20 Years Later, O’Brien Reflects

Two decades have passed since the release of Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” but this Pulitzer Prize finalist has lost little of his mass appeal. On March 25, O’Brien returned to Cambridge­—he once studied in Harvard’s Ph.D. program in government—to speak in celebration of the book’s 20th anniversary. O’Brien’s speech at First Parish Church Meetinghouse elicited both laughter and tears as he discussed the lasting influence of a work written, as he said at the event, “to help readers feel something about what it was to be a foot soldier in a long-gone war in Vietnam.”

FM had the chance to ask him a few questions after his speech.

Fifteen Minutes: Having formerly worked as a journalist, why did you decide to describe your experiences in Vietnam through fiction?

Tim O’Brien: Working as a journalist, I was always tempted to lie.  I felt I could do dialogue better than the person I was interviewing. I felt I could lie better than Nixon and be more concise than some random person I was covering. It was liberating to my imagination to break out of that and to be able to make things up that, although they were invented, felt truer than the truth. These are two different things [fiction and journalism] and one makes me feel and the other leaves me kind of cold.

FM: Why do you use the format of the short story in “The Things They Carried”?

O’Brien: The world comes at me that way—comes at me in clumps of stuff, sometimes little vignettes and sometimes whole stories. And then the rest is erased by the internal filter that erases things for the same reason you’d forget swatting a mosquito. The inconsequential gets erased. I don’t think of it as a book of stories. It’s a book. It feels unified. But I did want to write discrete stories because that’s how the world has been coming at me for all these years.

FM: You were a graduate student at Harvard after you returned from overseas. What was it like being a Vietnam vet on a campus that was once so opposed to the Vietnam War?

O’Brien: I was an anonymous veteran. I didn’t mention to anybody except my best friend here that I was even in Vietnam, much less that I was a soldier in Vietnam. It wasn’t out of any shame. I just didn’t want to have anyone look at me in any way beyond what I was, which was a student here. I didn’t want to explain myself to people–not out of any motive except it’s hard, and I didn’t want to go through the labor of it all. So I stayed silent about it. It was too exhausting to talk about. You come out of a jungle and a nightmare and you come to Harvard and it’s everything you’ve dreamed about. I wanted to be part of it and not be a et.