The Things They Carried
By Tim O'Brien
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Copyright © 1990
Tim O'Brien
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-618-70641-9
Chapter One
Spin
The war wasn't all terror and violence.
Sometimes things could almost get sweet.
For instance, I remember a little boy with a plastic leg. I remember
how he hopped over to Azar and asked for a chocolate
bar-"GI number one," the kid said-and Azar
laughed and handed over the chocolate. When the boy
hopped away, Azar clucked his tongue and said, "War's a
bitch." He shook his head sadly. "One leg, for Chrissake.
Some poor fucker ran out of ammo."
I remember Mitchell Sanders sitting quietly in the
shade of an old banyan tree. He was using a thumbnail to
pry off the body lice, working slowly, carefully depositing
the lice in a blue US0 envelope. His eyes were tired. It had
been a long two weeks in the bush. After an hour or so he
sealed up the envelope, wrote FREE in the upper right-hand
corner, and addressed it to his draft board in Ohio.
On occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You
could put fancy spin on it, you could make it dance.
I remember Norman Bowker and Henry Dobbins playing
checkers every evening before dark. It was a ritual for
them. They would dig a foxhole and get the board out and
play long, silent games as the sky went from pink to purple.
The rest of us would sometimes stop by to watch. There
was something restful about it, something orderly and reassuring.
There were red checkers and black checkers. The
playing field was laid out in a strict grid, no tunnels or
mountains or jungles. You knew where you stood. You
knew the score. The pieces were out on the board, the enemy
was visible, you could watch the tactics unfolding into
larger strategies. There was a winner and a loser. There
were rules.
I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, and the
war has been over for a long while. Much of it is hard to remember.
I sit at this typewriter and stare through my
words and watch Kiowa sinking into the deep muck of a
shit field, or Curt Lemon hanging in pieces from a tree, and
as I write about these things, the remembering is turned
into a kind of rehappening. Kiowa yells at me. Curt Lemon
steps from the shade into bright sunlight, his face brown
and shining, and then he soars into a tree. The bad stuff
never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying
itself over and over.
But the war wasn't all that way.
* * *
Like when Ted Lavender went too heavy on the tranquilizers.
"How's the war today?" somebody would say,
and Ted Lavender would give a soft, spacey smile and say,
"Mellow, man. We got ourselves a nice mellow war today."
And like the time we enlisted an old poppa-san to
guide us through the mine fields out on the Batangan Peninsula.
The old guy walked with a limp, slow and stooped
over, but he knew where the safe spots were and where
you had to be careful and where even if you were careful
you could end up like popcorn. He had a tightrope walker's
feel for the land beneath him-its surface tension, the give
and take of things. Each morning we'd form up in a long
column, the old poppa-san out front, and for the whole day
we'd troop along after him, tracing his footsteps, playing an
exact and ruthless game of follow the leader. Rat Kiley
made up a rhyme that caught on, and we'd all be chanting
it together:
Step out of line, hit a mine; follow the dink, you're
in the pink. All around us, the place was littered with
Bouncing Betties and Toe Poppers and booby-trapped
artillery rounds, but in those five days on the Batangan
Peninsula nobody got hurt. We all learned to love the
old man.
It was a sad scene when the choppers came to take us
away. Jimmy Cross gave the old poppa-san a hug. Mitchell
Sanders and Lee Strunk loaded him up with boxes of C rations.
There were actually tears in the old guy's eyes.
"Follow dink," he said to each of us, "you go pink."
If you weren't humping, you were waiting. I remember
the monotony. Digging foxholes. Slapping mosquitoes.
The sun and the heat and the endless paddies. Even in the
deep bush, where you could die any number of ways, the
war was nakedly and aggressively boring. But it was a
strange boredom. It was boredom with a twist, the kind of
boredom that caused stomach disorders. You'd be sitting at
the top of a high hill, the flat paddies stretching out below,
and the day would be calm and hot and utterly vacant, and
you'd feel the boredom dripping inside you like a leaky
faucet, except it wasn't water, it was a sort of acid, and
with each little droplet you'd feel the stuff eating away at
important organs. You'd try to relax. You'd uncurl your
fists and let your thoughts go. Well, you'd think, this isn't
so bad. And right then you'd hear gunfire behind you and
your nuts would fly up into your throat and you'd be
squealing pig squeals. That kind of boredom.
I feel guilty sometimes. Forty-three years old and I'm
still writing war stories. My daughter Kathleen tells me it's
an obsession, that I should write about a little girl who finds
a million dollars and spends it all on a Shetland pony. In a
way, I guess, she's right: I should forget it. But the thing
about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your
material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection
of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds
into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a
while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic
merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets.
As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the
ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the
real obsession. All those stories.
Not bloody stories, necessarily. Happy stories, too, and
even a few peace stories.
Here's a quick peace story:
A guy goes AWOL. Shacks up in Danang with a Red
Cross nurse. It's a great time-the nurse loves him to
death-the guy gets whatever he wants whenever he wants
it. The war's over, he thinks. Just nookie and newr angles.
But then one day he rejoins his unit in the bush. Can't wait
to get back into action. Finally one of his buddies asks what
happened with the nurse, why so hot for combat, and the
guy says, "All that peace, man, it felt so good it
hurt. I want
to hurt it
back."
I remember Mitchell Sanders smiling as he told me
that story. Most of it he made up, I'm sure, but even so it
gave me a quick truth-goose. Because it's all relative.
You're pinned down in some filthy hellhole of a paddy, getting
your ass delivered to kingdom come, but then for a few
seconds everything goes quiet and you look up and see
the sun and a few puffy white clouds, and the immense
serenity flashes against your eyeballs-the whole world
gets rearranged-and even though you're pinned down by
a war you never felt more at peace.
What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments
that have no beginning and no end:
Norman Bowker lying on his back one night, watching
the stars, then whispering to me, "I'll tell you something,
O'Brien. If I could have one wish, anything, I'd wish for my
dad to write me a letter and say it's okay if I don't win any
medals. That's all my old man talks about, nothing else.
How he can't wait to see my goddamn medals."
Or Kiowa teaching a rain dance to Rat Kiley and Dave
Jensen, the three of them whooping and leaping around
barefoot while a bunch of villagers looked on with a mixture
of fascination and giggly horror. Afterward, Rat said,
"So where's the rain?" and Kiowa said, "The earth is slow,
but the buffalo is patient," and Rat thought about it and
said, "Yeah, but where's the
rain?"
Or Ted Lavender adopting an orphan puppy-feeding
it from a plastic spoon and carrying it in his rucksack until
the day Azar strapped it to a Claymore antipersonnel mine
and squeezed the firing device.
* * *
The average age in our platoon, I'd guess, was nineteen
or twenty, and as a consequence things often took on a curiously
playful atmosphere, like a sporting event at some
exotic reform school. The competition could be lethal, yet
there was a childlike exuberance to it all, lots of pranks and
horseplay. Like when Azar blew away Ted Lavender's
puppy. "What's everybody so upset about?" Azar said. "I
mean, Christ, I'm just a
boy."
I remember these things, too.
The damp, fungal scent of an empty body bag.
A quarter moon rising over the nighttime paddies.
Henry Dobbins sitting in the twilight, sewing on his
new buck-sergeant stripes, quietly singing, "A tisket, a tasket,
a green and yellow basket."
A field of elephant grass weighted with wind, bowing
under the stir of a helicopter's blades, the grass dark and
servile, bending low, but then rising straight again when
the chopper went away.
A red clay trail outside the village of My Khe.
A hand grenade.
A slim, dead, dainty young man of about twenty.
Kiowa saying, "No choice, Tim. What else could you
do?"
Kiowa saying, "Right?"
Kiowa saying, "Talk to me."
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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
Copyright © 1990 by Tim O'Brien.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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