Twenty years after he left Vietnam, a decade after his Vietnam fantasy,
”Going After Cacciato,” won a National Book Award, Tim O`Brien hasn`t stopped telling war (or anti-war) stories. As much as anything else, it was the consuming need to tell these stories that brought him into Dan Quayle country, where O`Brien hoped to make people remember and, at the same time, forget Vietnam.
The author had come to town in behalf of his latest book, ”The Things They Carried,” an episodic novel in the form of a memoir, written by a fictitious ”Tim O`Brien.”
”People hear that the novel is about Vietnam,” he said, ”and it`s an eye-glazer, a turnoff. But I believe that once they open the cover, they`ll like the book. So this is a personal mission. By giving readings, going on TV, and talking to people in bookstores, I thought I could push that Vietnam obstacle out of the way.”
Even though he considers the subject matter an obstacle, it`s not as if O`Brien has any regrets or apologies for having written yet another book about Vietnam. Of his five books, three have dealt with the war, most prominently
”Cacciato,” which won an upset victory (over John Cheever and John Irving) for the 1979 National Book Award. While the prize brought the youthful O`Brien national prominence, along with comparisons to Tolstoy and Stephen Crane, it also rigidly typecast him as a Vietnam War novelist.
That`s a badge O`Brien wears with honor, but it`s also the source of some discomfort and misgivings. His new book, ”The Things They Carried,” will only reinforce that stereotype. Though there are boyhood interludes in Minnesota, during which the hero agonizes over his first love and, later, whether to evade the draft by fleeing to Canada, the book is mostly about his experiences in Vietnam, many of them evading enemy fire.
Yet O`Brien insists he`s no more a war novelist than Conrad was a sea novelist. ”Vietnam is only incidental to the book,” he said. ”It`s not about war. It`s not about bullets, not about bombs, not about maneuvers. It`s about human beings, and war is the context. When I`m writing, I don`t think about Vietnam. I can`t get away from it, but my attention is on this story, these characters in a purely writerly way.”
Even so, O`Brien doesn`t want to denigrate the importance or the authenticity of ”The Things They Carried” as a war document. ”I hope that 20,000 years from now, someone who knows nothing about Vietnam will pick up the novel and learn everything that`s important to know about the war, about its confusion and randomness, the purposelessness of it all, from the chaotic and fragmented quality of the book itself.”
To bring that message to contemporary readers, O`Brien had embarked on his ”first and only” book tour. At the outset, he had found it welcome R&R, after so many years of seclusion, working on his books at his home in the woods outside Boston. ”It was also nice to find that the books aren`t just going out into a black hole,” he said.
But the tour had somehow escalated into marathon proportions, keeping him on the road and in the air for two months, ”humping” from Tuscaloosa, Ala., to Cincinnati, from Iowa City to Winston-Salem, N.C. Arriving in the Indiana capital, O`Brien was complaining about a severe case of peacetime combat fatigue, a feeling of dislocation accompanied by a bad chest cold and a hacking cough, the result of too much travel and too little sleep.
While mostly exhausting, the blitz had also had its exhilarating moments, O`Brien said, especially after a San Franciso reading, when a man introduced himself as ”Country Joe.” ”It was Country Joe McDonald,” O`Brien said,
”who had this big Vietnam song, `One, two, three/What are we fighting for?` He was a big fan, and he brought along a T-shirt, a videocassette, and all these records. That meant a lot, because the song meant a lot to me back in the `60s.”
As he described his travels, O`Brien was relaxing in a downtown Indianapolis restaurant, an hour before he was due at a suburban bookstore for another autographing session. Drinking a Bloody Mary and smoking furiously, the 43-year-old author was dressed in his civilian uniform: weathered tennis shoes, jeans and denim jacket. His long hair spilled out of a corduroy Bosox cap, which he wears not only in restaurants but to bookstore signings, and, presumably, to bed. (He was, however, planning to take off the cap, put on a sport coat and ”become a real person” for an appearance on a network morning TV show.)
Because it`s so deep in the heart of Middle America, the Indiana capital might be considered a hardcore pocket of resistance, hostile territory for a writer whose message is so aggressively anti-Vietnam, not to mention anti-militaristic. But O`Brien said he had come to town largely at the urging of an American Legionnaire, a veteran of Vietnam, who wanted to show him how the legion had managed to keep up with changing times.
Wherever he has gone, O`Brien said, he has encountered only friendly audiences. ”Even if they haven`t liked my books, they haven`t said so. And people who still think the war was right would never read them in the first place. They`ve got to be illiterate to believe that. So the odds of running into one of those are one in a billion.”
But as a Vietnam veteran, as well as a war novelist, O`Brien said he has on occasion been a victim of mistaken identity. ”At a couple of readings, vets have asked, `What do you think of Jane Fonda?` expecting me to give the party line, which is that she`s a traitor. My God, the war`s been over 20 years, but there are still these little things that stick in the craw of veterans, one being that Jane Fonda and her ilk turned America against the war and made it impossible to win.”
How did O`Brien regard Fonda and the other anti-war militants, whose insurgent activities crested during 1969 and `70, while he was a foot soldier with the Army in Vietnam? ”I was glad for them,” he said, ”because I didn`t see much hope of winning the damn war. I was rooting for her or (Eugene)
McCarthy or somebody to get the war over with and get me home.
Until he was drafted, O`Brien was a dissenter. A native of Worthington, Minn., he had just graduated from Macalester College in St. Paul and had been accepted for Harvard University graduate school when he got his draft notice. ”There was no easy way out, that I knew of anyway,” he said. ”For me, it was a moral standoff. I was pulled one way toward Canada, the other way toward the war, by my fear of being embarrassed and ridiculed for cowardice, by the censure and the humiliation that I imagined would occur in my hometown, among my friends and their families.”
In O`Brien`s case, the war won, fortunately enough. Aside from a superficial grenade injury, which got him excused from the field for three days and brought him a Purple Heart, he came home from Vietnam without any permanent physical or psychic scars. But during his tour of duty he discovered not only the will to write but a subject that he was eager to write about.
”It was like having a trip-wire inside me,” said O`Brien, who eventually studied at Harvard and later spent a year as a reporter for The Washington Post. ”Where I`d been an intellectual, analytical person before, the Vietnam experience made me aware of the power of emotions in my life, the power of the heart, the value of beauty, even when the content is ugly, like the Picasso painting, `Guernica.` ”
In contrast to Hemingway, who argued that a soldier needs to suspend his imagination to survive war, O`Brien depended for his survival on the strength of his imagination. ”I used it as a means of escape,” he said, ”a way of coping and understanding. You can`t just sit there on guard duty night after night, staring into the blackness for the enemy, without going nutso. So I pretended I wasn`t there. I`d think about my girlfriends, my hometown, what I`d do when the war was over.”
It was just such nocturnal reveries that inspired O`Brien to write
”Going After Cacciato,” an extended daydream in which a soldier on guard duty fantasizes about pursuing the AWOL Cacciato from Vietnam to Paris. And even more than ”Cacciato,” O`Brien`s latest novel advances the proposition that ”soldiers are dreamers,” that they can keep the dead alive with war stories.
Even though ”The Things They Carried” is constructed like a memoir, O`Brien has been careful to label the book fiction, repeatedly interrupting the narrative to remind readers that the Tim O`Brien who wrote the book is not the Tim O`Brien who is its central character. ”A few things I take from my own life,” the author says, ”but all the rest is invented.” Among the numerous inventions are the narrator`s 10-year-old daughter (O`Brien and his wife, Ann, have no children) and his prolonged anguish over having killed a Viet Cong guerrilla.
As far as O`Brien knows, he never killed an enemy soldier. ”You never see what you shoot in combat,” he said. ”You`re scared. Your eyes are closed half the time. You fire at hedgerows, you fire into jungles. Everything`s happening so quickly that there are no targets, you don`t aim at anything. When it`s over, you don`t know who killed whom.
”So I don`t know if I killed anyone. But the point is that I felt responsible, the same way that the character in the book staring at the body does. I felt guilt and remorse for what happened over there. And writing fiction is a way of putting a dramatic face on emotions that have no faces.” But no matter how many disclaimers he offers, O`Brien can`t avoid confounding readers with his fictional ”memoir,” leaving them to puzzle over how much (or how little) of the novel is true. ”The truth is what you make,” he said. ”None of the events are true in the happening sense. But they ring true in my heart, so I know they`re true.” (For a more literal account of his wartime experiences, the author refers readers to his ”true” memoir, ”If I Die in a Combat Zone.”)
One reason O`Brien is on tour is to ensure that his new book doesn`t suffer the same commercial fate as ”Cacciato” (or the novel that followed it, ”The Nuclear Age,” sales of which were even more dismal).
”If it hadn`t been for the National Book Award, `Cacciato` would have been gone-vanished,” O`Brien said. ”I knew it was a really good book, but it wasn`t being read, which really depressed me. This time, I liked the book so much that I didn`t want to trust to luck.”
With that, O`Brien finished his Bloody Mary, straightened his ballcap, and set off in his rental car for Borders Bookstore, to help sell more copies of his novel. But for someone who has negotiated the meanest jungles of Vietnam, he found it hard to get his bearings in suburban Indianapolis.
Already a half-hour late, O`Brien was hopelessly lost in the sprawling labyrinth of malls on the city`s perimeter, disoriented by the riot of Shoe Carnivals and McDonald`s, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut restaurants. Finally, he abandoned all hope of finding the bookstore, stopped at a Denny`s, and phoned the manager, who drove over and escorted him to the signing.
By then, O`Brien had been given up for lost by many of the customers who came to get books autographed. For the next hour, he signed copies for latecomers, chatted with bookstore employees, and frequently ducked outside for a smoke. Then Steve Johnson, a family friend from Minnesota, who had moved to Indiana, showed up, and they spent the rest of the time talking about old friends and old times.
Leaving the bookstore, O`Brien was heartened to learn that his appearance, however delayed, had resulted in the sale of 24 copies. In the month since the book was published, 34,000 have been sold, or three times the total hardcover sale for ”Cacciato,” he reported, adding, ”I`m too tired to get excited about it.”
O`Brien still had a reading at Butler University the next day. Then it was onward and upward to Jackson, Miss., Phoenix and a half-dozen other cities-two more weeks of roadwork before he could pack up and go home, if able to hold out that long.
”I`m afraid of getting pneumonia,” he said, ”and I`m talked out. I`m used to going eight hours a day without hearing a sound, except for my word processor. This has been like going to war. But I`m glad I did it, even though it hasn`t been fun.”
Because he was so depleted by the tour, O`Brien said he will cancel a three-week trip to Vietnam in June, which would have been the first time he had been back since he was a GI. Instead, he plans to stay home, play golf with his neighbor, John Updike, and resume work on the novel ”The Lake of the Woods,” which was interrupted by his tour. The new book, he said, deals not with war but with the disappearance of a housewife in northern Minnesota.
Does that indicate that ”The Things They Carried” is O`Brien`s farewell to arms, that the Vietnam War is finally over for him. ”Oh, God no,” he said. ”Everybody asks why I don`t leave it behind, why I`m so obsessed by this. I`m not obsessed. But I`ve got so many war stories stored in my memory or my imagination that I`ll follow this track for the rest of my life.”
