payment page
Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.
Tim O’Brien realizes that stories are different from pure memory. They are a way to capture a memory in its most true form, even if that means infusing it with fictional bits that enhance the story’s truth while decreasing its factuality. But if memory and story are different, it means that when everyone who carries the memories is dead and gone, the story will be what others remember. For Tim, it’s more important that the story ultimately gets at the core truth of the memory rather than being an entirely factual, step-by-step report.
In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way.
Tim O’Brien recounts that the experience of Vietnam was so strange and absurd that what often seemed to be happening to him and his fellow soldiers was outside the realm of what most people would consider real or possible. However, Tim stresses the importance of telling what seemed to happen over what actually happened, because what seemed to happen becomes a truth and reality of its own that is as equally important as the actual reality. What seemed to happen – the reality of the physical land of Vietnam being filled with voices that soldiers can hear in the dark; a sweet, blonde American girl creeping through the Song Tra Bong wearing culottes and a necklace of tongues – ultimately is what happened. That absurdity is the reality of the Vietnam experience.
In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.
Again, Vietnam soldiers struggle to tell the difference between what is actually happening and what seems to be happening. There’s an almost magical, supernatural quality to their experiences in Vietnam – while it’s difficult from a logical standpoint to believe those experiences, those experiences are their reality. Thus, Tim points out the paradox that a true war story is never completely true. To truly help the reader understand the feeling of being a Vietnam soldier, the writer of a war story must put subjective truth over objective truth.
Vietnam was full of strange stories, some improbable, some well beyond that, but the stories that will last forever are those that swirl back and forth across the border between trivia and bedlam, the mad and the mundane.
The stories that feel most accurate and truthful to the Vietnam experience pair the mundanity of marching, camping, chatting, and laboring with the madness and horror of facing death and feeling the heightened sense of reality that fear and trauma create. For example, the mundanity of marching and waiting for helicopters to torch a nearby village mixes with the madness of shaking hands and conversing with a corpse. The absolute boredom of spending weeks lying in the jungle, hoping to spy a glimpse of suspicious enemy activity, mixes with the madness of hearing a glamorous cocktail party seemingly coming from inside a mountain. Stories that mix the realistic and trivial with the absurd and mystical are the ones that seem most real, even if they aren’t exactly true.
