Tim O'Brien: The Things They Carried

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.”’

Reading List

Extremely Loud, And Incredibly Close
Fight Club
On the Road
Ender's Game
Angela's Ashes
Me Talk Pretty One Day
A People's History of the United States
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Walden
Catcher in the Rye

The Contrived Generation

Pictures, photographs, polaroids, slides, little wool caps, winter breath, grey coats, and stoops, dust, sand, highways, viynl, and trains cars.

This generation sucks.
The internet (facebook, myspace, instant messanger), text messaging, digital cameras, iPods -- this is our generation, and it sucks.

Where is our artistic community? Where is our heart beat? Where are the innovators? The rebels? And, what -- are we going to show the next generation our facebook pages? Are we going to gather the grandchildren, set them in a semi-circle around an iPod, and flip through one's and zero's of our youthful adventures in New York City, Europe, the American West?

Where are our cold water flats? Our years of journey and self-exploration? Where are the movements? Where are the battle-lines?

We have a war, but no shattered twenty-somethings in search of completion, healing -- no antsy youth incapable of standing still, squirming under the heat of inability, smallness, and futility. We have a war, but no guilt.

We are spoiled by the Baby Boomers. We're complacent. We're comfortable. We're content. We're callous.

We're contrived.
This is the contrived generation.