Expectations

So I've always wanted to know more about this whole Vietnam thing. It's been that one lurking event in America's history that was always shrouded in mystery for me; every other major war was referenced some way or another in Saturday morning cartoons and stories. Growing up, the history lessons just stopped after the mid 20th century. It seemed like society was reluctant to discuss the topic all together.

Well I understand why now. Our reading thus far in The Things They Carried has filled in the holes of curiosity left by the 1979 film Apocalypse Now (the extent of my personal research on the Vietnam war). The horror (pun intended) of the stories O'Brien has shared have already inspired mixed emotions in me. O'Brien starts off his exposition with a very in depth analysis of the lives of the soldiers stationed in Vietnam, and by telling the story of the irrational Lieutenant Cross. His mind flips from longing thoughts to his lover back home and the gruesome war he is leading his men into. O'Brien doesn't even style his writing into first person until later when he begins telling his own story, like his experience as a young man shortly after being drafted. He explains his inner turmoil and his trip to the Rainy River. To establish ethos with the audience, O'Brien breaks down and clarifies the differences between true and false war stories, and starts telling his own.

I feel as if there is meaning in the haphazard nature of Tim O'Brien's writing style and story telling patterns. As far as structure goes, his lack thereof seems to embody the Vietnam war in its entirety. To paraphrase, he describes the war from his pre-war self as lacking a singular purpose, without distinct plans, and sloppy. O'Brien's style of storytelling is (so far) random--- I'm expecting it to all come together in the end. Well what I actually expect is for all of his irregularities and varying chapter lengths to form a greater picture of the war, as a means of representation. It would be insufficient and unsatisfying to tell one's story in a traditional chronological order. From what I've gathered so far, the war didn't feel like a day by day experience in retrospect. It was nights of waiting in silence in the brush, brief moments of gazing into the clouds from the foxhole in the ground under rain of flak and artillery, it was counting breaths and hearing the same stories over and over again, and being lost in thought for hours until an explosion brings you back to that moment and kills your comrade. Days for the soldiers didn't have the same numbers as the days of their pen pals. It wouldn't make any sense to write down your Vietnam war story in such a way, you wouldn't capture the meaning of it all.

My reaction to it all-- taken aback? Not quite. I was hoping a diary of mad stories and utter insanity. This was the content I was looking for that nobody wants to tell. Grandpa doesn't want to tell stories of Vietnam, and the same goes for the American media as a whole, for that matter. We like to relish in our glory; it's human nature. We tell stories of killing Nazis and giving the suppressed their human rights back and overthrowing dictators. Not how when the American boy soldier in Vietnam threw a grenade at the most feeble looking enemy boy soldier treading softly down the path on rubber sandals.

One last thing too. I'd like to dwell on what I was not expecting.

I guess I still have on my fiction reading cap, because at the end of every chapter I expect that one little sentence with the delicious bait on the end. You know, the cliffhanger. But out of self defense I'd like to say it's a deep, subconscious expectation. Can't find the right word to describe the tiny disappointment inside when the chapter ends and there's no redemption for Mary Anne, or no flashy sentence that makes me long to read more. Sometimes it's a line by Kiowa, but it's never what I want. Which is again that kind of intended emotion O'Brien is trying to condition in the reader. War stories aren't like that-- they aren't flashy or heroic or top selling movie material. It takes a while to assimilate, the notion of the glitterless reality. It's all the evolution of the boy soldiers thrown into the last place they'd ever want to be, and in the most maddening circumstances. They don't evolve into heroes. They turn into Kurtz from Heart of Darkness, and they shoot baby buffalos and cry.