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BACKGROUND
- William Timothy O'Brien (10/1/46)
- small town Minnesota ("boring")
- quiet, shy, overweight child
- father wrote New York Times pieces on WWI
- Iwo Jima, Okinawa
- inspiration to be a writer
- college:
- Macalester College (St. Paul, Minn.)
- political science major
- anti-war protester
- planned on getting PhD
- accepted to Harvard's School of Government
- drafted, 2 weeks after graduation
- drafted into Vietnam (although against war)
- tour 2/69-3/70
- Fifth battalion, 46th Infantry, 198th Infantry Brigade,
Americal Div.
- infantry (grunt soldier)
- Quang Ngai Province (setting of The Things They
Carried)
- My Lai massacre
(3/16/1968)
- (TOB got there 1 year later - hostility to US)
- 2 months after the Tet Offensive (sacred day)
- Vietcong (guerilla) territory in South Vietnam
- Lt. William Calley, commander of Charlie Company, 11th
Infantry Brigade, Americal Division
- densely mined
- --> many maimed or killed in preceding weeks
- --> troops = agitated, vengeful (REVENGE)
- “search and destroy” mission for the 48th Vietcong
Battalion
- massacre:
- 300-500 civilians
- unarmed, women, children, elderly
- (1 girl raped & killed)
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BACKGROUND
- medals:
- Purple Heart
- Bronze Star for Valor
- Combat Infantry Badge
- post-war:
- Harvard graduate student (dropped out)
- Washington Post intern
- national affairs reporter (1 yr.)
- 1979:
- National Book Award
- Going After Cacciato
- writer, visiting professor (Southwest Texas State U.)
- all books regard the VIETNAM
WAR
- its effects on hearts and minds
- ambiguities of LOVE and WAR
- If I Die in a Combat Zone,
Box Me Up and Send Me Home (1973)
Northern Lights (1975)
Going After Cacciato (1978)
The Nuclear Age (1985)
The Things They Carried (1990)
In the Lake of the Woods (1994)
Tomcat in Love (1998)
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THEMES
- on the Vietnam and Iraq wars:
I think in a lot of respects they’re justified
[comparisons]. The Iraq thing has the feel of a potential
quagmire where we just get deeper and deeper and deeper
involved, and when that happens it’s harder and harder and
harder to get out. There’s also the similarity with the
difficulty in finding the enemy. In Vietnam, we couldn’t
find the V.C., they were blended in with the population, and
we’re having the same problem in Iraq; you just can’t find
your enemy, because they blend in with the population. And
as a consequence, a kind of frustration begins to slowly
build up, as you take more and more casualties, and you
can’t shoot back, and you can’t find people to shoot back
at. And that frustration can turn into anger and rage and
terrible things can happen and you start blowing away
civilians. Which has already happened in Iraq.
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THEMES
- Just the doubletalk of it all reminds me of Vietnam,
“lights a glow at the end of tunnels,” and I’ve heard that
same kind of doubletalk as before, vis-à-vis Iraq. The word
coalition, for example has been stretched beyond its meaning
in the dictionary. A coalition of two, plus a couple of
Poles and Spaniards. That’s not a coalition. In fact, that’s
the opposite. Most of the world was aligned against us,
including our own allies. The justifications for the war are
also, as in Vietnam, incredibly suspect. The weapons of mass
destruction we can’t find. So, we make up a new reason for
the war, after we’ve already begun the war, which is
illogical and immoral. You don't go off to war telling your
country you’re going for these reasons and then make up new
ones afterward: “There’s this bad guy, and we got rid of
him.” It’s manipulative. So, I see a lot of similarities,
and it’s not identical of course, but it’s similar enough to
scare me.
- (http://www.flyernews.com/article.php?section=AE&volume=51&issue=9&artnum=01)
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STYLE
- compared to
- Stephen Crane (Red Badge of Courage)
- Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)
- on morals in war stories:
In “How to Tell a True War Story,” O’Brien wrote, “A true
war story is never moral. It does not
instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human
behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have
always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If
at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel
that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the
larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very
old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever.
There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you
can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising
allegiance to obscenity and evil.” (cite below)
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STYLE
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LINKS
LINKS
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