Summary:
Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried both draw upon their respective authors' experiences during the Vietnam War. Both novels reflect difficulties faced by veterans in telling a war story, including memory loss, the physical and mental magnitude of events, the burying of traumatic experiences, and demoralization. But both Caputo and O'Brien pursued different storytelling styles, both of which resulted in powerful stories.
David Buchheit
2/23/05
Telling a War Story
With the twentieth century came many wars and thousands of books about them. A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo and The Things they Carried by Tim O'Brien were two of the finest war novels ever written. They stem from The United States most infamous conflict, the Vietnam War. Some of the difficulties they encounter in releasing a true war story are memory loss, the physical and mental caliber of the events, the burying of traumatic experiences, and the demoralization inflicted by the war. However, both of them pass sharing a war experience in flying colors with different styles of powerful rhetoric.
One of the obvious problems for veterans in telling a war story is memory loss. In many places O'Brien and Caputo differ in the way they deal with this. O'Brien confronts certain times as if they were in a purple haze where reality is unimportant, but the way a man feels is very important. For example, O'Brien explains that he has difficulty remembering many of his experiences, "Much of it is hard to remember. I sit at this typewriter and stare through my words and watch Kiowa sinking into the deep muck of the shit field, or Curt Lemon hanging in pieces from a tree... the remembering is turned into a sort of rehappening." (The Things They Carried, 33) O'Brien admits that he pulls things from his mind, which may or may not have happened, in an attempt to get the emotional truth across in these stories about fellow soldiers, Lemmon and Kiowa. Sometimes the stories of O'Brien are compelling to the point where the reader may wish it were solid fact, a true story, even after the author has explicitly said that it isn't so. The coping method for O'Brien's memory loss may not be completely honest, but it is effective. Caputo takes the complete inverse route of this. The more conservative approach of Caputo can be seen all throughout the memoir in the instances where dialogue is inserted into the text in an attempt to show people the subjective truth. No man or woman could remember word for word what people said twelve years in the past to the extent that exact quotes could be used, but Caputo makes the memory as realistic as possible. One of the many instances in A Rumor of War that Caputo uses an exact quote is during boot camp, "'EYES FRONT! DON'T LOOK AT ME NUMBNUTS! EYES FRONT! SQUARE YOUR PIECE!'" (A Rumor of War, 9), this piece of writing real or not, was convincing. It is unclear whether or not a reader would feel what the author was feeling, but it seems like a narrative not an off the wall legendary like account that O'Brien is known for delivering. Although the means or telling is contrasting the two writers both tell great war stories with this road block n their way.
When one who has experienced war tries to cope with the magnitude of the events at hand, an apotheosis of narrative telling is needed to get the point across. Caputo and O'Brien are capable of delivering such an experience. It is made obvious in a Rumor of War that Caputo is a master of giving an informative account and that it he has the disturbing power to pull the reader from their environment into Caputo's Vietnam. One moment that Caputo does an excellent job of achieving this is when he is being shot at and recalls what a reader would not expect to hear,
"Something slapped into the branches not six inches above my head; a fillip form Charlie...I had the experience of being shot at by someone who was trying to kill me specifically. It was not horrifying or terrifying or any of the things it is supposed to be. Rather, it was perplexing. My first reaction, rooted in the illusion that anyone trying to kill me must have a personal motive, was: 'why does he want to kill me? What did I ever do to him"' A moment later, I realized there was nothing personal about it. All he saw was a man in the wrong uniform." (A Rumor of War, 93)
This simple thought in the midst of a larger more consequential series of events may seem insignificant, but it truly adds a needed detail. While many, including Caputo can bring the big event to a reader few have the exquisite technique of bringing in such a seemingly remote detail to make a reader feel immersed. On the other hand, O'Brien is no slouch when it comes to carrying his message to the reader. While one may feel they don't know if they believe what O'Brien is saying in the literal sense, it is highly likely that the reader will feel a connection with the war they can not quite describe. On one occasion O'Brien gives the account of Mitchell Sanders, one of his companions in the war. The story tells a tale of a group of men holding an observation post on a hill in the "Bush", meaning jungle of Vietnam, and the men begin to hear music. It seems to the men that the entire forest has come to musical life and that the sound booms not necessarily from the Vietcong, but the rainforest. The storyteller makes it clear that the sounds, whatever their origin were real. There is no way to truly tell if the story was true or not. However, the overwhelming feeling many receive is that a foot soldier just told a story to the reader. The details of Mitchell Sanders are masterful, the dialect is dead-on, the personality of the character is nicely portrayed, and he seems like a marine, "'we're talking regulation, by-the-book LP. These six guys, they don't say boo for a solid week. They don't got tongues. All ears.'" (The Things They Carried, 72) and the book is dedicated in part to the man. Even though one may believe Mitchell Sanders to be a fabrication after all of this evidence one will get the feel of war. The conversation takes you inside of a marine and gives you the feeling you are listening to another. Both Caputo and O'Brien can make one believe the big things with subtle details that inevitably are encompassed in a war.
One of the defense mechanisms people have as a basic instinct is to bury painful incidences. This is a common hurdle that war writers face, a writer often feels tremendous pain in every effort of recollecting events. Both Caputo and O'Brien go head to head with this human idiosyncrasy and convey their message. An obvious method that Caputo employs to combat this problem is by removing his emotion and setting a dry objective tone to his writing. A clear instance where lack of emotion is present to robot like extremes can be seen in a scene in the memoir where Caputo is tracking down an injured Vietcong soldier,
"We feel so many things in our guts, and that is where two 7.62-mm bullets had caught him.... A modern, high-velocity bullet strikes with tremendous impact. No tidy holes as in the movies. The two in his belly were small--each about the size of a dime-- but I could have put my fist into the exit wounds in his back."(119-120 A Rumor of War)
No where in this passage does Caputo give any condolence to the victim of the assault, Caputo simply states what he sees and what certainly the victim felt. On the other hand, O'Brien does not avoid what he and others feel. O'Brien's narrative sometimes takes on a surreal quality through his emotional truth oriented writing because sometimes he changes or exaggerates to achieve the emotional truth. Also O'Brien addresses the issue of the pain of buried emotions by trying to lure it out into the open where he can emotionally deal with them. One example of this psychedelic style of writing can be seen when Curt Lemon, a war buddy, dies while enjoying a game with his friend,
"There was a noise, I suppose, which must've been the detonator, so I glanced behind me and watched Lemon step form the shade into the bright sunlight. His face was suddenly brown and shining. A handsome kid, really. Sharp gray eyes, lean and narrow-waisted, and when he died it was almost beautiful, the way the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms." (The Things They Carried, 70) Clearly both Caputo and O'Brien are capable of telling their tales through the pain of telling memories long hidden from thought.
In war people change. Often times the senses of the morality of a person before they experience war and after they experience war can be compared to black and white. This drastic transformation can be difficult to convey because few, in the audience, have experienced such a change first hand. However, Caputo and O'Brien narrate excellent war stories even with this in their way. O'Brien demonstrates his ability to do this when he discusses the death of Kiowa and the people responsible for it. All along O'Brien has the death of Kiowa on his hands, he admits it by saying it was not Bowker's fault, "He (Bowker) did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of the story is my own." (The Things They Carried, 161) However he does not say this in the text until after a long story about Bowker's guilt he felt for the failure to save Kiowa and after that O'Brien objectively says that Bowker lost his nerve and let Kiowa die. It is clear that much more effort went into vilifying Bowker than there was effort vilifying O'Brien because the part where O'Brien admits his own weakness in the incident is very short. The story about the death of Kiowa was difficult to explain because O'Brien played a hand in it, the war changed O'Brien and the guilt demoralized him into inciting misplaced blame into his writing. Caputo's writing Also was affected by his demoralization that took place during the war. Before the war Caputo like many imagined war as a hellish event, but he admits amidst the chaos that he likes it, "Nevertheless, the experience--our first of a hot LZ (Landing Zone)--was not entirely unpleasant. There was a strange exhilaration in our helplessness. Carried willy-nilly...It was like the feeling of being on a roller coaster or in a canoe careening down a wild rapids." (A Rumor of War, 112) Fortunately this wasn't all just in Caputo's head, the Marine Corps worked hard to imbed this message into Caputo's head. An example of this can be seen in the classroom where a sergeant is teaching some things, "AMBUSHES ARE MURDER AND MURDER IS FUN." (A Rumor of War, 36) The war environment changes a man's sense of morality and can make a soldier seem to be a foreigner to someone who has not experienced what the soldier has.
Caputo and O'Brien are amazing writers. The two can make one feel that one has been in war which is no easy task and they employ different rhetorical skills. Whether it's conveying the details of feeling a powerful event, comprehending the changes of morality a soldier goes through, personally realizing the memory loss that takes place in war, or beginning to know what it's like to dig up a buried emotion the two writers take one through it.
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