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Tim O'Brien (born October 1, 1946 in Minnesota) is an American novelist who mainly writes about his experiences in the Vietnam War and the impact the war had on the American soldiers who fought there. He has held the endowed chair at the MFA program of Texas State University-San Marcos several times, from 2003 to 2004, then from 2005 to 2006, and a third time from 2008 to 2009.^[1]

Life and career

He was born in Austin, Minnesota,^[2] a town of about 20,000 people (a setting which figures prominently in his novels). When O'Brien was nine, his family, including a younger sister and a brother, moved to Worthington, Minnesota, a place that once billed itself as "the turkey capital of the world." Worthington had a large influence on O’Brien’s imagination and early development as an author. The town is located on Lake Okabena in the western portion of the state and serves as the setting for some of his stories, especially those in the collection titled The Things They Carried. He earned his BA in Political Science from Macalester College in 1968. That same year he was drafted into the Army and was sent to Vietnam, where he served from 1968 to 1970 in 3rd Platoon, A Co., 5th Batt. 46th Inf., as an infantry foot soldier. O'Brien's tour of duty was 1969-70. He served in the Americal Division, a platoon of which participated in the infamous My Lai Massacre. O'Brien has said that when his unit got to the area around My Lai (referred to as "Pinkville" by the U.S. forces), "we all wondered why the place was so hostile. We did not know there had been a massacre there a year earlier. The news about that only came out later, while we were there, and then we knew."[4]

Upon completing his tour of duty, O'Brien went on to graduate school at Harvard University and received an internship at the Washington Post. His writing career was launched in 1973 with the release of If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, about his war experiences. In this memoir, O'Brien writes: "Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories."

While O' Brien insists it is not his job or his place to discuss the politics of the Vietnam War, he does occasionally let fly. Speaking years later about his upbringing and the war, O'Brien called his hometown "a town that congratulates itself, day after day, on its own ignorance of the world: a town that got us into Vietnam. Uh, the people in that town sent me to that war, you know, couldn't spell the word 'Hanoi' if you spotted them three vowels."[5] Contrasting the continuing American search for U.S. MIA/POWs in Vietnam with the reality of the Vietnamese war dead, he calls the American perspective "A perverse and outrageous double standard. What if things were reversed? What if the Vietnamese were to ask us, or to require us, to locate and identify each of their own MIAs? Numbers alone make it impossible: 100,000 is a conservative estimate. Maybe double that. Maybe triple. From my own sliver of experience — one year at war, one set of eyes — I can testify to the lasting anonymity of a great many Vietnamese dead."[6]

One attribute in O'Brien's work is the blur between fiction and reality; labeled "verisimilitude," his work contains actual details of the situations he experienced; while that is not unusual, his conscious, explicit, and metafictional approach to the distinction between fiction and fact is extraordinary: In the chapter "Good Form" in The Things They Carried, O'Brien casts a distinction between "story-truth" (the truth of fiction) and "happening-truth" (the truth of fact or occurrence), writing that "story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth." Story truth is emotional truth; thus the feeling created by a fictional story is sometimes truer than what results from reading the facts. Certain sets of stories in The Things They Carried seem to contradict each other, and certain stories are designed to "undo" the suspension of disbelief created in previous stories; for example, "Speaking of Courage" is followed by "Notes," which explains in what ways "Speaking of Courage" is fictive.

O'Brien received the National Book Award in 1979 for his book Going After Cacciato.^[3] His novel In the Lake of the Woods won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction in 1995. His most recent novel is July, July.

O'Brien's papers are housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

O’Brien writes and lives in Central Texas, where he raises his young sons and teaches full-time every other year at Texas State. In alternate years, he teaches several workshops to MFA students in the Creative Writing Program.^[1][4]

"Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead." – Tim O'Brien

Works

• If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973)
• Northern Lights (1975)
• Where Have You Gone Charming Billy? (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)
• July, July (2002)

References

External links

• Tim O'Brien, novelist useful links for more info on O'Brien
• 1990 audio interview with Tim O'Brien at Wired for Books.org by Don Swaim
• Online book discussion of Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" at www.BookTalk.org
• Tim O'Brien's papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
• Tim O'Brien's Writer's Reflect at the Harry Ransom Center.

From Wikiquote

Tim O'Brien (1946-10-01) is an American novelist who mainly writes about his experiences in the Vietnam War and the impact that the war had on the American soldiers who fought there.

Sourced

The Things They Carried (1990)

• They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the power of the things they carried.

• They were afraid of dying but even more afraid to show it.

• They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing — these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.

• They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.

On the Rainy River

• Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.

• I remember opening the letter, scanning the first few lines, feeling the blood go thick behind my eyes. I remember a sound in my head. It wasn't thinking, just a silent howl. A million things all at once — I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything. It couldn't happen. I was above it.

• At night, when I couldn't sleep, I'd sometimes carry on silent arguments with those people. I'd be screaming at them, telling them how much I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simpleminded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love-it-or-leave it platitudes, how they were sending me off to fight a war they didn't understand and didn't want to understand.

• You were a treasonous pussy if you had second thoughts about killing and dying for plain and simple reasons.

• Intellect had run up against emotion. My conscience told me to run, yet some irrational and powerful force was resisting, like a weight pushing me toward the war. What it came to, stupidly, was a sense of shame. Hot, stupid shame. I did not want people to think badly of me.

• Right then, with the shore so close, I understood that I would not do what I should do. I would not swim away from my hometown and my country and my life. I would not be brave.

• I would go to the war — I would kill and maybe die — because I was embarrassed not to. That was the sad thing. And so I sat in the bow of the boat and cried.

• I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.

How to Tell a True War Story

• To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true.

• Any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. the grass, the soil — everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble.

• For example, we've all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies. Is it true? The answer matters. You'd feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding of reality, it's just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue

• A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it's a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, "The fuck you do that for?" and the jumper says, "Story of my life, man" and other guys starts to smile but he's dead. That's a true war story that never happened.

Field Trip

• There were times in my life when I couldn't feel much, not sadness or pity or passion, and somehow I blamed this place for what I had become, and I blamed it for taking away the person I had once been.

In the Lake of The Woods (1994)

• 'Well, I still don't get it,' she said. 'The way you talk, it sounds calculating or something. Too cold. Planning every tiny detail.' 'And that's bad?' 'No. Not exactly.' 'What then?' She made a shifting motion with her shoulders. 'I don't know, it just seem strange, sort of. How you've figured everything out, all the angles, except what it's for.' 'For us,' he said. 'I love you, Kath.' 'But it feels — I shouldn't say this — it feels manipulating.'... He talked about leading a good life, doing good things for the world. Yet even as he spoke, John realized he was not telling the full truth. Politics was manipulation. (p. 35)

• "Fuck it. Kill Jesus."
  • John K. Wade (p. 67)

• Did I choose this life of illusion? Don't be mad. My bed was made, I just lied in it. (p. 87)

• "The way I see it, he came back pretty shattered, pretty fucked up, then he got married to Kathy and they had this really great love thing going. Never saw two people so feelie-grabbie. So he gets his life back together. Doesn't say anything about the Vietnam shit — not to his wife or me or anybody. And then after a while he can't say anything. Sort of trapped, you know? That's my theory. I don't think it started out as an intentional lie, he just kept mum about it — who the hell wouldn't? — and pretty soon he probably talked himself into believing it never happened at all. The guy was a magic man... I guess it basically boils down to a case of colossal self-deception."
  • Anthony L. (Tony) Carbo (p. 196)

• It was the spirit world. Vietnam. Ghosts and graveyards. I arrived in-country a year after John Wade, in 1969, and walked exactly the ground he walked, in and around Pinkville, through the villages of Thuan yen and My Khe and Co Luy. I know what happened that day. I know how it happened. I know why. It was the sunlight. It was the wickedness that soaks into your blood and slowly heats up and begins to boil. Frustration, partly. Rage, partly. The enemy was invisible. They were ghosts. (p. 199)

• A fat little kid doing magic in front of a stand-up mirror. 'Hey, kiddo, that's a good one,' his father could've said, but for reasons unknown, reasons mysterious, the words never got spoken. He had wanted to be loved. And to be loved he had practiced deception. He had hidden the bad things. He had tricked up his own life. Only for love. Only to be loved. (pp. 242-243)

• Maybe in the fog Kathy said, 'We could do it — right now,' and maybe Sorcerer murmured something about a pair of snakes along a trail in Pinkville, how for years and years he had wondered what would've happened if those two dumb-ass snakes had somehow managed to gobble each other up. A tired old story. If Kathy smiled, it was out of politeness. But maybe she said, 'I dare us.' (p. 300)

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