His is a voice of, and against, war
Vietnam vet O’Brien has a new book due
In “Dad’s Maybe Book,” due out in mid-October, Tim O’Brien writes of the bitter irony of being known as a war writer, “despite my hatred for war, despite my ineptitude at war, despite my abiding shame at having participated in war.”
He denied being a voice for those who served in Vietnam, yet the 400 people who attended his talk last week at the Heinz History Center included many veterans of that war clutching copies of “The Things They Carried” — one of the finest works of literature about the horrors of war — for him to autograph.
“An Evening With Tim O’Brien” was the last event in the run of “The Vietnam War: 19451975,” the third-most popular exhibit in the center’s history, drawing an estimated 85,000 visitors since April, marketing director Brady Smith said.
Mr. O’Brien’s new book is an assembly of reflections, memories, history lessons, homework, advice and love letters for his sons, Timmy and Tad, now 16 and 14. The title came from a question Tad asked: “’Is this book ever going to be finished?’” he said, “and I said ‘Maybe.’”
Timmy and Tad are blessed to have this gift of memories by which to know something of their dad’s life and their early years with him when they are grown. He will be 73 on Oct. 1.
He said he wished his own father had done that for him.
This resonated with me. Like his father, mine never spoke of his service in World War II. He taught us kids how to say “Good night, nurse” in German. “Gute nacht, krankenschwester,” he said, laughing as if it had been a rollicking good time over there.
The only war story he shared was of doing intake at a prison camp and feeling conflicted. The surrendering Germans were either old or very young, all tattered, hands up, hungry. He had no conflict with the rightness of fighting the Nazis, but he was tenderhearted.
“My dad had no business being in a uniform,” I told Mr. O’Brien during an interview last year, and he said, “I had no business being in a uniform.”
From several exchanges with Mr. O’Brien, I feel a sense of my father — good-natured and tenderhearted, even some physical resemblance, and similarly, not far beneath the surface, an outrage over the destruction of and excuses for war. Mr. O’Brien calls war a euphemism for “killing people, including children.”
He was drafted in 1969 and daydreamed about driving to Canada, but he gave in to the bewildering propriety of parents and hometowns to spare himself their shame. But who bears the shame of destruction in war? The dead can’t. The generals and politicians won’t. Parents and hometowns don’t see their own culpability. Soldiers absorb it all.
“If you support a war, go to it,” he writes to his sons — and to us. “Unless, of course, you support a war only to the extent that other people — but not you — should die and kill.”
To one young audience member who asked what her “takeaway” from his work should be, he offered instead a bit of advice he wrote for his sons as well — beware absolutism.
He said: “Be skeptical. Check it out. Read a bunch of newspapers.” (Yes!) “Listen to disparate sources. Question going to war for a reason when the reason does not exist,” a reference to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “Absolutism kills people.”
He said the memory of Vietnam, as war and memory, has become surreal — “from up-to-your-eyeballs horror to a hazy uncertainty. How did I, or anyone, not go insane in the midst of all that terror and death? Or did we go insane? Are we all insane? Lately, in my old age, I have been asking such questions, not only about Vietnam but about pretty much everything.”
After each spate of killing people, including children, the “bad guys” are no longer bad guys. American veterans revisit
revisit Vietnam, meet old enemies — Communists! They hug, take selfies together, even cry together.
Although Mr. O’Brien has largely become a contented and centered civilian, he told his audience, “some essential part of me remains in Quang Ngai province, still young and scared. Still astonished by my moral diminishment.
“Getting old hasn’t helped.”