by Troy Bowers
Many RACC students may be familiar with Tim O’Brien because of having been assigned to read his novel “The Things They Carried” for a lit class. For those who are not familiar, like most of O'Brien’s novels, “The Things They Carried” is about the Vietnam War and how it affected those involved. These characters are not always soldiers.
One of the most moving stories in “The Things They Carried” concerns a soldier who finds a way to sneak his fiancée from back home in the states into his remote base camp in Vietnam. What starts out as a story of two lovers reunited winds up becoming a tragedy of lost hopes. Not because either of the lovers die, that would have been altogether preferable to what actually happens.
Rather, the fiancée, after spending a great deal of time with the Green Berets who also use the camp, becomes someone completely different from the woman who stepped down off the supply chopper upon arrival. She starts going out on patrol with the berets and eventually realizes that she was born for this life. The narrator of this chapter thinks that he is bringing his old life to Vietnam to help stave off the homesickness he feels because of having to leave his fiancée.
Ultimately, the war changes her view of the world and her place in it. No longer does she want the American dream of a nice house with a picket fence, two kids, and a dog. Her life becomes consumed with the war and the jungle, and in the end, the narrator loses her when his tour is over and it is time to return to the states.
Some people criticize O’Brien by saying that he only writes Vietnam fiction because he knows only one story and just keeps finding new ways of telling it. While it is true that all but two of O’Brien’s novels concern the Vietnam War, and even those two stories feature protagonists that were affected by Vietnam, all of O’Brien’s novels are far from being repetitious in terms of plot.
Far more repetitious are O’Brien’s recurring themes of memory, interpretation, dreams (both literal and figurative) and meaning. Those who are familiar with Derrida’s literary theory of Deconstruction, or more broadly Post-Modern literary theory, these stories really lend themselves to modern literary critique as they are filled with characters who are trying to understand or “deconstruct” their own fictional lives.
Worth noting is that, like many authors whose writing concerns the Vietnam War and its aftermath, O’Brien himself is a veteran. As a result, while the stories are fiction, they are often based on real events and experiences from the author’s life. It is almost as if O’Brien, through his writing, is trying to find meaning in his own past by exploring his experiences in the realm of fiction.
My favorite of O’Brien’s novels is “Going After Cacciato.” The story takes place in Vietnam during the war and told from the point of view of Paul Berlin, a soldier in the war. The story begins with a Berlin telling his Lt. that one of the soldiers in their platoon, Cacciato himself, has gone AWOL. He had told Berlin before leaving that his plan was to walk to leave the war behind and walk to Paris.
At first, everyone thinks Cacciato is crazy, stupid, or both. How could someone get from Vietnam to Paris France on foot? They set out to track him down and bring him back to the war. Along the way, Cacciato starts to fantasize about how one would actually get to Paris from Vietnam and uses this daydreaming to remove himself from the realities that he has faced during his tour. Some of the soldiers in his platoon had murdered their prior Lt. because he always forced them to follow procedure, even though following procedure was often both pointless and deadly to those ordered to carry out the order.
Berlin was not directly involved in the murder, but he kept quiet about it and allowed it to happen making him an accomplice. Berlin wants to leave the reality of this world so badly, that his fantasy of tracking Cacciato all the way to Paris takes over and makes up the bulk of the narrative. The narrative itself is not linear. Instead, Berlin remembers things that lead to other memories of the war so that what actually happened and the order in which it happened is often blurred. Not only can the reader not entirely trust the narrator, the narrator himself cannot even trust his own story.
Occasionally Berlin’s narrative returns to the here and now where he is performing guard duty at an outpost by the South China Sea. The events concerning the search for Cacciato are in the past and Berlin is trying to remember what happened as well as figure out how and why. But mostly the story follows Berlin’s fantasy of how things could have happened, and how just maybe, they might have followed Cacciato all the way to Paris if he’d been able to stay ahead of them and keep from getting caught by his old platoon mates.
It is a form of escape for Berlin who was opposed to the war when it started and would have dodged the draft if it were not for his feelings of social obligation and duty as well as the ostracization he would encounter from everyone he knew. Berlin did not follow his own conscience, but rather that of his culture and the people around him. As a result, his feelings concerning the things he has seen and done are confused and at odds with each other.
At its core, the story is about trying to find meaning, which lends itself very well to students who have been assigned to read the book and are trying to find meaning in the narrative. Berlin helps the reader along the way by asking of himself many of the same questions that the reader should be asking. I highly recommend “Going After Cacciato” to anyone who read and enjoyed “The Things They Carried,” or who is interested in post modern fictional narratives, or who enjoys tragic stories and wants to join the narrator in his escape from consequence.
