"Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."
- Tim O'Brien
Perhaps the greatest thing about literature is how it can capture a moment, the feeling of a generation and save it - wrap it up nice and tight in words and grammar and save it until it is needed by a different generation.
Tim O'Brien has done this. He has captured a part of the Vietnam War and saved it for us. Now, with the world in a state of armed conflict, it is time to draw on the experiences of an older generation.
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Tim O'Brien is a writer who came of age during the Vietnam War era. He was a soldier in the conflict and his writings focus on his experiences there. He brings insight and compassion to the stories and, most importantly, his themes go well beyond simple ideas of right and wrong.
Widely recognized as the preeminent American novelist of the Vietnam experience O'Brien has received critical and commercial success.
As a writer he is able to translate his experiences in the combat zone to the larger questions of life and death, guilt, redemption and life after the war. His books The Things They Carried, and his other works, aspire to transcend mere words and find meaning in the world through human experience, especially if those experiences are not always the cleanest.
I must have read the opening chapter of The Things They Carried five times since I enrolled at UNM. It seems as if every English teacher insisted on pulling it out of some anthology or another. It's 26 pages long and it doesn't tell a story, it tells thousands of them.
Through the list of items carried by the narrator and his platoon it somehow conveys a story for every man, woman and child who lost their lives in the Vietnam War. Throughout the entire book it doesn't say a word about right or wrong and it doesn't glorify war, or killing, or even surviving.
Before reading this book, I never gave much thought to what a war is. It always seemed so distant and surreal. Fantasies of bravery in battle were always there, but with no backing behind the daydreams.
There was no knowledge of what it must be like to have to kill or be killed, or even the effects of being forced to take a human life. From this book, it is easy to see that what war is and what being a soldier in a war is are two totally different things.
With the world in the volatile state that is, it seems as though it's changed, even though absolutely nothing had changed. School still trudges on, no one I know is forced to shoot at another human being and our tuition just got another hike.
When this all started I didn't know what to think. I wasn't about to let some pseudo hippie tell me what to believe and I wasn't about to let some suit in Washington tell me how to act.
They say that those who do not remember the past are destined to repeat it and in many ways this saying is poignant today for both the anti-war groups and the supporters of the war in Iraq. War is ugly and war is unkind. Wars kill people, young and old, innocent and corrupt. Nothing has ever been solved by war.
Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried is an important book. Not only for its ability to convey what war is like, but also because it is capable of conveying what war is to a solider who didn't want to be there.
O'Brien's works have always been important but never more so than they are right now. Isn't the human experience the most important?
