Summary
Insisting that sometimes war is less violent and more
sweet, O’Brien shares disconnected memories of the war. Azar gives
a bar of chocolate to a little boy with a plastic leg. Mitchell
Sanders sits under a tree, picking lice off his body and depositing
them in an envelope addressed to his Ohio draft board. Every night,
Henry Dobbins and Norman Bowker dig a foxhole and play checkers.
The narrator stops the string of anecdotes to say that he is now
forty-three years old and a writer, and that reliving the memories
has caused them to recur. He insists that the bad memories live
on and never stop happening. He says his guilt has not ceased and
that his daughter Kathleen advises him to write about something
else. Nevertheless, he says, writing about what one remembers is
a means of coping with those things one can’t forget.
O’Brien describes when the Alpha Company enlists an old
Vietnamese man whom they call a “poppa-san” to guide the platoon through
the mine fields on the Batangan Peninsula. When he is done, the
troops are sad to leave their steadfast guide. Mitchell Sanders tells
a story of a man who went AWOL in order to
sleep with a Red Cross nurse. After several days, the man rejoined
his unit and was more excited than ever about getting back into
combat, saying that after so much peace, he wanted to hurt again.
Norman Bowker whispers one night that if he could have one wish
it would be for his father to stop bothering him about earning medals.
Kiowa teaches Rat Kiley and Dave Jensen a rain dance, and when they
ask him, afterward, where the rain was, he replies, “The earth is
slow, but the buffalo is patient.” Ted Lavender adopts a puppy,
and Azar later kills it, claiming his own immaturity as an excuse.
Henry Dobbins sings to himself as he sews on his new buck-sergeant
stripes. Lavender occasionally goes too heavy on the tranquilizers
and calls the war “nice” and “mellow.” After Curt Lemon is killed,
he hangs in pieces on a tree. Last comes the vision of a dead, young
man and Kiowa’s voice ringing in O’Brien’s ear, assuring him, repeatedly,
that O’Brien didn’t have a choice.
Analysis
“Spin,” with its unconnected anecdotes delivered in scattered phrases
and half-realized memories, stylistically echoes the fragmentation
of the war experience. Like the anecdotes in “The Things They Carried,”
the anecdotes here are static and seemingly unrelated. They jump
in time, purpose, and magnitude in the same way that a soldier’s
mind might jump around his past. In this story, it becomes clear
to us that all the stories O’Brien is telling originate from his
memory. A shift in tone accompanies the fragmentation; O’Brien transitions
from a balanced to a disillusioned evaluation of the war. He argues
that the war is unlike Dobbins and Bowker’s well-ordered, rational
games of checkers. The war has neither rules nor winners, and men
witness horrific acts juxtaposed with random acts of kindness.
“Spin” is like a map of the uncharted territory of war
for readers who have never experienced it. The story allows us to
feel the boredom of war by describing the things that happen when
nothing is happening: jibes, songs, stomachaches, and despair. It
also addresses the way men choose to deal with fright, uncertainty,
and devastation. Unable to cope with stress, Azar brutally kills
Ted Lavender’s adopted puppy and uses his immaturity and youth as
an excuse for his actions. O’Brien’s decision not to explain or
elaborate on this event conveys the message that sometimes the facts
in a true war story need no further commentary.
Although the plot of “Spin” is not complicated, the story
establishes the identities of the characters who appear throughout The Things
They Carried. We encounter most of the main characters
in the title story, but we find out more about them here. We see
the immature inhumanity of Azar, the philosophical even-headedness of
Kiowa, and the dimness of Norman Bowker, and each character becomes
more rounded and real with the revelation of a new detail. One way
that “Spin” develops characters is by describing the inner conflicts
that define them throughout The Things They Carried. O’Brien
revisits, throughout the work, such elements as Ted Lavender’s tranquilizer
abuse, Curt Lemon’s death, and his own killing of a Vietnamese man,
and with each new look at a given event we gain added perspective
on the characters involved.
O’Brien’s relationship with his daughter Kathleen reveals
the importance of storytelling. An outsider to O’Brien’s experience, Kathleen
cannot begin to imagine what her father went through when he was
a soldier in a foreign country long before she was born. She is
therefore convinced that her father’s obsession with Vietnam is
an easily curable condition. She suggests that he write something happier,
something entirely different, failing to realize that there is a reason
that he needs to tell these stories, and to tell them to her, specifically.
O’Brien says the function of telling stories is delivering the past
into the future, for giving perspective and understanding. His act
of telling, which bridges the gap between past and present, helps both
him and Kathleen more fully understand his war experience.
