When I bought this book way back in June, my brother told me that it was one of his favorites, but it would take me awhile to realize it. As in, the first half and a bit is pretty boring.
And I have to say, those are my feelings exactly.
There was no real development throughout the book, so it took me awhile to get used to.
So, I'm thinking the theme of this book was death. I don't think Tim really wanted us to learn anything from this book. He just wanted to make it interesting, but not necessarily entertaining.
I like how at the end he brings in Linda. I mean, the entire book death was confined to war. Although war might amplify death, it is still a major part of normal life. The analogy helps us relate to the characters on a smaller scale, which is important in any novel.
When I think about how I feel about this book, my mind automatically thinks: "And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe 'Oh'" (page 74). Personally, I might add a "that was weird".
I found it unusual, yet interesting, that Tim would include this analogy between war and his childhood sweetheart. Although the comparison was unexpected, it made sense. Ultimately Tim's talking about death. He handled these two completely different death experiences very similarly.
"But in a story I can steal her soul. I can revive, at least briefly, that which is absolute and unchanging" (page 224).
I know Tim is redundant at times, and he already made this point once or twice before, but giving us a second outside example helps push the point through. He writes to give his friends a voice.
He made Linda, Kiowa, Lavender, Lemon, and Norman all alive again. As Tim told this story, I "...dream[t] along with [him]...to make spirits in [my] head" (page 218). These people were alive in my mind and in the minds of every person who has read this book.
I think it's beautiful the way he says that.--"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" (page 218). That has got to be my favorite take on writing that I've ever heard.
When a soldier shot himself to get out of the war, he was treated sorta like a coward, I guess. It was considered pathetic. As unnatural and horrific as war is, soldiers realize that it is something that they just need to get used to for a while and when someone wimps out, it is a big deal. But in Rat Kiley's case, "No one blamed him..." (page 212). Being a medic, Kiley probably saw a lot of dead bodies and torn limbs.. and who knows what else. Everyone killed, but Kiley let his own people go. People he knew, he let slip away. (I'm not saying he liked killed anyone, but he couldn't save a lot of them).
I appreciated no one giving him a hard time about leaving.. He obviously had seen too much.
Reading about this change in Kiley got me thinking that every soldier mentioned in this story is probably a dynamic character. They all change in some important way as a result of the story's action. And the story's action just happens to be the Vietnam War.
So earlier Tim talked about blame and now he is talking about revenge, which is basically the same thing. Revenge is placing the blame on someone plus other bad things.
Because Jorgenson didn't save Tim in time, he has to work at some base, away from the action. This separated him from his friends and what they were experiencing.. He had it too easy. So he is mad at Jorgenson for that and for ruining his butt. He is mad in some sick sort of way.
So this quote "Sanders shrugged. 'People change. Situations change. I hate to say this, man, but you're out of touch. Jorgenson-he's with us now.' 'And I'm not?' Sanders looked at em for a moment. 'No,' he said. 'I guess you're not'"(page 188) and this famous quote " Whoa, whoa! Time out. Let me get this straight. You know her, she knows you and she wants to eat him. And everybody's okay with this? Did I miss something?!" (You know, from the Lion King.) We all know how Timone and Pumba feel.. you know, through the whole Can You Feel The Love Tonight scene. Left out, abandoned, and sad. They want their "trio" back. But this random lion stole it from them. All they know is that she's got Simba and they're back on their own-alone.
This is how Tim felt. He wanted his buddies back, but Jorgenson stole them from him. He's getting revenge. Even if he knows deep down, it isn't right. "There was a coldness inside of me. I wasn't myself. I felt hollow and dangerous" (page 197). This situation is far different from death. In death, the only way to get even is, well, more death. In this case, however, Tim can get even just by spooking Jorgenson a little. It's wrong, but it's not as wrong as death, right?
I thought for sure the prank would end terribly.. but I think it acutally made everything better. Hmm. Maybe Tim is saying that blame/revenge is acceptable and useful in any case that doesn't involve death.
"'That old man,' she said, 'is he mad at you or something?' 'I hope not' 'He looks mad.' 'No,' I said. 'All that's finished'" (page 179). Ambiguity! Tim could mean that the war is over or he could mean that he has finally put Kiowa to rest in his mind. For him, those things probably mean the same thing. His fellow soldiers equaled the Vietnam War. We see it as a fact in history. Just something that happened. Tim lived it.
After he returns Kiowa's moccasins (why did he have moccasins?), he is at peace with his best friend's death, and therefore, at peace with the war? So "that old man" isn't angry anymore.
I don't know if this story is true or not, but if it is I also do not know if Tim originally knew that he would take the shoes back. Once he saw the field, he knew he had to. Because "Now, [the field] was just what it was. Flat and dreary and unremarkable" (page 176), Tim had to make something permanent within it. He had to leave the shoes there.
We read works of fiction all the time, so reading something that isn't true really doesn't bother me. Usually that's the fun part. But thinking that a work is true for well over half the book, then finding out it was mostly all a lie is kinda irritating.
"I want you to feel what I felt" (page 171). If you wanted us to feel how you felt, then maybe you should have written about how you felt. Not about how you would have felt if what actually happened was way cooler. "I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening truth" (page 171). How the heck can fake be truer than truth?
Why don't you (*Crazy Idea*) write a novel about how you actually felt? See how that sells.
I know I seem mad, but I'm not really. I respect Tim as an author and veteran. He also seems like a pretty nice guy. And I guess maybe I understand what he was trying to do. Maybe the feelings he shares with us throughout the book match more closely to the feeling that he felt he should feel during the war, but like he said, he was too afraid to feel them. I think either way, we get an inkling of what it was like to be in the Vietnam war. (That's probably a stretch).
From the beginning Cross didn't seem like your typical military man. Always thinking about Martha and whatnot. And now he (well, Tim..) sorta admits it. "...he had signed up for the Reserve Officer Training Corps without much thought" (page 160). And so now he is leading all these men, and because of his mistake, Kiowa dies. But is it really his fault..? This chapter focuses a lot on blame.
On page 169, Tim or Cross or whoever contradicts himself big time: "No apologies were necessary, because in face it was one of those freak things...When a man died, there had to be blame" (page 169).
This begs the question: Does there have to be blame when a man dies? I mean, Tim gave us a long list of reasons Kiowa could have died. But what does it matter? When a man dies, he is dead and "nothing could ever change it anyway" (page 169).
I think Tim just wants his readers to realize that placing a blame usually makes things more complicated and drags everything out. Whereas letting something go is simple and quick. Just rip that band-aid right off instead of picking at it -you know, one hair at a time. It's gonna hurt more if you do it that way.
I think I found more motivation for the writing of this book. But I also realized that the lit term "motivation" doesn't meant the author's reason for writing, it means the characters reason for behaving. Buuuut, I'm going to proceed, because Tim is a character and this book is basically about him remembering all these things to write..
Through all Norman's apostrophes, it is easy to tell that when a soldier comes home, he is itching to talk about it, but just doesn't know how. Like I said earlier, no one understands. He keeps replaying fake conversations in his head.. It's so sad. I just want to tell him that I understand that he couldn't save Kiowa..
Norman wanted to talk so bad, but he wouldn't let himself. Then in Tim's own little explication, we find out that Norman actually wanted Tim to write about a man struggling like he did post-war. Tim gave himself purpose by writing all these war stories.
"[The town] did not know shit about shit, and did not care to know" (page 137). (I found this a little bit puny, but in a more serious tone) and then.. "This guy wants to talk about it, but he can't...You were there you tell it" (page 151).
Tim isn't motivated by just preserving these stories, he is motivated by his friends-giving them a voice, so they can move on and find another purpose in their lives.
If you didn't notice, Kiowa is always the one who comforts Tim after he kills a man. (Well, at least in the two cases described in this book.)
"Kiowa tried to tell me that the man would've died anyway. He told me that it was a good kill, that I was a soldier and this was a war, that I should shape up and stop staring and ask myself what the dead man would've done if things were reversed" (page 127).
From the way Tim describes Kiowa and his family, I know he is a nice guy, who in any other situation, wouldn't want to hurt anyone. He respects life, but knows he doesn't have time to get all worked up about lives lost, especially the enemy. But I find it ironic/foreshadowish that in the very next chapter, Tim reveals how Kiowa died in Vietnam. I don't know if he meant anything by that..
He could just be reinforcing the point I already made.. I think he really wants us to know that all life is important to him. And even though Kiowa tried to help him move on from the people he killed, it still meant something. He still felt they deserved a moment of his time.. I guess. Because then, when Kiowa dies, everyone is thinking about him and how much he meant to everyone. He got that moment of time. His death was a bigger deal than a death of the enemy.. but Tim didn't want to treat it that way.
I finally had hope that this chapter "The Man I Killed" would involve Tim as a character.. but really, it didn't.
But luckily, he knew the entire history of a man he killed before he could even talk to him. Well.. that's what I thought when I was reading. I even wrote "How does he know that?!" on the side of the page. After giving it some thought, I think Tim made it all up, because this man he killed sounds sorta like Tim did before war.
"He loved mathematics..." (page 121) versus "I had the world dicked-Phi Beta Kappa and summacum laude..." (page 39).. Then "Beyond anything else, he was afraid of disgracing himself, and therefore his family and village" (page 121) versus "I feared losing the respect of my parents...My hometown was a conservative little spot on the prairie... conversation slowly zeroing in one the young O'Brien kid, how the damned sissy had taken off for Canada" (page 43).
The two men are clearly very similar.. Tim had to have created his image in the man he killed, because he felt guilty. Instead of trying to not feel guilty, by convincing himself that the man was terrible and evil for fighting for the Viet Cong or whatever, he convinced himself that the man didn't really deserve to die. They were there for practically the same reasons. Maybe this was the first person he killed, so he it really took a toll on him. If every soldier had to think that long about the person they just killed, we'd still be fighting the British for our independence. Death has to become a natural part of daily life for a soldier . I don't think it had kicked in for Tim at this point.
So far Tim (I'm going to call him that now) has talked about love, death, friendship, pride, and God. Each thing is taken on a little bit differently than what we would call typical.
Now they are building some kind of fort in a church, probably somewhere in southern Vietnam. The monks living there seem so grateful for the Americans and show no sign of reluctancy in letting them set up in their Church. I really don't know much about the Vietnam War- I know we had to somehow stop Communism and whatnot, but there were probably some selfish government reasons involved too. Tim didn't agree with the war, or he didn't before he went. I don't know his take on it now, but I'm sure there were others that didn't want to be there either. And I know war probably isn't the number one solution on any sane church's list, but these really holy men appreciated the war efforts, I assume. So if the monks appreciated it, I'm sure that the average southern Vietnamese citizen also appreciated the Americans. I noticed that through reading this.. but I don't think the soldiers did. Kiowa was was afriad to be at the church.. "'It's bad news,' Kiowa said. 'You don't mess with churches'" (page 113).
I think maybe in the midst of all the fighting, the Americans didn't realize why they were there? They just concentrated on the day to day and humped fake things.
I'm trying so hard to figure out this book, but then I remember O'Brien told us that none of his stories will have a real point to them. He just wants us to read them and react with an "Oh". So far I've been reacting with a "huh?". It's not that I'm not enjoying it, I just don't know what to say about it.
I'm sorry Tim, but I'm going to have to come up with something.
Humping. "To carry something was to hump it" (page 3). I thought that was a really weird way to describe it, but I didn't put much thought into it until now.
Henry Dobbins umm.. "humped" the memories of his girlfriend through her pantyhose. I think there is a bit of situational irony when she breaks up with him and he still uses the panty hose as a good luck charm: "'No sweat,' he said. 'The magic doesn't go away'" (page 112). You expect him to be like Mark Fossie.. getting rid of the panty hose and finding something else to hump. Kinda like in Dear John, where John burns all the letters from the woman he loved.. I forget his name. So I'm thinking that maybe these soldiers don't really need something to be real to hump it, they just need the idea. Unlike us, they don't see their girlfriends every day, they probably don't really communicate either. All they have are thoughts (unless your dumb enough to bring your girlfriend to war).
As I'm thinking about this more, I'm realizing that Cross (from the beginning) humped the love he had for his girlfriend through pictures and rocks.. but he didn't have that love in return. All he did was imagine it. And apparently that is enough for men at war.
This really long chapter about Mary Anne and Mark Fossie makes a really good point. I don't know how realistic this is though.. Can a soldier really bring his girlfriend to war with him? The whole story was pretty elaborate not to be true, but I'm reluctant to believe it could happen. However, I understand what the story really was about.. and that's what O'Brien really wants anyways.
After I read, I was reminded of this movie I watched called Brothers, it's rather recent, so you all probably know what I'm talking about, maybe. Here's the trailer, watch if you want to. I'm not really referring to the whole love drama of it. Well, the part in the trailer where he is like "You know what I did for you?!?" (He is crazy mad) Well, he did something crazy so that he could get back to her, but he can't talk about it with anyone, because no one understands. He is really stressed out and gets really angry. At one point, he asks to go back to Afghanistan, because "No one can understand here".
That's exactly what Rat Kiley explains: "...Mary Anne made you think about those girls back home, how pure and innocent they all are, how they'll never understand any of this, not in a billion years. It's like trying to tell someone what chocolate tastes like" (page 108).
(I never really thought about describing chocolate to someone who has never tried it.. although, I've never met anyone who hasn't tried chocolate either)
Soldiers have seen things indescribable to the typical American. Even though there is no point to a good war story, I think O'Brien shared this one with us because he wants us to know that even though this entire book will talk about the war (probably) we won't understand it completely, unless we've experienced ourselves. It is kinda of like a foreshadowing. O'Brien is warning us of what is ahead by telling us that if we aren't a soldier or a Mary Anne, then forget now about wanting to feel some sort of connection to this novel.
I am kinda confused in understanding the point of view that this novel is written in. The narrator is clearly there as a part in the action. He uses pronouns like "we" and "I", but he is also sort of "all-knowing". Especially in the beginning when he talks about Lt. Cross and Martha.. "Lt. Cross gazed at the tunnel But he was not there. He was buried with Martha under the white sand at the Jersey shore...he was aware of how quiet the day was...yet he could not ring himself to worry about matters of security" (page 11). How does the narrator know all that? I guess he could just be making assumptions. This confusion makes me question the actual role of the narrator. Why is he even there? He doesn't really get in on any of the action. When you envision the actual scene, he is just there, listening to Rat Kiley or someone telling a story. Surely he will play a bigger role eventually, right?
Even though he is telling us these stories, I think he is just a flat character. We really don't know him very well other than he fought in the war, and he is now an author. I can sorta create some other personality traits of his based on his description of the other men, but I don't think he will change the course of the story. His sole purpose is to tell stories to his audience.
O'Brien dedicated this entire chapter, like 16 pages, to the truth of a war story. He reiterated himself a lot, so I know that this truth thing must be a big deal for the upcoming chapters. I kept questioning him as I was reading. Why do you keep saying the same thing over and over? By the end of the chapter, I felt like he did at war: (not to the same extent, obviously) where "the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity" (page 78). O'Brien wants us to understand that the validity of the details of war stories are probably always going to be ambiguous and the response to most of them might just be an "oh", like he explained. But if you look past the war part of the story.. if that makes sense.. you can see something else. For instance, in that baby water buffalo story, who knows if any of that was true. What we do know now is that Rat Kiley loved Curt Lemon.
War stories aren't about war. They are about love, courage, grief, anger, friendship and other stuff like that. This kinda shines a new light on what I used to think of when I heard my Grandpa talk of war. I always expected to hear some sort of adventure hero story. And as a child, that is what I heard. But I'm sure now that as a "more mature child" I would gain something different from the story.. Well, I don't know. O'Brien makes it so confusing. He says that a true war story has no meaning, but then he kinda also says it does at the end. So who knows?
The juxtaposed chapters. Enemies and Friends. So far I still don't see a plot, even less so than in The Sun Also Rises. O'Brien just writes little tidbits of his memories and categorizes them into typical characteristics of the war he experienced. In these two chapters for instance, he remembers Jensen and Strunk. The two hated each other to the extreme extent that it felt "like fighting two different wars" (page 60). And O'Brien has me thinking that men at war are crazy. I mean the weapons they carry could do a lot of damage, if you think about it. I know when I first started driving, I always thought to myself that I had so much power in this car. You know? Like I could run into things and destroy a lot (Don't think I'm crazy or anything, I know you've all thought about it. Especially those of you who drive SUVs.) I can't imagine having that power times a gillion. So when these guys get angry, they get pretty freaking crazy. Jensen "rattled off an entire magazine of ammunition" (page 60) because he was so ticked off with Strunk. But then I read the next chapter entitled "Friends" assuming it would be about two other people. Nope.. It is about Jensen and Strunk. They hated each other so much, but at the same time, "they learn[ed] to trust each other" (page 62). These two relationship statuses: Enemies and Friends are complete opposites, and yet I guess in a war,you can be both.
So Tim O'Brien is the narrator? I'm going with that. I don't really know what to say about this chapter. I'm sorta surprised about his reaction to the war itself. Going into this book I assumed O'Brien was some sort of war buff who willingly dedicated his life to our country.. but not really our country, more like to stopping the Dominoes. He went to Vietnam "because [he] was too embarrassed not to" (page 57). I'm not trying to judge his reasonings, but it does seem kinda lame. But I probably would go through the same process. I hope I wouldn't flee to Canada, but I would definitely think about it. (Not that I would be any help in fighting a war). I'm curious to know if his philosophies change after serving in Vietnam. I thought this book was going to be inspiring, but now I'm sorta thinking it might just be an "I regret my life" sorta novel. Nonetheless, it is very well written and I'm enjoying myself. And I have a sneaking suspicion that which ever way his stories take me, I will learn something from them.
I'm also confused about the organization of the book. He started off in Vietnam, telling war stories. Then he flashes forward to sometime after the war, where he and Cross recollect old memories. And then he flashes way back to before he serves in Vietnam. I want to know if this is going to be how the rest of the novel is written, or will I eventually find a real story line?
I don't know who the narrator is yet, but I know he is going to write a book similar to this novel. The narrator represents O'Brien. He tells his readers why he wrote this book and many others through this mysterious character. They share the same motivation. Like Hemingway wrote a novel based on stories from his life in Spain, O'Brien remembers stories from his life at war.
"You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come to you" (page 33).
Well, I guess I just summed up some of his motivation in a quote, which isn't how we are supposed to do it. But I wanted to also point out the imagery O'Brien uses. When I read that passage I see it all happening. I don't know if it helps me better understand his reasonings, but it makes it a lot more interesting. He goes on to also tell us that "stories are for joining the past to the future" (page 36). In The Sun Also Rises I had to use outside knowledge to come up with a motivation factor, but O'Brien comes straight out with it. I think this is because not everyone (especially in our class) can really relate to these characters who have been in war. So O'Brien assures us that he knows what he is talking about. These are all stories from his memory that he has made into a work of .. historical fiction? By stating his motivation, he has egos.
Right from the beginning we know that Cross is in love with Martha, so it must play a big role in the rest of the book.. although knowing that Cohn was a boxer really meant nothing to the novel. I'm going to go ahead and say that love is a motif for Cross's life. He loved Martha, but he also loved his men and he was at constant battle trying to prioritize. Martha definitely had it in the bag. Even after he tried to "shut down the daydreams" (page 23), he still thought about her too much. He told himself he would be a better commander, but all the while he thought about how much he hated her, but still loved her. Or what he was going to do with the lucky pebble. "He [dispensed] of love; it was not now a factor" (page 25). Before Lavender's death he was trying to love his men more than Martha, but afterwards, he tried to hate Martha, which disabled him to love his men. At this point, I think he is just as confused as I am. Because after chapter 2, we find out that he never gets Martha. So why is she playing such a big role?
Chapter One gave the title of this book a literal meaning. O'Brien described the things that soldiers actually carried: "...P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches..." (page 2). And he also gave us an idea of what soldiers have to physiologically carry: "...the responsibility for the lives of [Cross's] me, ...a silent awe for the terrible power of [some] of the things they carried, ...ghosts, ...imagination,...blame..." (Chapter 1). I think the emotional baggage that these men carried affected the way they talked, walked, slept, and even fought. Soldiers were stripped of their "humaness" in some ways. Death at home sometimes takes months and years to fully accept and heal, but in war death occurs too often to take that much time to accept. Soldiers sometimes just have to ignore it and treat it like a normal part of life. Instead of mourning the loss of Lavender, all Kiowa can think of is "boom-down" (page 6). Although they have to ignore it and move on at the time, I think everything they experence will one day hit them hard. War isn't a healthy environment for anyone. As I am reading this book, I am also thinking about my Grandpa, who fought in Vietnam. If you don't know who Ronald Lee Ermey is, you probably do. He was a drill instructor for the Marines and an actor. He was in Vietnam and talks about it a lot. My Grandpa used to tell us how much he hated him, because "No one who actually fought in Vietman would talk about it". My Grandpa also fought in WWII and he told us all the stories we wanted to hear about it, but that was the only comment he ever gave about Vietnam, which makes me think that the emotional toll from Vietnam was huge.
