Tim O’Brien’s Novel The Things They Carried: War Past and Present

“Be All That You Can Be.” A tagline created for US army promotions, this phrase appeared in advertisements and television commercials nationwide. Yet, as evidenced by Tim O’Brien’s book “The Things They Carried,” entering into combat with other human beings is not the average soldier’s idea of fulfilling his greatest potential. Rather, by fighting to “preserve civilization” and “restore order”, many soldiers feel their own sense of civility destroyed. Soldiers, such as Norman Bowker, a central figure in O’Brien’s book, who enter as young men with high expectations for themselves in life, leave the war with an unshakable sense of guilt, untellable stories, and a feeling of purposelessness.

In The “Things They Carried,” readers are introduced to Norman Bowker, an experienced soldier with multiple honors to his name; a combatant who “bravely” fought against the “enemy”….and now drives around town aimlessly, haunted by his own demons. Bowker, who experiences the loss of his comrade Kiowa in a shit field in Vietnam, always blames himself for his friend and ally’s death. He fixates on what he could have and should have done, instead of the reality of the situation: Kiowa, when he died, was stuck under such a layer of muck that it would have been impossible for Bowker to save him.
Bowker never quite gets over his preoccupation with the war and what his usefulness could be after combat.

He had won seven medals for himself due to his courage in combat, yet does not consider them to be medals of honor, but rather burdens. Every time he tries to explain the realities of war to such persons as his father, they point out his medals, as a way to quiet his rattlings about such truths as the death of Kiowa and what it is like to shoot another man. Bowker, who O’Brien identifies as a young man with parents who “treated him with kindness and obvious love;” a person who before the war enjoyed conversations with friends and car rides around the town lake, eventually hangs himself, unable to find meaning in his life after combat (155).

Bowker, in his own letter to O’Brien, summarizes the guilt that built up in soldiers such as himself when there was nowhere to turn to release their emotions. “Write a story about a guy who got zapped over in that shit hole,” he says. “A guy who can’t get his act together and just drives around town all day and can’t think of any damn place to go and doesn’t know how to get there anyway” (157). He concludes by explaining that Tim perhaps can explain it solely because he experienced it. “You were there,” he says. “You can tell it” (157). As a war survivor, that is just what O’Brien tries to do: tell the truths of war (even if they take on fictional form). Yet he himself is not immune to the deleterious effects of combat. We find Tim O’Brien to suffer the same symptoms of worthlessness and irrepressible guilt as the Norman Bowker.

Pre-Vietnam War Tim O’Brien could have been seen as an ideal young man: Twenty – one years old, recently graduated Summa Cum Laude and president of the student body of his college, and on a full scholarship for graduate school at Harvard University. Yet, with the delivery of a single letter, his whole sense of confidence and assuredness in his position in life becomes skewed. Once a (though tame) protester of the Vietnam War, O’Brien believed that “certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons” (40). However, when his draft notice arrives his “only certainty….was moral confusion” (40). The reader comes to learn, though, that it is not his opinion on the war that changes. Instead, it is a fear of a social disdain of draft-dodgers that pushes him into a war he does not support.

Even twenty years later this feeling of embarrassment for not wanting to enter combat sticks with him. “For more than twenty years I’ve had to live with it, feeling the shame, trying to push it away,” O’Brien says (39). Before the war even starts for him on a personal level, he is already experiencing it’s negative effects on his psyche. “It was a kind of schizophrenia,” he says, “a moral split….I feared the war…but I also feared exile”(44). The war is not a choice for O’Brien but rather a forced responsibility. He can either go to war and risk death, or escape to Canada, only to be labeled as a coward upon his return.

After the war, the reader finds a different Tim O’Brien. Far from the young man who believed that “if the evil were evil enough, if the good were good enough, (he) would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had been accumulating inside (him) over the years,” (39) O’Brien calls himself “a coward” (61). Furthermore, O’Brien develops a poor image of himself not only for entering the war, but for not being the “perfect soldier;” saving every one of his men, always forging the correct path. Similar to the situation Norman Bowker experienced, the guilt he suffers due to the death of the soldier Kiowa lasts long after the war ceases. Returning to the site of Kiowa’s death, he comments that he wants to show his daughter “the Vietnam that kept (him) awake at night” (184).

Something about his experiences keeps his thoughts there even when he is not. Perhaps his preoccupation centers around the fact that he has no outlet for his emotions; no one who can quite understand or who even cares to know the realities of war. Once involved in the war, his involvement defines him; he feels less alive on the outside of the fighting. The reader can gain a better understanding of O’Brien’s loss of identity through the Ghost Soldiers chapter. “I missed the adventure,” he says in this portion of the book, “You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood – you give it together, you take it together” (192). Outside of the fighting, he is alone. Returning to his old troops after an a combat-ending injury, he is hit by the reality: He is no longer a true part of the group.

What he used to understand, he can’t anymore, just because he isn’t present with them; a member of the “family” they form. Mitchell Sanders, his fellow soldier, explains it to him this way, commenting on the acceptance of the group of a new soldier named Jorgenson: “People change. Situations change. I hate to say this, man, but you’re out of touch. Jorgenson – he’s with us now” (198). With this explanation, O’Brien finds himself in a role commonly associated with those who did not enter the war. Frequently soldiers would return home, only to find that no one understood the depth of their war stories, or the reality of combat. O’Brien realizes he is now one of those hometown folks who just does not understand.

In contrast to the everyday citizen listening to a war story, though, O’Brien does have the depth of experience. He gives witness to that fact in “The Things They Carried.” His examples of the effect of war on a person’s psyche are related through believable tales that seem as if they are personal accounts of war at it’s most primitive moments. He makes each story believable (even if it is entirely a work of fiction) in order to make the characters real and their turmoil understandable. Norman Bowker may not have ever existed, but his strife does; it is reality for so many unnamed fighters.

Perhaps The Things They Carried is the outlet needed for O’Brien to tell his war story. Norman Bowker went so far as to write O’Brien, asking for his story (though not his name) to be included in his scripting of the Kiowa tale. Whether it becomes a way of relieving guilt, or just giving a soldier a purpose through other’s understanding, both see sharing their experiences as vital. It may be too late for Norman Bowker, but O’Brien at the end of “The Things They Carried” summarizes it as such: “I realize it as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story” (246).