The Things We Carry

I just finished a book called “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien.  It’s a series of stories derived from the author’s personal experiences during the Vietnam War.  I found it haunting, but not in the way you think.  O’Brien shows great courage in writing a very detailed and honest depiction of the war from his own memory.  The depictions of the mangled dead and the men’s gruesome acts were heard to listen to but this was not what made it so disturbing to me.  Like the author confesses, with so much bloodshed it was not long before I became num.  Much like someone watching a horror movie, I would imagine, it stops having meaning, it’s senseless.

What shook me to the core was when he wrote about the transition home.  He depicted one of his comrades in a short story driving around a 7-mile lake in his home town, pulling over every so often when he saw someone he knew.  This man wanted to tell his friends and family about the war, the medals he had won, and the friends he lost but he could never find the words. He felt that people could never really understand.  He reminded me of Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, misunderstood and longing for someone to listen, but no one does.  After this story, the author tells the actual story of his friend.  He never truly came back; he was never able to truly relate to anyone. This curses him with a deep loneliness. After a game of basketball at the local YMCA with some of his high school friends, he went into the locker room and hung himself.  

J.D. Salinger, who fought on the beaches of Normandy, and O’Brien both brilliantly illustrated war, or rather, the complex emotions derived from the things that can’t be unseen. Not through depicting honor and courage or death and carnage but by describing the void created, the vacuum.  The loneliness of knowing that few will ever be able to understand, to understand what has been seen and felt.

This keeps me up tonight.

Scotty