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Jim Neilson

The Truth in Things: Personal Trauma As Historical Amnesia in The Things They Carried

It is repugnant for honest people to think that the government of a country with the standing of the United States had, for many years, premeditated, prepared, and planned, down to the most minute details, systematic aggression; a criminal war of genocide and biocide against a small people, a small country situated 10,000 kilometers and more from America's frontiers; to think that this government for many years on end has deliberately and knowingly lied to cover up the crime, to hide its plans and deceive American public opinion.
                                               -- North Vietnamese pamphlet, 1971

"Daddy, tell the truth," Kathleen can say, "did you ever kill anybody?" And I can say honestly, "Of course not."
Or I can say, honestly, "Yes."
                                                -- Tim O'Brien

These quotes -- the former from a North Vietnamese periodical responding to The Pentagon Papers, the latter from the story "Good Form" in The Things They Carried -- suggest those opposing strains in contemporary academic discourse that have come to preoccupy many historians and literary and cultural critics. In the first, we see the belief that government elites both plan systematic aggression and fabricate a false history in order to maintain power. In the second, the systematic deception by government has been supplanted by the uncertain truths of individual memory. The difference between these quotes, then, is the difference between realism and postmodernism, between macro and micropolitics, between historical explanation and personal experience. In this essay I will show that Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried accords with much of the anti-totalizing strains of postmodernism, and I will argue that it is precisely this tendency in his fiction that makes it incapable of opposing the ongoing reconstruction of the war as an American tragedy.

Critics and reviewers have lavished much praise upon O'Brien, often asserting that his fiction captures something essential about the nature of the Vietnam War. To Robert R. Harris in the New York Times Book Review, The Things They Carried "crystallizes the Vietnam experience for us." Likewise, to Julian Loose in the Times Literary Supplement, O'Brien's is not "a merely fashionable reflectivity"; instead, by "creating a work which so adroitly resists finality, O'Brien has been faithful both to Vietnam and to the stories told about it." Philip Beidler declares that O'Brien "is still telling Vietnam stories after all these years" (32), The Things They Carried being "but the newest version of art's old impossible project, 'to make the stomach believe'" (37). This truth-telling, according to Beidler, is a vital project in "a country whose resolute belief in its historical exceptionalism, even after its involvement in a geopolitical tragedy like Vietnam, continues to be predicated on its easy capacity for historical amnesia" (28).

O'Brien has been successful at conveying these vital truths about the war, many critics argue, because of his use of a postmodern aesthetic. By "postmodernism" I mean what Jean-Francois Lyotard identifies as "that severe reexamination . . . on the thought of the Enlightenment, on the idea of a unitary end of history and of a subject" (73). Or as Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux explain, postmodernism consists of a "refusal of grand narratives, [a] rejection of universal reason as a foundation for human affairs, [a] decentering of the humanist subject, [and a] radical problematization of representation" (61). Postmodernism is the label given the tendency in contemporary thought to question the individual's ability to order and understand reality. Mediated by language, knowledge is seen as contingent, local, fragmentary -- the site of ongoing discursive struggle. Objective reality, subjectivity, representation, and any totalizing schema -- what Lyotard defines as "any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse" (xxiii) -- are brought into question by postmodernism. If there were a credo for postmodernists, it would be Lyotard's call to "wage a war on totality; [and to] be witnesses to the unpresentable" (82).

Indeed, for American literary culture the Vietnam War seems at times to have been waged more against totality than against the peoples of Indochina. For many critics and theorists, the war cannot be represented adequately through traditional literary modes; only a postmodern aesthetic can convey something of the war's surreal, sense-shattering, media-inflected nature. For Fredric Jameson the Vietnam War was "the first terrible postmodernist war" (44), for Thomas Myers "a war that was at its core postmodern both in form and in historical message" (143). As Donald Ringnalda explains, "the war does not fit within the tidy perimeters of the ethnocentric, traditional war narrative" ("Doing" 68). Or as Klinkowitz asserts, "the appropriate fictive responses to America's involvement in Vietnam will only be successful when they account for postmodern . . . techniques for dealing with a fundamentally unstructurable reality" (155). To Peter S. Prescott in Newsweek, "Straightforward wars are built like novels. . . . Messy wars, like the one we fought in Vietnam, lend themselves more readily to fragmented narratives." Fragmented and unreal, the Vietnam War is thought to overwhelm conventional categories of understanding, leading critics like Klinkowitz to speak of "the void itself that Vietnam had become for us" (135) and to view the war as an experience that "could be described as one of uncertainty in the face of disrupted forms" (137). Similarly, Jameson suggests that the Vietnam War leads to "the breakdown of all previous narrative paradigms . . . along with the breakdown of any shared language through which a veteran may be said to convey such experience" (44).

The war, according to these critics, was defined by uncertainty -- in motivation, history, strategy, official rhetoric, media representations, identification of friend and foe. For Klinkowitz, it was "a nonlinear war, with no objective to seize, no identifiable goal to achieve, and no overall end-date in sight" (148). Likewise, Myers speaks of the war's "chimerical, processive nature" (25), a perception caused by an "unfamiliar geography, constantly shifting official pronouncements, absence of discernible objects, and decaying support at home" (35-36). Conventional notions of truth and reference were disrupted by the war. As Timothy Lomperis puts it, "with the facts of Vietnam in such a flux, perhaps some small measure of comfort can be taken in the certainty that eventually everyone will be wrong. The facts, in Vietnam, make liars of us all" (59). It is within this framework -- the belief that the war escapes understanding and representation and even makes us liars -- that O'Brien attempts to tell a true war story. There remains a tension throughout The Things They Carried, therefore, between O'Brien's affinity with postmodernism and his desire to tell the truth. This tension begins with the title page, where The Things They Carried is identified as "a work of fiction by Tim O'Brien," and the opening epigraph, taken from John Ransom's Andersonville Diary, which asserts textual authenticity: "Those who have had any such experience as the author will see its truthfulness at once, and to all other readers it is commended as a statement of actual things by one who experienced them to the fullest." Central among O'Brien's concerns, then, is the attempt to reconcile fact and fiction, the real and the imagined. His aim is paradoxical and characteristically postmodern -- to identify the fundamental nature of the Vietnam War while revealing the impossibility of such epistemological certainty, to reconcile historical accuracy with the ineffable unreality of his experience in Vietnam. Ultimately, this reconciliation is sought through self-referentiality, through viewing the war not as past experience but as ongoing interpretation, as the very process of literary creation.

The Things They Carried is a hybrid text, a collection of stories that functions as a novel. Characters and incidents are repeated from story to story and are refracted through several literary modes and through the O'Brien narrator/persona's shifting self-interest and self-delusion. Thus The Things They Carried is an embodiment of the processive and indeterminate nature of consciousness; it seeks to replicate a veteran's struggle to make sense of war-time experience and memory. To demonstrate the workings of O'Brien's aesthetic, I will focus on one incident from this allusive and self-conscious text -- the death of Kiowa.

In the story "Speaking of Courage" O'Brien's platoon bivouacs beside the Song Tra Bong River in what they discover too late is "a shit field. The village toilet" (164). Rain transforms the ground into "deep, oozy soup. . . . Like sewage" (164), and during the night a mortar attack makes the land explode and boil, causing a soldier named Kiowa to sink into the shit field. Another soldier, Norman Bowker, "grabbed Kiowa by the boot and tried to pull him out. . . . then suddenly he felt himself going too. He could taste it. The shit was in his nose and eyes. . . . and he could no longer tolerate it. . . . He released Kiowa's boot and watched it slide away" (168).

Repeatedly in The Things They Carried O'Brien forces this image before us to convey the horror of war. It also serves as a metaphor for combat: to American soldiers in Vietnam "the shit" referred to "the day-to-day combat operations endured by GIs in the field" (Clark 463). O'Brien revivifies this conventional metaphor by making it horribly tangible. That men's lives were wasted in Vietnam is likewise made literal by the shit field. Kiowa's death also evokes the notion that for the U.S. Vietnam was a quagmire; his drowning functions almost emblematically to suggest America's deepening involvement in southeast Asia. "This field," O'Brien writes, "had embodied all the waste that was Vietnam" (210).

What is striking about The Things They Carried, though, is not this particular image but the O'Brien narrator's elaborate and elusive self-consciousness. We are given several versions of this incident. In "Speaking of Courage" O'Brien tells us that Norman Bowker failed to save Kiowa. In "Notes" he reveals that Kiowa's death had been omitted from an earlier version of the story and that Bowker, haunted by that night, had committed suicide. In "In the Field" O'Brien blames not Bowker but an unnamed soldier who instigated the mortar attack by turning on his flashlight. And in "Field Trip" O'Brien tells how, years after the war, he returned to the site of Kiowa's death and waded into the Song Tra Bong -- not to purify himself but to plunge into the same filth in which Kiowa drowned. "That little field," he writes,

had swallowed so much. My best friend. My pride. My belief in myself as a man of some small dignity and courage. Still, it was hard to find any real emotion. . . . After that long night in the rain, I'd seemed to grow cold inside, all the illusions gone, all the old ambitions and hopes for myself sucked away into the mud. (210)

Nowhere in The Things They Carried does O'Brien explain more clearly the psychic devastation wrought by wartime trauma. To overcome this trauma and to regain what he lost in Kiowa's death, O'Brien must confront his past. Whereas he had once "felt a certain smugness about how easily [he] had made the shift from war to peace" (179), now he acknowledges the psychological damage caused by the war, writing, "in a way . . . I'd gone under with Kiowa, and . . . after two decades I'd finally worked my way out. . . . I felt something go shut in my heart while something else swung open" (212). O'Brien seems at last to confront the horrible truth of his experience in that shit field.

This preoccupation with truth-telling is most vividly seen in "How to Tell a True War Story." Here O'Brien asserts, "This is true" (75)," "It's all exactly true" (77), "It all happened" (83), "here's what actually happened" (85). At the same time, though, O'Brien declares that, because of its complex and contradictory character, the war can never be faithfully rendered: "the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity." He goes on to say that "in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true" (88). O'Brien attempts to resolve this paradox -- the need to tell the truth about an experience that is inherently unreal and which thereby defies conventional categories of true and false -- by emphasizing the process of story-making. It is in this process that truth and falsehood, reality and representation, subject and object, fact and fiction cohere. Hence a true war story cannot be separated from its telling. By emphasizing artifice, by demonstrating the extent to which experience is an imaginative construct, O'Brien attempts to identify the important truths buried within his memories of Vietnam. To O'Brien self-referentiality is a necessary feature of truthful writing, for only by emphasizing artifice can he write the truth, or as he suggests, "you tell lies to get at the truth" (141). It is through stories that experience is given the heft of truth: "As I write about these things," O'Brien tells us, "the remembering is turned into a kind of rehappening" (36). And this "story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth" (203).

For O'Brien, truth exists as process, as an act of remembering and telling -- truth and reality are inseparable from their imaginative reconstruction. Accordingly, "What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end" (39), fragments such as

A red clay trail outside the village of My Khe.
A hand grenade.
A slim, dead, dainty man of about twenty.
Kiowa saying, "No choice, Tim. What else could you do?"
Kiowa saying, "Right?
Kiowa saying, "Talk to me." (40)

O'Brien explains how such fragments are reimagined in the process of writing:

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 . . . and as I write about these things, the remembering is turned into a kind of rehappening. (36)

Explaining how such fragments of memory are given significance and meaning by the imagination, O'Brien (in an interview with Eric Schroeder) states, "we use our imaginations to deal with situations around us, not just to cope with them psychologically but, more importantly, to deal with them philosophically and morally" (139). It is the significance that we ascribe to stories, the meaning with which we imbue them, that makes them true.

This obsession with telling the truth, while uncharacteristic of postmodernism, is a convention of war narratives and, according to Kali Tal, is a defining feature of the literature of trauma. Reading the accounts of Holocaust and A-bomb survivors, rape and incest victims, and war veterans, Tal finds an "urge to bear witness, to carry the tale of horror back to the halls of normalcy and testify to the truth of the experience" (emphasis added, 229). O'Brien conveys the traumatic, obsessive nature of his experience by circling back to specific incidents, such as Kiowa's death, sometimes through brief allusion, sometimes by approaching it from different angles and different narratives that suggest the oblique and defensive manner of a trauma victim confronting his past. The book's very structure, its uncertain position between fiction and autobiography, between novel and story collection adds to this impression of a troubled psyche grappling to understand itself.

O'Brien's final story, "The Lives of the Dead," which repeats the literary devices and narratives of the preceding stories, encapsulates the book as a whole. But it is also unlike anything else in The Things They Carried; its focus is broader, concentrating not on Vietnam but on those times throughout O'Brien's life when he was made aware of human mortality -- from the death of childhood schoolmate Linda to numerous American and Vietnamese battle casualties. These confrontations with mortality scar him and shape his belief that the most important thing fiction can do is reimagine the dead. "Stories," he suggests, "can save us. . . . in a story . . . the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world" (255). Stories are a means of overcoming trauma, "a way of bringing body and soul back together" (267). This latter is a fair statement of the book's central theme -- ultimately, The Things They Carried is O'Brien's attempt to sort through the pieces of his life to begin connecting his fractured self into a sensible whole. "I'm forty-three years old," he writes in the novel's concluding passage,

and . . . still dreaming Linda alive. . . . in the spell of memory and imagination, I can still see her as if through ice. . . . I can see Kiowa . . . and sometimes I can even see Timmy skating with Linda. . . . I'm young and happy. I'll never die. I'm skimming across the surface of my own history . . . and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story. (273)

In this conclusion O'Brien attempts to achieve psychic wholeness by reconnecting the boy he was before Vietnam with the man he has become. Also, he transforms the waste of Vietnam into the purity of ice, and the unstable ground which swallowed Kiowa into a solid surface meant to support his fractured psyche. Nonetheless, in its emptiness and coldness this final image suggests O'Brien has not fully regained his capacity to feel. And in skimming across the frozen surface of his own history, O'Brien avoids plumbing the depths of his troubled psyche, suggesting that, like many veterans, his effort to make sense of war-time experience and memory is a continuing struggle. These are burdens O'Brien will forever carry.

In addition to depicting the Vietnam War more accurately and problematizing conventional notions of truth and self, postmodernism is alleged to provide space for individuals, groups, and beliefs previously marginalized by the metanarratives that comprise the Western tradition. Postmodernism, alleges Linda Hutcheon, "[has] become a most popular and effective strategy . . . of black, ethnic, gay, and feminist artists -- trying to come to terms with and to respond, critically and creatively, to the still predominantly white, heterosexual, male culture in which they find themselves" (37). The discourse of postmodernism is replete with a radical-sounding rhetoric concerned with opposing tyranny and giving voice to the marginal and the oppressed. As Hal Foster suggests, postmodernism "seeks to question rather than exploit cultural codes, to explore rather than conceal social and political affiliations" (xii). Indeed, many postmodernists allege its political potential: Jerry Varsava notes that postmodernism may "contribute in some measure to the formation of a more radically heterogeneous and democratic world" (188); Hutcheon asserts that postmodernism aims to "chang[e] consciousness through art" (202); Aronowitz and Giroux define postmodernism as the "intellectual expression" of "radical democracy" (185).

In the case of Vietnam War literature, though, postmodernism has been strikingly ethnocentric. Although one of postmodernism's defining characteristics, according to Aronowitz and Giroux, is "its celebration of plurality and the politics of racial, gender, and ethnic difference" (61), it is precisely the postmodern elements of The Things They Carried that contribute to its solipsism and ethnocentrism. O'Brien's preoccupation with the reconstructive power of the imagination, his problematizing of unequivocal truth and a knowable reality, rather than leading to a more expansive vision and a more considered portrait of the Vietnamese, leads to a concentration on "Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story" (273). Ironically, in attempting to challenge the concept of an autonomous subject, O'Brien writes a text that is obsessed with self, that details the uncertain effects of an unreal war upon an unknowable self but fails to examine its all too real effects upon the Vietnamese. The Things They Carried supports Philip H. Melling's assertion that postmodernists "have become fascinated with Vietnam as a place redolent with the modes of modern experience . . . at the expense of its moral or social contexts." For Melling,

what the American experience in Vietnam reveals [to postmodernists] is a level of sophistication and enterprise that is far more intriguing and relevant to the world in which we live than the primitive ideology of an aspiring third world country, or the social catastrophe that Vietnam has experienced in recent times. (119)

In postmodern fashion, The Things They Carried focuses on literary and epistemological preoccupations at the expense both of a Vietnamese perspective and of any broader historical/political understanding.

These omissions urgently need correction because of the thoroughness with which the history of American militarism in southeast Asia has been repressed and revised in the last two decades to promote a militarist, nationalist, and capitalist ideology. As is common after a war or period of social crisis, this history has been reinterpreted and radical moments excised from American cultural memory. It is in the interest of ruling elites, after all, to deny the efficacy of and if possible even the existence of large-scale oppositional social movements and to revise troubling historical fact. Those with access to the means of cultural production (book publishers, film companies, media conglomerates, etc.) have been significant forces behind such revision, promoting, in the words of Michael Klein, "a process of organized forgetting [that] takes people's complex past away, substituting comfortable myths that reinforce rather than challenge the status quo" (19).

Most revised in the recent historical record has been how horribly destructive the war was for the Vietnamese. Even "On the rare occasions when the devastating consequences of the war are noted," Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman note of mass-media discussions of Vietnam, "care is taken to sanitize the reports so as to eliminate the U.S. role" (After 83). Part of this role between 1965 and 1969 was to unleash 4.5 million tons of aerial bombardment upon Indochina -- about nine times the tonnage dropped in the Pacific during World War II (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki). According to Herman, this amounted to "over 70 tons of bombs for every square mile of Vietnam, North and South " (qtd. in Chomsky, At War 291). By the end of the war, the U.S. had dropped seven million tons of bombs on Vietnam -- more than twice the tonnage dropped on Europe and Asia during the second world war, or almost one 500 pound bomb for every Vietnamese (Zinn 469). While not sanitizing the U.S. role in Vietnam, O'Brien nonetheless overlooks the brutality inflicted by massive aerial bombardment and other advanced weapons, the terrible dislocation of the rural peasantry, the use of defoliants and other chemical weapons, the sanctioned slaughter of free-fire zones and the Phoenix Program. Marilyn Young summarizes the consequences of the American war against Vietnam:

in the South, 9,000 out of 15,000 hamlets, 25 million acres of farmland, 12 million acres of forest were destroyed, and 1.5 million farm animals had been killed; there were an estimated 200,000 prostitutes, 879,000 orphans, 181,000 disabled people, and 1 million widows; all six of the industrial cities in the North had been badly damaged, as were provincial and district towns, and 4,000 of 5,800 agricultural communes. North and south the land was cratered and planted with tons of unexploded ordnance, so that long after the war farmers and their families suffered serious injuries as they attempted to bring the fields back into cultivation. Nineteen million gallons of herbicide had been sprayed on the South during the war. (301-02)

While many Americans can give a rough estimate of U.S. casualties, they consistently underestimate Vietnamese casualties. In a study conducted by the University of Massachusetts in 1992, Americans on average estimated 100,000 Vietnamese deaths, missing the true figure by only 1,900,000 (Chomsky, "Media" 280). (When I teach Vietnam War literature to undergraduates some of my students are surprised to learn not that 40 times as many Vietnamese as Americans died but that Vietnamese deaths outnumbered Americans at all.) Such ignorance of the lethal consequences of U.S. militarism is due to a process of historical revision that has been ongoing since the end of the war. With its lack of interest in the plight of the Vietnamese and its focus on the psychological suffering of one American veteran, The Things They Carried, like almost all other Vietnam War novels, has in its small way furthered this process of forgetting.

O'Brien moves beyond the world view of an American soldier only once -- in "The Man I Killed." Here he invents the biography of a slain Vietcong, imagining this soldier's rural upbringing, his interest in mathematics, his love affair with a university classmate, etc. This story stands out, not only in The Things They Carried, but in Vietnam War novels generally, for its attempt to humanize a Vietcong soldier. O'Brien demonstrates the American disregard for the lives of the Vietnamese by juxtaposing this soldier's life with the insensitive comments of American soldiers:

He wanted someday to be a teacher of mathematics. At night, lying on his mat, he could not picture himself doing the brave things his father had done, or his uncles, or the heroes of the stories. He hoped in his heart that he would never be tested. He hoped the Americans would go away. Soon, he hoped. He kept hoping and hoping, always even when he was asleep.

"Oh, man, you fuckin' trashed the fucker," Azar said. "You scrambled his sorry self, look at that, you did, you laid him out like Shredded fuckin' Wheat." (140)

However sympathetic his reconstruction of an enemy soldier's life, though, O'Brien consistently undercuts it by emphasizing textual artifice: he was "a scholar, maybe. . . . He had been born, maybe, in 1946 in the village of My Khe" (139). All we know for certain is that this man is dead. After all, O'Brien's real concern is not with the lives of the Vietnamese but with what such fanciful reconstructions reveal about the imaginative process. This dead Vietcong soldier has no purpose and no existence beyond his literary expropriation. Even his death, which initially is alleged to have been caused by O'Brien, becomes grounds for speculation about the nature of truth: "I did not kill him," O'Brien declares, "but I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt enough. . . . I remember feeling the burden of responsibility and grief. I blamed myself. And rightly so, because I was present. But listen. Even that story is made up" (203). Rather than providing him with a means to celebrate ethnic difference and to represent a marginalized -- in fact, a brutalized -- population, O'Brien's postmodernism causes him to turn inward, to use the death of a Vietcong soldier to question the nature of truth and to celebrate the reconstructive power of the imagination.

Nowhere else does O'Brien individualize the Vietnamese -- except for a brief description of "an old pappa-san [who] guide[ed] [them] through the mine fields" (36) and a girl who, amidst the rubble of her village, "danced with her eyes half closed, her feet bare" (153). This girl is the only living, individualized Vietnamese in The Things They Carried who has been affected by the war. Her dance exemplifies the hysteria caused by war (her family has been burned to death). It also suggests to O'Brien and his comrades the inexplicable character of the Vietnamese -- as one soldier explains, this dance is "Probably some weird ritual" (154). Otherwise, there are only the faceless Vietnamese O'Brien's platoon encounters in the course of their combat missions. They search villages, "frisking children and old men" (15), watch "a dozen old mama-sans [run] out and start . . . yelling" (164), and dig foxholes next to a pagoda whose "monks did not seem upset or displeased" (133). Impersonal descriptions like these, broad strokes meant to suggest village life and to convey a sense of rural Vietnam, constitute the limits of O'Brien's investigation of Vietnamese culture. As Frances Fitzgerald makes clear, though, the village was central to a peasant population who

lived in a society of particular people, all of whom knew each other by their place in the landscape. "Citizenship" in a Vietnamese village was personal and untransferable. In the past, few Vietnamese ever left their village in times of peace, for to do so was to leave society itself -- all human attachments, all absolute rights and duties. (13)

According to Fitzgerald, the rural Vietnamese self-identity was inseparable from village identity. Yet in The Things They Carried O'Brien seems unaware of the importance of this communal existence; the villages encountered by his platoon are homogenous, their inhabitants generic.

In The Things They Carried Vietnamese are KIAs, "twenty-seven bodies altogether, and parts of several others. . . . all badly bloated. Their clothing was stretched tight like sausage skins" (270- 71) and an individual corpse, "an old man who lay face-up near a pigpen at the center of the village. His right arm was gone. At his face there were already many flies and gnats" (256). They are human remains, "Stacks of bones -- all kinds" with a poster proclaiming, "ASSEMBLE YOUR OWN GOOK!! FREE SAMPLE KIT!!" (119). They are ghosts "wiping out a whole Marine platoon in twenty seconds flat. Ghosts rising from the dead. Ghosts behind you and in front of you and inside of you" (231), "odd shapes swaying in the paddies, boogie-men in sandals, spirits dancing in old pagodas" (229). They are part of the countryside, "blend[ing] with the land, changing form, becoming trees and grass" (229). And the land itself is "some kind of soft black protoplasm, Vietnam, the blood and the flesh" (249). While these descriptions may convey something of the war's carnage and may accurately document American soldiers' fear of and estrangement from their surroundings, they also repeat dehumanizing and racist attitudes toward the Vietnamese. With no normative contrast (other than "The Man I Killed"), O'Brien can do little to correct these views or to humanize the Vietnamese.

In fact, the Vietnamese exist primarily as a backdrop for what is truly important to O'Brien -- an exploration of how the imaginative reconstruction and reconsideration of trauma may serve as a wellspring for literary creation. What O'Brien acknowledged about Going After Cacciato is true for The Things They Carried: "I don't see it as a book about war. . . . In part it's a book about writing a book. . . . when I talk about imagination and memory, I'm talking about the two key ingredients that go into writing fiction" (qtd. in Schroeder 134- 35). Ironically, his inability to convey anything specific and human about the Vietnamese repeats the cultural ignorance and ethnocentrism that dominated the attitudes of American military leaders and policymakers and that has so narrowly defined American cultural memory of the war. O'Brien's interest in personal trauma and the individual's ability to organize experience into meaningful narrative results in a text that is solipsistic and culturally exclusive.

O'Brien's focus on his individual experience does not merely result in the exclusion of the Vietnamese. This self-interest, combined with a postmodern aversion to totality, causes him to disregard any larger perspective. Hence he does not place the actions of his platoon within the context of a policy that encouraged systematic terror; does not depict senior officers, let alone military strategists and government policy-makers; and does not view his actions in Vietnam as part of a broad strategy to further American geopolitical aims. These omissions are not exclusive to The Things They Carried; in truth, they are almost endemic to Vietnam War literature. I direct my critique at The Things They Carried because it is a recent text by the most critically acclaimed of Vietnam War authors; it is an example of the kind of postmodern aesthetic thought necessary for conveying the essence of this war; and its literary aesthetic is alleged to have radical political potential.

Contrary to these allegations, historical fact and explanation in The Things They Carried, rather than being made more possible, is constrained by O'Brien's use of a postmodern aesthetic. For example, in "On the Rainy River" he asks,

Was it a civil war? A war of national liberation or simple aggression? Who started it, and when, and why? What really happened to the USS Maddox on that dark night in the Gulf of Tonkin? Was Ho Chi Minh a Communist stooge, or a nationalist savior, or both, or neither? What about the Geneva accords? What about SEATO and the Cold War? What about dominoes? (44)

This rapid-fire succession of questions is meant to demonstrate confusion about the war circa 1968, as well as the impossibility of ever explaining the war. This uncertainty is also characteristic of postmodernists' conception of the Vietnam War, since answers to questions like these require facts that are knowable, history that is objective, and truths that are verifiable -- all of which has been brought into question by postmodernism. Postmodernists write of the need to counter totality with heterogeneity and fragmentation, believing that other approaches merely replace one exclusive, elitist, hierarchical scheme with another. For many postmodernists, there is little difference between totality and totalitarianism -- what Lyotard describes as "a return of terror . . . the realization of the fantasy to seize reality" ( 82).

One reason postmodernist Vietnam War authors like O'Brien fail to view the war in its larger historical and geopolitical context, then, is that to do so they must rely upon a realist epistemology, a belief that there exists a reliable correspondence between experience and knowledge, between reality and representation. To postmodernists, this correspondence is forever problematized by the mediating effects of consciousness, culture, and language. Tracing out the patterns of American interventionism, according to this logic, is to impose, in totalitarian fashion, a narrative and epistemological certainty upon the chaos of life. As Donald Ringnalda asserts in his discussion of The Things They Carried, Vietnam should have taught us that there is no easy difference between nonfiction and fiction, that "this genre-sureness got us into Vietnam in the first place" and that the belief that we can distinguish between stories and reality is "the very reason we got into and waged the Vietnam War" (Fighting 101, 106). Postmodernists argue that to avoid future Vietnams we should reject our belief in universal truth and individual reason -- especially anything that approximates metanarrative -- and should become, in Christopher Norris's words, "strategists engaged in producing various sorts of discourse, from various (often contradictory) subject-positions, without any claim to ultimate authority or truth" (105) -- a description that almost exactly restates O'Brien's aesthetic in The Things They Carried.

But if O'Brien's questions are to be answered (which, of course, they are not meant to be), we must have an explanatory framework that can choose between competing truth claims; specifically, we must have some way of accounting for U.S. foreign policy during the cold war. We must be able to explain the consistency with which the U.S. has thwarted political movements and overturned governments that opposed the interests of capital. We must ask, as Michael Parenti does,

Why has the U.S. government never supported social revolutionary forces against right-wing governments? Could it possibly do so? If not, why not? Why in the post-war era has the U.S. overthrown a dozen or more popularly elected left-reformist democracies? Why has it fostered close relations with just about all the right-wing autocracies on earth? (qtd. in Meyerson 68)

The most logical and consistent explanation for this history is that U.S. policy was determined by the interests of global capital (tempered by the pursuit of national advantage). The Vietnam War was part of a strategy to thwart, writes Chomsky, "the effort of indigenous movements to extricate their societies from the integrated world system dominated largely by American capital, and to use their resources for their own social and economic development" (At War 5). Unfortunately, an explanation such as this requires the kind of metanarrative (i.e., class analysis) that postmodernists seek to overturn and that O'Brien does not even consider.

In The Things They Carried O'Brien does not attempt to identify those truths about the war that have been obscured by nationalist myth and capitalist hegemony, focusing instead on the processive and paradoxical nature of all truths. Because of his postmodern sympathies, O'Brien fails to consider the larger cultural and political dynamics of the Vietnam War. He has declared that he views literature "as a way of jarring people into paying attention to things -- not just the war but your personal stake in the political world" (qtd. in Schroeder 146). And he has suggested that his work "has been somewhat political in that it's directed at big issues" (qtd. in Schroeder 145). Unfortunately, these "big issues" seem not to include American imperialism, the slaughter of the Vietnamese people, the poisoning and deforestation of the Vietnamese landscape, or the continuing deprivation wrought by America's twenty year trade embargo; instead, he says his "concerns have to do with abstractions: what's courage and how do you get it? What's justice and how do you achieve it? How does one do right in an evil situation?" (qtd. in Schroeder 137). At times he criticizes Americans' ignorance of and indifference toward Vietnam, writing that "they didn't know Bao Dai from the man in the moon. They didn't know history. They didn't know the first thing about Diem's tyranny, or the nature of Vietnamese nationalism, or the long colonialism of the French" (49). Unfortunately, there is nothing in The Things They Carried to correct this ignorance. By concentrating almost exclusively upon what he directly experienced, O'Brien fails to examine the history of American involvement in Vietnam. Without this broader understanding, he cannot explain the killings he both witnessed and took part in. Kiowa's death, for example, prompts him to write that "when a man died, there had to be blame. . . . You could blame the war. You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going to it" (198). O'Brien continues,

You could blame the enemy. You could blame the mortar rounds. You could blame people who were too lazy to read a newspaper, who were bored by the daily body counts, who switched channels at the mention of politics. You could blame whole nations. You could blame God. You could blame the munitions makers or Karl Marx or a trick of fate or an old man in Omaha who forgot to vote. (198-99)

Ultimately, the only certain cause of Kiowa's death, according to O'Brien, is its direct cause: "In the field . . . the causes were immediate. A moment of carelessness or bad judgment or plain stupidity" (199). Yet some causes are more proximate and explanatory than others. Robert McNamara is more responsible for deaths in Vietnam than an old man in Omaha who forgets to vote. The board of directors of Dow Chemical are more blameworthy than people who switched channels at the mention of politics. O'Brien cannot make such seemingly obvious distinctions because, according to the logic of postmodernism, to do so is to endorse a naive and dangerous positivism. And so he is left with an assortment of equally plausible (and equally false) explanations.

As the Vietnam War has receded in national memory, it has been transformed into a lesson in patriotism and Vietnamese cruelty. Popular memory of the war has been shaped so as to erase anything that might either challenge the benign nature of U.S. foreign policy or reveal the success of mass social movements. More than ever, then, there is an urgent need for the accurate and wide-ranging historical rendering of the war.Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky explain how, in the wake of the Vietnam War, government, corporate, and media elites in the U.S. were faced with the need to overcome

the dread "Vietnam syndrome." . . . This was part of a larger problem, the "crisis of democracy" perceived by Western elites as the normally passive general population threatened to participate in the political system, challenging established privilege and power. A further task was to prevent recovery in the societies ravaged by the American assault, so that the partial victory already achieved by their destruction could be sustained. (Manufacturing 237)

O'Brien cannot confront this revisionism because his literary aesthetic is at odds with the metanarratives necessary for any such task. Despite its frequent criticism of the absurdity and inhumanity of the Vietnam War, therefore, The Things They Carried does not significantly challenge prevailing myths about the war. O'Brien's preoccupation with the ways experience is structured and given meaning by the imagination, his erasure of the Vietnamese, and his refusal to consider the larger issues raised by the war are all due to his acceptance of the tenets of postmodernism. His solution to postmodernism's problematizing of a knowable reality and an individual subject is to see both the real and the self as provisional and processive. In other words, while there is no certain reality because it is forever mediated, this mediation, for O'Brien, is real. "The life of the imagination," he says, "is real -- it's as fucking real as anything else" (142).

The weakness of The Things They Carried is that O'Brien's imagination is virtually the only reality. O'Brien does not contextualize his experience, does not provide us with any deeper understanding of the causes and consequences of this war, and does not see beyond his individual experience to document the vastly greater suffering of the Vietnamese. In so doing, O'Brien has constructed a text that, despite its radical aesthetic, largely reaffirms the prevailing ethnocentric conception of the war.