TTTC

First, I want to respond to what April was saying about The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong. Yes, the girl is an idealized high school sweetheart. But isn't that the point? This is a morality tale about the insidious nature of war. It's as though O'Brien knew we would dismiss the young men's moral degeneration as somehow natural. Doing hard things, unspeakable things is part of becoming a man. There is this idea in our culture that men can be brutal when necessary, maybe we aren't too suprised to see these male characters behaving brutally. So he brought in this spotless innocent, this girl next door, to show us how once the war touches you, you're never the same. Sexist? Yes. But it works here, he's playing off of our notions of gender roles, certainly not reinforcing them. If anything, it seems this girl, set free from the social constraints of what a girl should be, becomes just as brutal and despicable as her male counterparts. So in this way, the tale is actually feminist. No matter how sweet and gentle you might be when you come to Nam, war makes you a monster, you end up wearing a necklace of tongues(which I thought was a nice touch, playing on the gender roles again). It's not supposed to be based on what happened, as he's said so many times, but what might have happened, how it felt.

This is the jist of Good Form (179). Earlier, in The Man I Killed (124), he is leaning over the body of a young man who he shot, inspecting the wounds and inventing the man's life, trying to absorb his role in the war, his responsibility for this death. Within fifty some pages he tells you "I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt enough." How fitting that a book about something as big as a war should come back to personal responsibility. The theme comes up again and again. There is a great passage in the previous story, In the Field, on page 177,
"When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war. You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going to it. You could blame the rain. You could blame the river. You could blame the field, the mud, the climate. 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."
A war is a big thing with many players but O'Brien always comes back to personal responsibility, the only actions you can control are your own. So in times of war, where do you put the responsibility, in god's hands? the politicians? the scared shitless kids fighting? From the beginning, O'Brien emphasizes the importance of individual choices. The Things They Carried- the soldiers choose what is most necessary to their survival. Choices make the man. He introduces each character by their choices: pantyhose, pot, tranquilizers. Already we know they are soldiers, they have made that choice (maybe agonized over it like the author but either way, decided to participate in the war).
In Good Form he says "I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth." And this is why: real life choices are never simple. They are not like a story, the characters' motives are not clearly delineated illuminating a certain hero and villian. In real life, standing by while a man is shot can make you a murderer. There are no heros or villians, and, especially when you're young, the meaning in all the muddle of choices doesn't come until later.
In book club we're reading another of O'Brien's books, Going After Cacciato, in which he describes a difficult march up a hill on a hot day. The main character, Paul Berlin is moving out of habit, knowing that he will not fight well when they arrive at the battle, not wanting to reach the destination, but telling himself that he will stop marching when he chooses. Then, he decides to stop, "The decision was made but it did not flow down to his legs, which kept climbing the red road. Powerless and powerful, like a boulder in an avalanche, Private First Class Paul Berlin marched toward the mountains without stop or the ability to stop." All the while he is being watched by his lieutenant who is admiring "the oxen persistence with which the last soldier in the column of thirty-nine marched, thinking that the boy represented so much good- fortitude, discipline, loyalty, self-control, courage, toughness. The greatest gift of God, thought the lieutenant in admiration of Private First Class Paul Berlin's climb, is freedom of will."
I don't know who chose The Things They Carried for us to read this semester but I hope that they were hoping the readers would take this message regarding the war and regarding their lives. Individual choices count. Each of us carries responsibility for the state of the world and our part in it.