The Things They Carried

by Tim O'Brien

I hated him for making me stop hating him.

Something had gone wrong. I’d come to this war a quiet, thoughtful sort of person, a college grad, Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, all the credentials, but after seven months in the bush I realized that those high, civilized trappings had somehow been crushed under the weight of the simple daily realities. I’d turned mean inside. Even a little cruel at times. For all my education, all my fine liberal values, I now felt a deep coldness inside me, something dark and beyond reason.

I was atrocity—I was jungle fire, jungle drums—I was the blind stare in the eyes of all those poor, dead, dumbfuck ex-pals of mine—all the pale young corpses, Lee Strunk and Kiowa and Curt Lemon—I was the beast on their lips—I was Nam—the horror, the war.

and there was a blurred sequence as he lunged sideways and rolled toward a heap of sandbags and crouched there and hugged his rifle and waited. “There,” I whispered. “Now you know.” I could read his mind. I was there with him. Together we understood what terror was: you’re not human anymore. You’re a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted or believed in. You know you’re about to die. And it’s not a movie and you aren’t a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait. This, now, was something we shared. I felt close to him. It wasn’t compassion, just closeness. His silhouette was framed like a cardboard cutout against the burning flares.

how crazy it was that people who were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead.

“This whole war,” he said. “You know what it is? Just one big banquet. Meat, man. You and me. Everybody. Meat for the bugs.” The next morning he shot himself.

But this too is true: stories can save us. I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now, and even still, right here, I keep dreaming Linda alive. And Ted Lavender, too, and Kiowa, and Curt Lemon, and a slim young man I killed, and an old man sprawled beside a pigpen, and several others whose bodies I once lifted and dumped into a truck. They’re all dead. But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.

“You did a good thing today,” he said. “That shaking hands crap, it isn’t decent. The guys’ll hassle you for a while—especially Jensen—but just keep saying no. Should’ve done it myself. Takes guts, I know that.” “It wasn’t guts. I was scared.” Kiowa shrugged. “Same difference.”

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.

That’s what a story does. The bodies are animated. You make the dead talk. They sometimes say things like, “Roger that.” Or they say, “Timmy, stop crying,” which is what Linda said to me after she was dead.

know my own eyes—and there is no doubt that the Timmy smiling at the camera is the Tim I am now. Inside the body, or beyond the body, there is something absolute and unchanging. The human life is all one thing, like a blade tracing loops on ice: a little kid, a twenty-three-year-old infantry sergeant, a middle-aged writer knowing guilt and sorrow.

just a bright ongoing everness, that same pinprick of absolute lasting light that I see today in my own eyes as Timmy smiles at Tim from the graying photographs of that time. “Dead,” I said. Linda smiled. It was a secret smile, as if she knew things nobody could ever know, and she reached out and touched my wrist and said, “Timmy, stop crying. It doesn’t matter.”

In Vietnam, too, we had ways of making the dead seem not quite so dead. Shaking hands, that was one way. By slighting death, by acting, we pretended it was not the terrible thing it was. By our language,

I learned that words make a difference. It’s easier to cope with a kicked bucket than a corpse; if it isn’t human, it doesn’t matter much if it’s dead. And so a VC nurse, fried by napalm, was a crispy critter. A Vietnamese baby, which lay nearby, was a roasted peanut. “Just a crunchie munchie,” Rat Kiley said as he stepped over the body.

We kept the dead alive with stories.

Mostly, though, we had to make up our own. Often they were exaggerated, or blatant lies, but it was a way of bringing body and soul back together, or a way of making new bodies for the souls to inhabit.

She’d say amazing things sometimes. “Once you’re alive,” she’d say, “you can’t ever be dead.”

But back then it felt like a miracle. My dreams had become a secret meeting place, and in the weeks after she died I couldn’t wait to fall asleep at night.

“Well, right now,” she said, “I’m not dead. But when I am, it’s like . . . I don’t know, I guess it’s like being inside a book that nobody’s reading.” “A book?” I said. “An old one. It’s up on a library shelf, so you’re safe and everything, but the book hasn’t been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody’ll pick it up and start reading.”

I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story.