seal. He bought countless cups of mango pudding even after my mother screeched, “Don’t buy it! Sabrina already ate this and that. Poppy, don’t! You can’t have it either. Remember your diabetes!”

He simply laughed his mellow old man laugh.

My mother regularly took me to visit his studio by the East River. Time seemed stationary in Grandpa Milton’s studio, and because he didn’t have air conditioning; so on humid summer days, time lagged even more slowly.

I sat on the ledge by his window and stretch as far out as I could without falling down eleven floors to my death. Using his rusted binoculars, I scanned the city scene below me and through a film of grease on the lens, I saw boats bobbing left and right, right and left, cruising down the river. I wasted many afternoons watching white sails; they taught me that nothing was constant, but anything could be beautiful.

Memories and responsibilities are heavy, and if we reflect too much upon the past, on regrets, on trying to reconstruct emotions, on what we ought to do, on who we ought to be, then life, in itself, is an awfully heavy burden. Yet, as heavy as memories and responsibilities are, what we choose to remember and what we choose to do create who we are as individuals. The irony, though, is that sometimes when life becomes dreary, we need rekindle a warm memory to lighten our stresses and worries, our fears and inconsistencies.

My warmest memories are of people who I can no longer make memories with. And when their sounds and smells become increasingly harder to recall, I write down my memories to capture grains of truthfully felt emotions with even the slightest of details. I find that words are harder to muster when the memory, the inspiration, is fading. The words become heavy. The letters become heavy. But if I were to be left with nothing—no memories and no accounts of memories—the emptiness would be the greatest weight of all.

Troy Davis

In light of the recent execution of death row inmate Troy Davis, the debate about the truth of eyewitness testimony flares up again. Recently, studies have been conducted to determine the accuracy of eyewitness accounts and their power in convicting those on trial. These researchers and clinical analysts are delving into the same topic that we discuss every day in class: is what an individual perceives the truth of the matter?

Studies are finding that in any eyewitness account the witness can only tell the truth as he perceives it. Often times any act, but more pertinent to these studies - any crime, occurs so quickly that the brain doesn’t have time to process the events which are occurring. As a result the witness is left with only a fragmented series of incidents which the brain then attempts to reconstruct. This reconstruction is what the eyewitness recounts to the authorities, and often times does not reflect the events as they actually happened. The eyewitness, however, believes that his account of the events is accurate.

The brain cannot stand that the fragmented pieces of the story do not relate together. This is why it insists on reconstructing the events in a manner where they flow seamlessly. The human brain insists on having a set framework within which it can relate. The same thing happens when we are reading fiction novels. The brain finds it difficult to function on a level in which it cannot relate. Therefore it insists on interjecting its own perceptions to make the story fit into a more familiar framework and therefore, more believable or relatable. Therefore it is important for any story to contain a bit of truth. Without this the reader would not be able to relate to the story and would not become emotionally or mentally involved. Even in science-fiction novels, the relationships between characters or the struggles they endure are relatable to the reader. Without these grounding points, the reader would be unable to become involved in the fantasy world in which the characters live.

Like the narrator of a novel, we must be wary of how much trust we put into the eyewitness. The account was simply a reconstruction of the events from his perspective. This is no different than that of a narrator. In The Things They Carried the reader is introduced to an untrustworthy narrator, yet we still find ourselves being uncontrollably engaged in his story. In The Things They Carried Tim O’Brien the narrator tells us that all of his stories are untrue, and then begins to tell us one that is. He tells us how he didn’t actually kill a man but rather watched a man be killed. At the end of this story, however, he tells us that even this story is untrue. But even after we found out he lied for the first half of his book, we still wanted to believe the truth in his words. In the Troy Davis account, seven of nine eyewitnesses changed their testimonies after the trial. Although Troy Davis’s case went to multiple appeals courts, his verdict was upheld. This shows the tendency of people (or a jury) to believe something if it fits within a familiar framework or falls within their expectations. The jury believed these seven witnesses even though later they recanted their testimonies. This is the same as when the reader believes Tim O’Brien’s (the narrator’s) story even though he later admits that it was not true.

Bag of Weight

There is a weight that everyone carries whether they know of it or not. Sometimes it’s just the physical strain that ends up being the reminder. Sometimes it’s the thoughts that accompany it.

In my bag, I have a lot of things that pull against my shoulders. There is the weight of heartbreak somewhere within the pages. It is almost essential to have that within what is stored away. There is something about life that won’t let us get away without such a thing. There is pain from that, but then again, there is always pain amongst the weight. It is a burdening thing that stays with life through all the journeys.

There is weight from what joy there is in the world. It is not the grand type that comes at once in an event. There is only the small joy that tug at the corners of the mouth when there is a frown on one’s lips. It hides in a pocket within the bag, trying to hide its weight from the world. It can still be felt, but it is nothing that is worrying. The shoulders of the bag will still cut without it.

There’s a rock in the bag as well. It is a painful thing to carry because so much rides upon it. Responsibility does that to people. It hurts to carry the burden because it loves gravity, allowing itself to be pulled along with the movement. It is the greatest thing that one has to carry. To lighten the load would be impossible, as letting go of some only brings a different form of it back. It’s always taxing.

Then there’s love. Love is an unusual thing to carry around with everything in the bag. It is like the joy that tries to stay light. But that is just dressing up what it really is. People tend to forget what is what when they carry their bag. But love is always an interesting thing to carry. It floats and sinks the straps into your skin. It hurts but one cannot part with it easily. It can bring pain and make the weight feel like it’s gone. The double edge sword of what burdens us is always the most dangerous.

I carry lies with me as well. They are too much like the truth because I give them life. It is not in the way that I give them meaning, but the way that I let them mean something to me. A writer tells a story of truths and lies. Sometimes there is a practiced ease to it. Sometimes there’s a shake of death that haunts one in the middle of the night. There’s a sense that the weight can play on both sides, yet be equally as punishing. The line between definitions blur with such use. Even my own mind cannot tell the difference between the weight.

But have I lied to myself again?

(Author’s Note: This is a response to the first chapter of The Things They Carried. I wanted to list things that can be carried that are not physical objects that can be weighed but rather the emotional things that people feel “burdened” by. There is also the part that, towards the end, brings about the question of the control of the author over the reader as well as the author’s ability to tell the truth.)

The Contradicitons of War

I believe in class someone brought up that the chapter “How to Write a True War Story” could be seen as a metaphor for the Vietnam War or war in general. I want to build on that thought. We noted how O’Brien’s rules for how to write a true war story often contradicted each other. He says that war stories have no moral and then later references the moral of a true war story. He says they have no point and then talks about the point of a true war story. A war story is true if you cannot believe it but it is true if your stomach believes it. It is a very confusing chapter, but then again, war itself is confusing and full of contradictions.

At the end of “On the Rainy River,” O’Brien declares that he “was a coward. [He] went to the war” (p. 58). He goes to war to avoid the embarrassment of being called a coward, but fighting and killing in a war he does not agree with is an act of cowardice. He is a coward if he stays and a coward if he goes. This contradiction leads to another. Is it right to kill the enemy, or wrong to kill someone you do not even know? Is a soldier a hero or a villain? It is a matter of perception. To their respective countries, soldiers are heroes, fighting for freedom and their homeland. To the opposing side, soldiers are villains, killing friends and family members, destroying homes and livelihoods. We are taught that it is wrong to kill our fellow man, but right to kill for our country.

When a man goes to war, his morality and his identity are often split in two. The emotional crisis of this split is described in “The Man I Killed.” O’Brien kills the man because he had a weapon and that is what he was told was the right thing to do. Kiowa assures him, “No choice, Tim. What else could you do?...Right?” (p. 36). But he as he looked at the man and thought of who the dead man could have been, he felt in his gut that it was the wrong. Soldiers are taught to think of the enemies as less than human, but how can they when the enemies are clearly human?

Soldiers are lied to in order to be motivated; soldiers lie to other soldiers to comfort them; soldiers lie to themselves to deal with their burdens. So how can a true war story not include lies?