- Geoffrey Chaucer (life, chronology, language)
- Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) (brief bio)
Department of English
Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University
The Things They Carried
(1986)
Tim O'Brien
(1946– )
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Notes
"The Things They Carried" was first published in Esquire in 1986.
3 Cross:
3 Chaucer: Geoffrey Chaucer, middle English poet
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3 Virginia Woolf:
modern British novelist and short story writer
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4 P-38 can openers:
a very small foldable military issue can opener; also called the John
Wayne
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4 R&R: rest and recreation. A 3–7-day leave from the war for a soldier. (Glossary of Military Terms)
4 SOP: standard operating procedure (Glossary of Military Terms)
4 RTO: radio telephone operator (Glossary
of
Military Terms)
6 Bonnie and Clyde: 1967 film, directed by Arthur Penn and starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, about two infamous Texans wanted by the law: Clyde Champion Barrow and Bonnie Parker
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7 dead weight:
21 freedom birds:
22 sin loi: Vietnamese for "sorry," "excuse me," "pardon me." In GI slang it's more like "sorry," "that's too damn bad." (See xin loi and Vietnamese Primer)
From "How to Tell a True War Story"
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done.
...
In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't tease it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh."
True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis.
For example: War is hell. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true, and yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can't believe it with my stomach. Nothing turns inside.
It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.
(O'Brien, Tim. "How to Tell a True War Story." The Things They Carried. New York: Broadway, 1998. 68, 77–78.)
"Good Form"
It’s time to be blunt.
I’m forty-three years old, true, and I’m a writer now, and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier.
Almost everything else is invented.
But it’s not a game. It’s a form. Right here, now, as I invent myself, I’m thinking of all I want to tell you about why this book is written as it is. For instance, I want to tell you this: twenty years ago I watched a man die on a trail near the village of My Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt enough. I remember his face, which was not a pretty face, because his jaw was in his throat, and I remember feeling the burden of responsibility and grief. I blamed myself. And rightly so, because I was present.
But listen. Even that story is made up.
I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.
Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I’m left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.
Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him.
What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.
I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.
“Daddy, tell the truth,” Kathleen can say, “did you ever kill anybody?” And I can say, honestly, “Of course not.”
Or I can say, honestly, “Yes.”
(O'Brien, Tim. "Good Form." The Things They Carried. New York: Broadway, 1998. 68, 179–80.)
From "The Lives of the Dead"
In Vietnam, too, we had ways of making the dead seem not quite so dead. Shaking hands, that was one way. By slighting death, by acting, we pretended it was not the terrible thing it was. By our language, which was both hard and wistful, we transformed the bodies into piles of waste. Thus, when someone got killed, as Curt Lemon did, his body was not really a body, but rather one small bit of waste in the midst of a much wider wastage. I learned that words make a difference. It's easier to cope with a kicked bucket than a corpse; if it isn't human, it doesn't matter much if it's dead. And so a VC nurse, fried by napalm, was a crispy critter. A Vietnamese baby, which lay nearby, was a roasted peanut. "Just a crunchie munchie," Rat Kiley said as he stepped over the body.
(O'Brien, Tim. "How to Tell a True War Story." The Things They Carried. New York: Broadway, 1998. 238–39.)
A Conversation With Tim O'Brien
Daniel
Bourne: Now that you are looking at the war in that way, how
have you found this terrain of Vietnam a convenient metaphor?
Tim O'Brien: That's mostly how I look at it-though I'm
not sure I'd call it a convenient metaphor. I'd say an essential metaphor
or a life-given metaphor that, for me, is inescapable. And I'm grateful
for it in a sense. I've used it in the way Conrad writes about the sea,
life on the water, stories set on boats, from Heart
of Darkness to Lord Jim,
from Nostromo to "Typhoon" to
"Youth." But Conrad is no more writing about the sea than I am writing
about war. That is, he's not writing about marine biology and dolphins and
porpoises and waves. He's writing about human beings under pressure, under
the certain kinds of pressure that the sea exerts, life aboard vessels,
the discipline of living aboard a ship at sea, the expectations of
behavior that are a part of a ship's life. Lord Jim and his act of
cowardice and so on. Conrad uses the sea the same way I use Vietnam, as a
way to get at the human heart and the pressure exerted on it. He's not
writing literally about sailing and sailors. At the same time, this life
aboard vessels carries with it a framework for storytelling that he uses
beautifully. My content is not bombs and bullets and airplanes and
strategy and tactics. It is not the politics of Vietnam. It too is about
the human heart and the pressures put on it. In a war story, there are
life and death stakes built in immediately, which apply just by the
framework of the story. There is a pressure on characters that in other
kinds of fiction one would have to meticulously build. So, in a way, using
the framework of war is a short cut to get at things without having to
engage in some of this mechanical work that I don't particularly like, to
get bogged down in plotting. I don't like reading heavily plotted stories.
I like a situation to have an instant sort of pressure.
The Impossible Victory: Vietnam
Earlier in 1963, Kennedy's Undersecretary of State, U. Alexis Johnson, was speaking before the Economic Club of Detroit:
What is the attraction that Southeast Asia has exerted for centuries on the great powers flanking it on all sides? Why is it desirable, and why is it important? First, it provides a lush climate, fertile soil, rich natural resources, a relatively sparse population in most areas, and room to expand. The countries of Southeast Asia produce rich exportable surpluses such as rice, rubber, teak, corn, tin, spices, oil, and many others. ...
This is not the language that was used by President Kennedy in his explanations to the American public. He talked of Communism and freedom. In a news conference February 14, 1962, he said; "Yes, as you know, the U.S. for more than a decade has been assisting the government, the people of Vietnam, to maintain their independence.
[...]
In early August 1964, President Johnson used a murky set of events in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of North Vietnam, to launch full-scale war on Vietnam. Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told the American public there was an attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on American destroyers. "While on routine patrol in international waters," McNamara said, "the U.S. destroyer Maddox underwent an unprovoked attack." It later turned out that the Gulf of Tonkin episode was a fake, that the highest American officials had lied to the public-just as they had in the invasion of Cuba under Kennedy. In fact, the CIA had engaged in a secret operation attacking North Vietnamese coastal installations—so if there had been an attack it would not have been "unprovoked." It was not a "routine patrol," because the Maddox was on a special electronic spying mission. And it was not in international waters but in Vietnamese territorial waters. It turned out that no torpedoes were fired at the Maddox, as McNamara said. Another reported attack on another destroyer, two nights later, which Johnson called "open aggression on the high seas," seems also to have been an invention.
At the time of the incident, Secretary of State Rusk was questioned on NBC television:
REPORTER: What explanation, then, can you come up with for this unprovoked attack?
RUSK: Well, I haven't been able, quite frankly, to come to a fully satisfactory explanation. There is a great gulf of understanding, between that world and our world, ideological in character. They see what we think of as the real world in wholly different terms. Their very processes of logic are different. So that it's very difficult to enter into each other's minds across that great ideological gulf.
The Tonkin "attack" brought a congressional resolution, passed unanimously in the House, and with only two dissenting votes in the Senate, giving Johnson the power to take military action as he saw fit in Southeast Asia.
[...]
By the end of the Vietnam war, 7 million tons of bombs had been dropped on Vietnam, more than twice the total bombs dropped on Europe and Asia in World War II—almost one 500-pound bomb for every human being in Vietnam. It was estimated that there were 20 million bomb craters in the country. In addition, poisonous sprays were dropped by planes to destroy trees and any kind of growth—an area the size of the state of Massachusetts was covered with such poison. Vietnamese mothers reported birth defects in their children. Yale biologists, using the same poison (2,4,5,T) on mice, reported defective mice born and said they had no reason to believe the effect on humans was different.
On March 16, 1968, a company of American soldiers went into the hamlet of My Lai 4, in Quang Ngai province. They rounded up the inhabitants, including old people and women with infants in their arms. These people were ordered into a ditch, where they were methodically shot to death by American soldiers. The testimony of James Dursi, a rifleman, at the later trial of Lieutenant William Calley, was reported in the New York Times:
Lieutenant Calley and a weeping rifleman named Paul D. Meadlo—the same soldier who had fed candy to the children before shooting them—pushed the prisoners into the ditch....
"There was an order to shoot by Lieutenant Calley, I can't remember the exact words-it was something like 'Start firing.'
"Meadlo turned to me and said: 'Shoot, why don't you shoot?'
"I was crying. "I said, 'I can't. I won't.'
"Then Lieutenant Calley and Meadlo pointed their rifles into the ditch and fired.
"People were diving on top of each other; mothers were trying to protect their children. ..."
[...]
The army tried to cover up what happened. But a letter began circulating from a GI named Ron Ridenhour, who had heard about the massacre. There were photos taken of the killing by an army photographer, Ronald Haeberle. Seymour Hersh, then working for an antiwar news agency in Southeast Asia called Dispatch News Service, wrote about it. The story of the massacre had appeared in May 1968 in two French publications, one called Sud Vietnam en Lutte, and another published by the North Vietnamese delegation to the peace talks in Paris-but the American press did not pay any attention.
[...]
Indeed, My Lai was unique only in its details. Hersh reported a letter sent by a GI to his family, and published in a local newspaper:
Dear Mom and Dad:
Today we went on a mission and I am not very proud of myself, my friends, or my country. We burned every hut in sight!
It was a small rural network of villages and the people were incredibly poor. My unit burned and plundered their meager possessions. Let me try to explain the situation to you.
The huts here are thatched palm leaves. Each one has a dried mud bunker inside. These bunkers are to protect the families. Kind of like air raid shelters.
My unit commanders, however, chose to think that these bunkers are offensive. So every hut we find that has a bunker we are ordered to burn to the ground.
When the ten helicopters landed this morning, in the midst of these huts, and six men jumped out of each "chopper", we were firing the moment we hit the ground. We fired into all the huts we could...
It is then that we burned these huts. . . . Everyone is crying, begging and praying that we don't separate them and take their husbands and fathers, sons and grandfathers. The women wail and moan.
Then they watch in terror as we burn their homes, personal possessions and food. Yes, we burn all rice and shoot all livestock.
[...]
Meanwhile, just across the border of Vietnam, in a neighboring country, Laos, where a right-wing government installed by the CIA faced a rebellion, one of the most beautiful areas in the world, the Plain of Jars, was being destroyed by bombing. This was not reported by the government or the press, but an American who lived in Laos, Fred Branfman, told the story in his book Voices from the Plain of Jars:
Over 25,000 attack sorties were flown against the Plain of Jars from May, 1964, through September, 1969; over 75,000 tons of bombs were dropped on it; on the ground, thousands were killed and wounded, tens of thousands driven underground, and the entire aboveground society leveled.
[...]
Desperation led the CIA to enlist the Hmong tribesmen in military campaigns, which led to the deaths of thousands of Hmong. This was accompanied by secrecy and lying, as was so much of what happened in Laos. In September 1973, a former government official in Laos, Jerome Doolittle, wrote in the New York Times:
The Pentagon's most recent lies about bombing Cambodia bring back a question that often occurred to me when I was press attache at the American Embassy in Vientiane, Laos.
Why did we bother to lie?
When I first arrived in Laos, I was instructed to answer all press questions about our massive and merciless bombing campaign in that tiny country with: "At the request of the Royal Laotian Government, the United States is conducting unarmed reconnaissance flights accompanied by armed escorts who have the right to return if fired upon."
This was a lie. Every reporter to whom I told it knew it was a lie. Hanoi knew it was a lie. The International Control Commission knew it was a lie. Every interested Congressman and newspaper reader knew it was a lie.. . .
After all, the lies did serve to keep something from somebody, and the somebody was us.
By early 1968, the cruelty of the war began touching the conscience of many Americans. For many others, the problem was that the United States was unable to win the war, while 40,000 American soldiers were dead by this time, 250,000 wounded, with no end in sight. (The Vietnam casualties were many times this number.)
—Zinn, Howard. "The Impossible Victory: Vietnam." A People's History of the United States. New York: HarperPerennial, 2005. Print.
Indochina War
ห้วงเวลาระหว่าง พ.ศ. 2510–2511 นั้น มิได้ให้ความหมายเพียงว่าสุจิตต์ วงษ์เทศ มีอายุอยู่ระหว่าง 22–23 ปี และขรรค์ชัย บุนปานมีอายุอยู่ระหว่าง 23–24 ปีเท่านั้น
หากกล่าวในทางเศรษฐกิจและการ เมือง ระยะกาลนั้นสังคมประเทศไทยเริ่มก้าวเข้าสู่ร่มเงาของแผนพัฒนา เศรษฐกิจและสังคมแห่งชาติ ฉบับที่ 2 ในทางการเมืองการทหาร จอมพลถนอม กิตติขจร ผู้บัญชาการทหารสูงสุด ดำรงตำแหน่งนายกรัฐมนตรีว่าการกระทรวงกลาโหม ทั้งยังเป็นอธิการบดีของมหาวิทยาลัยธรรมศาสตร์ พล.อ. ประภาส จารุเสถียร ผู้บัญชาการทหารบก ดำรงตำแหน่งรองนายกรัฐมนตรีและรัฐมนตรีว่าการกระทรวงมหาดไทย ทั้งยังเป็นอธิการบดีจุฬาลงกรณ์มหาวิทยาลัย
ขณะเดียวกัน เปลวเพลิงแห่งสงครามอินโดจีนก็ทวีความร้อนแรงมากยิ่งขึ้นเป็นลำดับ รูปธรรมภายในประเทศไม่เพียงแต่มีอาสาสมัครชาวอเมริกันมาสอนวิชาภาษาอังกฤษ ตามสถาบันการศึกษาหลายแห่งทั่วประเทศเท่านั้น หากแต่ที่ตาคลี, นครราชสีมา, อุบลราชธานี, อุดรธานี เป็นต้น เริ่มมีทหารและฐานทัพสหรัฐ เข้ามาตั้งอยู่
บาร์ ไนต์คลับ สถานอาบอบนวด ไม่ได้มีอยู่เฉพาะถนนเพชรบุรีตัดใหม่เท่านั้น หากแต่กระจายอยู่ตามเมืองใหญ่เกือบทุกภาคของประเทศ โดยเฉพาะบริเวณรอบๆ ที่ตั้งฐานทัพ
พระที่นั้งอนันตสมาคมตั้งเด่น เป็นสง่า แต่ผู้เข้าประชุมมิใช่สมาชิกสภาผู้แทนราษฎร หากแต่เป็นสมาชิกสภาร่างรัฐธรรมนูญ ซึ่งแต่งตั้งและร่างรัฐธรรมนูญกันมาตั้งแต่เกือบกุมภาพันธ์ 2502 และยังไม่สำเร็จเสร็จสิ้น
ย่อส่วนลงมาในสังคม
มหาวิทยาลัยอันเสมือนเป็นภาพจำลองจากสังคมไทยขนาดใหญ่
อาจกล่าวได้ว่ายังเป็นยุคมืดในทางพุทธิปัญญา
ความฟุ้งเฟ้อฟุ่มเฟือยยังเป็นด้านหลักเหนือกว่าความเป็นเลิศทางด้าน
วิชาการ นิสิตนักศึกษาสนใจกับการประชันแข่งขันในการจัดมีตติ้ง,
งานบอลล์, ประกวดเทพีมากกว่ากิจกรรมทางปัญญา
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Study Questions
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Review Sheet
Characters
First
Lieutenant Jimmy Cross,
Lieutenant Cross –
"carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian
College in New Jersey" (3)
Tim
O'Brien –
the narrator
Mitchell
Sanders –
the RTO (3);
Norman
Bowker –
"carried a diary" (3);
Kiowa – "a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament" (3)
Ted Lavender – "scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April" (4); wrapped up in his poncho after being shot and transported out in a helicopter (3);
Henry
Dobbins –
"big man...carried extra rations...especially fond of canned peaches in
heavy syrup" (4)
Rat Kiley – "carried comic books" (3);
Martha – "a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey" (3), "an English major...wrote beautifully about her professors and roommates and midterm exams" (3)
Dave Jensen – "practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-sized bars of soap" (4)
Lee
Strunk –
draws the number 17 on April 16 and goes down to search the tunnel
near Than Khe before the platoon blows it up (11); he comes up "grinning,
filthy but alive" just before Lavender was shot (12)
Setting
Vietnam
Than Khe –
Chu Lai –
Sample Student Responses to Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"
Response
1
Responding to the question: Things in the texts we have read are often about non-things. Examine the use of concrete objects or entities in at least two works and show how particular material things acquire meanings beyond their physicality.
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Response
2
Michele Friedlander's essay explicates the metafictional elements in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. This essay was the winner of the East Carolina University English department's 2000 Paul Farr Memorial Essay Contest.
Reference
O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. 1990. New
York: Broadway, 1998. Print.
[The page numbers of "The Things They Carried" on this webpage refers to this edition of the story.]
Bibliography of Secondary Material
Bates, Milton J. "Tim O'Brien's Myth of Courage." Critique (1987).
Herzog, Tobey C. Tim
O'Brien. New York, Twayne Publishers, 1997. Print.
Kaplan, Steven. Understanding
Tim O'Brien. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994.
Print.
Zins, Daniel L. "Imagining the Real: The Fiction of Tim O'Brien." Hollins Critic (Hollins College, Virginia), June 1986.
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