Author Tim O’Brien to speak in Peters
The first chapter of Tim O’Brien’s just-completed book is a letter to his son: It begins “Dear Timmy,” and then it proceeds to break your heart. He wrote the letter when his son was a toddler and he was in his 50s, a first-time dad whose accomplishments include the 1990 masterpiece, “The Things They Carried” and “Going After Cacciato,” the 1979 National Book Award winner for fiction. Both are considered among the finest literature to reflect the anguish of soldiers during the war in Vietnam.
His ninth book, “Dad’s MaybeBook,” is to be published next autumn by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
In a recent phone interview from his home in Austin, Texas, Mr. O’Brien said the new book was 14 years in the making. It began with written anecdotes that put time and place to moments in the child’s growth. His older son is now 15 and his younger son is 13.
The book is “in a way a memoir, about my dad and about being a dad in my old age, but also about what a child forgets,” said Mr. O’Brien, who also is a consultant and writer for NBC’s hit show “This Is Us.” “If one of the kids did something charitable and kind, I would write it down without ever thinking it would be in a book. Mini stories about their youth. It was for me. My wife jotted things down, and one of our baby sitters jotted stuff in a journal.”
Eventually, he had the makings of what he thought was maybe a book, he said, thus the title.
“When you begin to know me,” Mr. O’Brien wrote in his letter, “I’ll be an old man, and that’s the best scenario.” The letter continues, “In many ways, a man is what he yearns for. I yearn to witness your first act of kindness. I yearn to witness your first act of moral courage.”
He said moral courage was something he wished he had exercised when he got his draft notice.
What kept him in line was a sense of duty. It was the kind of thing a kid who grew up in Worthington, Minn., did.
Yet he was anti-war going in and his feelings grew stronger as the war dragged on. Today, he said, “I’m not a pacifist, but I am the next closest thing.”
During his tour of duty, from 1969 to 1970, he was a radioman, tethered to an officer in a sort of “double jeopardy. You think, ‘What are my odds?’ People dropped like flies.”
He said he found being there surreal and always expected to be killed. The memory of the daily terror is alive in him every day, he said. Most combat veterans acknowledge their combat experience occupies a prominent seat inside them, like a passenger in a car, invisible to others.
He imagines climbing into a foxhole every night to go to sleep.
Healing is something you can only work toward, never fully achieving, he said, “not without a lot of drugs or by dying.
“You can camouflage it and guys do try to. God knows I did, to dull it down. Willful forgetfulness. You get in the habit of not talking about it, and it becomes almost a credo. A lot of my friends still refuse to talk about it.
“What I have wasn’t curable. But you can make yourself a better person and a happier person by putting your hands in the dirty stuff and your head inside the dirty stuff and lifting up the dirt of your own life, things you did that you wish you hadn’t, things you didn’t do that you wish you had, being honest with yourself.”
From childhood, he vowed to be a writer, but he said Vietnam made him need to write and gave him a deeply rich loam to work.
For a few years in the early 1970s, Mr. O’Brien was a reporter for The Washington Post. He said he loved and misses the camaraderie of a newsroom.
“But I am a novelist at heart.”
In 1994, he returned to Vietnam to write a retrospective for The New York Times. He walked through the same villages in Quang Ngai province he had walked through, filled with terror, as an Army grunt. Twenty-five years later, he and his companion were treated to a meal in a village where many elders were survivors of American attacks. He described a lovely welcome that put him on edge, feeling haunted and guilty.
He met people in My Lai, a village his company had walked through a year after the massacre but before it had made headlines, before his company knew about it.
“The place blends in with all the other poor, scary, beleaguered ‘villes’ in this area we called Pinkville,” he wrote, referring to the area of then-South Vietnam shaded in pink on military maps. “Even so, the feel of the place is as familiar as the old stucco house of my childhood. The clay trails, the cow dung, the blank faces, the unknowns and unknowables. There is the smell of sin here. Smells of terror, too, and enduring sorrow.”
During his service and throughout his writing career, he has spoken often about the wrong done to the people of Vietnam, the destruction of villages, the casual brutality against clearly harmless people, including babies.
He assails the hubris of an American war machine that invades countries for ideological or other reasons. He said most rural Vietnamese could not read Vietnamese, much less Marx and Engels. During one ambush, he recalled, three armed Viet Cong passed about 30 yards away. It was the first time he had seen actual enemy people.
TheAmericans opened up on them and, amazingly, only one fell. The other two vanished.
“I’ll never know whether a bullet from my gun hit that guy, but I bear responsibility,” he said.
Asked if he will ever let himself off the hook, he said, “It’ll never happen.” The pain and grief “should never be gone,” he said. “It shouldn’t be called a declaration of war. It should be called a declaration of people killing, including children, and every time you vote for a war you are voting for people killing. When you say you are in favor of the war, you are all for people killing.” Language that obfuscates what it really means, Mr. O’Brien said, “is like Novocain. It can dull us.”
He said defense of one’s country should be just that. “If somebody came to my house and tried to kill my children, I would do everything in my power to kill him. But even then, I would feel guilty, like, why didn’t I try to talk to the guy?”
Tim O’Brien will speak at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Peters Township High School for the Peters Township Library Foundation’s second annual Novel November event. Tickets — $5 students, $15 veterans, $20 adult general admission and $60 VIP — can be purchased at the library or ptlibrary.org.