Tim O'Brien and the Art of the True War Story: "Night March" and "Speaking of Courage" - Critical Essay

The Vietnam war story is not simply about the rise and fall of nations (South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Laos, China, Thailand, the United States, the Soviet Union). Rather, it is about the rise and fall of the dreams of individual soldiers--their hopes riddled by disillusionment, their fantasies broken by shrapnel-edged realities. In his Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War, Don Rignalda observes that Washington engaged in the war as a clinical and statistical commodity: "We imposed a carpentered reality on a country (South Vietnam) that wasn't a country at all, but merely a recent, diplomatically created abstraction run by a series of corrupt puppets. Oblivious, Americans became 'cartomaniacs' in Vietnam" (14). Having reduced the Washington-created enemy to ciphers, the cartomaniacs did precisely the same thing to the American soldier. In a war fought according to statistics, and where ciphers are thrown against ciphers, who is left to tell the true war story? Who enters the lives and uncovers the dreams, the dark secrets, the fears and the hopes that bestow personality back on the cipher?

Certainly it is possible to engage the experience of war exclusively on scholarly and academic terms, to configure the experience according to statistics and historical accounts. Every time human experience is rendered as fact, however, the human place in war becomes more abstracted and more simplistic. In "We're Adjusted Too Well," Tim O'Brien voiced his dismay that the nation's hope for everything to slide back into some vague state of being "normal"--or "adjusted"--has been fulfilled all too well. For his part, O'Brien says, "I wish we were more troubled" (207). If American society is no longer troubled, if it has exorcised a segment of our historical past, it has also occluded something of our human nature. War stories must evoke the dreams and lives of individual soldiers, as opposed to giving a statistical or historical accounting of data.

This telling raises several aesthetic questions. Can one capture the reality of the event in such a way that the reader imaginatively participates in it? Is there a point where the imaginative life evokes a greater reality than the factual accounting, so that the reader understands not only what happened but also why it happened and how it affected the soldier? Furthermore, as the war recedes into the past, can the writer preserve an authentic memory of it, free from romantic idealism or bitter cynicism? Or are we better off letting it slide, as two of O'Brien's characters (the fathers of Paul Berlin and Norman Bowker) suggest?

A gap inevitably opens up between the imaginary casting of an event (the fictive event) and the factual details of that event (the historical chronicle). That forces of the First Cavalry Division, for example, combined with CIDG soldiers to kill 753 NVA regulars near Fire Base Jamie on December 6,1969, is the historical chronicle. What happened in the hearts and minds of the soldiers who fought that battle is not conveyed by clinical data. To uncover that is the task of fiction.

This is precisely the task that Tim O'Brien undertakes.

The essential dialectic of the war story lies in this interplay between reality as data and the reality of the human spirit. O'Brien aims for nothing less than resolving this dialectic into an integrated whole, often by means of a metafictional discourse in which his characters and narrators engage in the dialectic themselves. Two notable examples are his companion short stories "Night March" and "Speaking of Courage," both of which pose a fundamental distinction between the fact of what "actually" happened and the reality experienced by the individual.

Examining these two works also raises questions about how the true war story can be told. Is the disparity between personal experience and the historical facticity of war irresolvable? Or is it possible to achieve some integration, and if so, how? Such questions further define the complementary and conflicting elements of these two stories. After examining the stories, therefore, I will consider what in general constitutes the true war story for Tim O'Brien.

"Night March" is O'Brien's most widely anthologized story. It first appeared in Redbook in May 1975 under the title "Where Have You Gone, Charming Billy?" and was revised to become a chapter of Going After Cacciato in 1978. It still stands independently, but in Going After Cacciato it is woven seamlessly into the rather wide-ranging plot of one man's imaginary long walk away from war. All the stories in Cacciato stem from Paul Berlin's reflections while on observation post. Past horrors and present dreams (echoing the book's epigraph from Sassoon) buckle together at the moment of "observing." But at that moment, Paul Berlin's actual goal, we are told, is simply to live long enough to escape to the real world. What constitutes the real world is the essential issue.

The internal tensions of the war story "Night March" may best be understood by comparing it to O'Brien's postwar story "Speaking of Courage." First published in the Summer 1976 issue of Massachusetts Review and then in Prize Stories and The O. Henry Awards in 1978, "Speaking of Courage" finally became a part of O'Brien's 1990 work The Things They Carried. The two stories are connected in several ways. For example, the 1976 version of "Speaking of Courage" reprises chapter 14 of Going After Cacciato, where Paul Berlin thinks he could have won the Silver Star if he had rescued Frenchie Tucker. In "Speaking of Courage," Norman Bowker thinks he could have won the Silver Star if he had rescued Kiowa. But neither Berlin nor Bowker rescued, and neither won. Like men on plastic ponies at the carousel, they hang suspended, bouncing up and down between reality and fantasy.