Close Reading of Passage

Vietnam Memorial

“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.”

(Tim O’Brien “The Things They Carried”, 68-69)

            I think this passage is the crux of O’Brien’s message.  War is not moral.  War is killing or being killed.  War is humping (O’Brien 4).  It is moving from one day to the next, over the same ground, doing the same thing, hoping to come out alive. 

In the old days (before Vietnam) war was considered one’s duty and an honor.  The world had visions of heroism, bravery and strength.  War brought up images of John Wayne and Gregory Peck fighting the evil enemy and returning victorious.  There was a morality to war.  We were victorious because we were on the side of the moral right.  It had to be so or we would have lost, like the evil Germans or Japanese.

Vietnam was a whole new ball game.  We weren’t winning, it wasn’t even a war.  It challenged everyone’s views on war, government, political agendas.

Tim O’Brien peels back the veneer of morality in order to show that war isn’t moral.  There is no honor in killing.  It is just killing.  His stories are filled with images of horrible things and they tell of how young men tried to cope (or couldn’t cope) with the realities of being put in places they never knew existed and doing things they never dreamed they could do.

This is a link to information on more Vietnam authors.   

O'Brien, Tim. "The Things They Carried". New York: Huffington Mifflin, 1990. Print.

Image: http://www.goiam.org/index.php/territories/western/7288-iam-pays-for-care-of-vietnam-memorial