A few years ago I heard a lecture by Tim O’Brien,
author of The Things They Carried. I attended several functions highlighting
this book the focus of the BIG READ in Wichita. I never sensed that audiences
grasped the gist of what he was trying to say about the Viet Nam war with which
he was intimately familiar, and about war generally.
For some people the city-wide focus on this novel was
mostly a nostalgic look at a distant common experience. This was a war that
wasn’t really a war. The nation couldn’t
agree on it politically, causing huge protests in America, particularly among
young people. Today, people protest their
right to own firearms more often than the political and moral necessity of going
to another country to kill or be killed.
Today I returned to my notes about O’Brien’s
lecture.
He told us that the Viet Nam conflict was actually between
“two hells” and he, as a conscripted soldier, had to choose to be loyal to his country or to his
conscience. As a child he had been taught in church that killing was wrong. He
had grown up in a world of absolutes: black versus white. Now he was expected to kill – anything that
moved. His moral compass went out of kilter.
He couldn’t reconcile these two disparate views–
that one man’s truth was another man’s lie. One side’s terrorist was another
side’s freedom fighter. War caused him
to do things he was ashamed of.
It ended up with him losing his sense of purpose as
he stumbled around in that Asian countryside in a conflict which had no front. Danger
was pervasive and unrelenting, success measured in dead bodies. He had no idea what
he and his friends were dying for. Why do they make us do this? he asked
himself. Reality became blurred. Fact and
fiction got intermingled.
Recently I read a newer book by O’Brien: In the Lake of the Woods. He calls it a
novel, but like The Things They Carried,
you begin reading what you think is fiction, when suddenly you find yourself faced
with real life incidents.
This “novel” begins with the fictional John Wade, Viet
Nam veteran, successful politician, who,
in his campaign for president, is defeated in a humiliating loss. Someone
unearthed his Viet Nam record and made it public shortly before the election.
He and wife Kathy retreat to a cabin on one of the Lake
of the Woods islands in northern Minnesota to nurse their wounds and mend personal
differences sharpened during the tense times of the campaign.
The novel interrupts this story again and again to give excerpts of the court
records of the trial of Lt. William Calley and the My Lai massacre during the
Viet Nam war when about 300 defenseless villagers, young and old, women and
children, even infants, were mercilessly butchered. O’Brien was eyewitness to similar killings. Calley
was the only person convicted of the My Lai massacre, according to a footnote in the book.
The earlier novel becomes more understandable after
reading this second one. O’Brien has one theme and one only: The after-effects of war. War doesn’t end
with a peace treaty.
In In the Lake
of the Woods, Kathy disappears during the night, as does the Wade boat. Law enforcement is brought in to conduct a
search, with no success.
The novel focuses on the search to find her but backtracks
to the wartime experiences of her veteran/turned politician husband. Wade, the
presidential hopeful, thought he had put his war experiences behind, but finds he
can’t. He had also killed without cause and must rationalize
his actions.
The fictional part of the novel asks What happened here? Was Kathy
murdered? If so, by whom? Did she commit suicide? Did she get lost during the night among the
many little islands, which will soon all have looked alike to her as she motored
among them? We never find out about
Kathy. Readers are left to decide.
The novel asks the same question about Viet Nam: What
happened here? Its story line is a
metaphor for the Viet Nam fiasco.
At the lecture, O’Brien commented that people ask
him why he blurs fact with fiction in his novels. Reading this second book made that clear to
me. He said he did this mixing deliberately
to make the point that in situations like Viet Nam, reality get blurred. Who is the enemy? What here is morally right? Morally
wrong? What is truth? What is a lie? The
outer conflict creates a huge war inside and makes you question who you are.
O’Brien writes, “War has the feel—the spiritual
texture—of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity.
Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no
longer true.”
Some people have the idea that once one power is
defeated, peace will result. O’Brien told us in his lecture that “peace is a
shy thing.” I understand his words better now. Peace does not rush forward boldly, defiantly,
pronouncing itself as the victor. It remains elusive.
After the conflict, mothers, wives, and children
still mourn their dead, still go hungry,
still look for warmth and shelter, still ache for life as they once knew it.
After a conflict, those who fought return home, hang
up their uniforms but not their memories.
What happened to others, to them, still remains murky, still a burden.
“Because there is no end, happy or otherwise.
Nothing is fixed, nothing is solved.”
O’Brien writes, “You can tell a true war story by
the way it never seems to end. Not then, not ever” (The Things They Carried). Not in the land. Not in one’s soul.
Peace is a
shy thing, a very shy thing.
