Uncertainty and Truth in Tim O'Brien's Vietnam War Writing

Introduction: O'Brien's Mission Against Ignorance

Tim O'Brien is the author of The Things They Carried, a celebrated collection of short stories. A renowned American writer, William Timothy O'Brien became famous for his Vietnam War-centered novels. Aside from The Things They Carried, many recognize O'Brien for Going After Cacciato (Herzog 10). Born in Austin, Minnesota on October 1, 1946, O'Brien spent most of his childhood in Worthington. Growing up there gave him the opportunity to develop both his imagination and artistic sensibility (Herzog 10). Furthermore, the location became a model for some of the stories in The Things They Carried.

One of the main reasons O'Brien wrote this collection was his conviction that the general public was deeply ignorant about the Vietnam War. With most of the characters being semi-autobiographical, O'Brien provides a basis for understanding what the Vietnam War was really like, demonstrating the pervasive sense of uncertainty both in the conflict and in his own life during that period. The central argument of The Things They Carried is that war is nothing like what people imagine it to be — it is far worse — and that the uncertainty of everyday life in war is precisely what makes it so horrible.

Memoir and Reality: If I Die in a Combat Zone

If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home is Tim O'Brien's autobiographical account of his tour of duty in Vietnam. Published in 1973, the memoir takes readers through an average day for a soldier during the war. Just as in The Things They Carried, O'Brien describes a small number of "grunts" he encounters and the psychological effects of the war. Spending his time in Alpha Company, he recounts the horrible effects of the various mines encountered and the maiming and disfigurement of both civilians and combatants (O'Brien 125–126). He also describes the accidental shelling of a lagoon village that Alpha Company had tried to protect, as well as a brief glimpse of the My Lai Massacre when he is airlifted away. The Charlie Company in the story is under investigation for the massacre (O'Brien 136). These scenes promote a sense of the tragedy and insanity that defined the Vietnam War, educating the public on the true horrors of war.

Narrative Uncertainty and the Imagination

Kaplan, writing in a 1993 article, discusses the uncertainty of the narrator in The Things They Carried and reinforces how the Vietnam War's terrifying truth remained largely unknown. As Kaplan observes: "The Vietnam War was in many ways a wild and terrible work of fiction… the United States decided what constituted good and evil, right and wrong, civilized and uncivilized, freedom and oppression for Vietnam…" (Kaplan 43). Elaborating further, Kaplan describes how the war eroded all certainty — "yes" was no longer "yes," and so forth. That uncertainty surrounding every aspect of the conflict, whether people lived or died, the nature of morality, and the effects of immorality, all found expression in the authors who wrote about this subject.

Tim O'Brien created a world within these short stories that mimicked the environment he experienced in Vietnam. By embedding uncertainty in both the narrator and the setting, he continually challenges the image American civilians had formed of the war. Gone are the impressions of good guys versus bad guys and obedient soldiers. Both The Things They Carried and If I Die in a Combat Zone replace those impressions with images of blown-up body parts, rogue soldiers, death, and grief — producing the fear and awakening to reality that O'Brien sought.

Aside from revealing the truth of the war through reality-based experiences, O'Brien also used his imagination — much as he had in childhood — to further convey that sense of uncertainty. As Kaplan notes, O'Brien "takes the act of trying to reveal and understand the uncertainties about the war one step further, by looking at it through the imagination" (44). By utterly destroying the fine line that divides fact from fiction, more so than he did in Cacciato, he makes good on his effort to eliminate public ignorance about the Vietnam War. A striking example is O'Brien's description of a man caught in an explosion: "He fell on his back. His rubber sandals had been blown off. He lay at the center of the trail, his right leg bent beneath him, one eye shut, his other eye a huge star-shaped hole" (O'Brien 127). Such a description may have come from his real-life experiences, or it may be an imagined scenario rooted in situations he lived through. Either way, the scene generates uncertainty that reveals something profound — not only to the reader, but about the writer himself.

Returning to that scene, the person described does not quite feel real. The star-shaped hole and the rubber sandals seem juxtaposed with each other, as if one detail is drawn from life and another from an action film. But that is often how soldiers experience war — some elements simply do not feel real. Whether from shock or the surreal quality of memory, events like this remain simultaneously real and imagined. O'Brien excels at presenting real and imagined scenarios that bleed into each other.

Conclusion: War's Lasting Impact

In conclusion, through The Things They Carried, O'Brien gave readers a chance to confront the unknown. He spoke to the public's ignorance of war — and especially of the Vietnam War. His stories highlighted not only that the Vietnam War was a horrendous ordeal, but that it had long-lasting impacts. Soldiers who entered the war did not know whether they would eat, whether they would live, or whether they would be whole when it was over. That uncertainty is brilliantly expressed through O'Brien's juxtaposition of language and his willingness to vary his writing styles. In essence, his writing became the mind of a soldier — and in doing so, it revealed the uncertainty of both the soldier and the narrator.

Works Cited

Calloway, Catherine. "'How to Tell a True War Story': Metafiction in The Things They Carried." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 36, no. 4, 1995, pp. 249–257.

Herzog, Tobey C. Tim O'Brien: The Things He Carries and the Stories He Tells. Routledge, 2018.

Jarraway, David R. "'Excremental Assault' in Tim O'Brien: Trauma and Recovery in Vietnam War Literature." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 44, no. 3, 1998, pp. 695–711.

Kaplan, Steven. "The Undying Uncertainty of the Narrator in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 35, no. 1, 1993, pp. 43–52.

O'Brien, Tim. If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. Crown Publishing Group, 2011.

---. The Things They Carried. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

Sherman, Nancy. The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of Our Soldiers. W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.

Taylor, Nicholas, and Gerald Voorhees. Masculinities in Play. Springer International Publishing, 2018.