“A true war story is never moral,” says Tim O’Brien in The Things They Carried. “If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, “ he continues, “then you have been made a victim of a very old and terrible lie.” A nice idea. I thought of it after finishing Ben Fountain’s novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Certainly I did not feel uplifted in the sense that I wanted to go and fight a war. But the story quite clearly had a moral, even if I couldn’t quite put the moral into words. Would this book be proscribed according to O’Brien’s ideal? Would O’Brien’s own book? Were they in fact true war stories or did fiction circumvent this requirement? For some time now, Americans have been caught in a frustratingly circular conversation about war movies and war literature (see here and here for examples of those using O’Brien to break the impasse). The debate is not so much pro-war versus anti-war, but the authentic versus the non-authentic, with each side accusing each other of the same lack of authenticity. I blame Tim O’Brien. A true war story is always moral. Encouraging young writers, young soldiers and young civilians to believe such amoral stories exist or might be someday written is a dangerous American tradition that we would be well advised to stop.
Though nominally a work of fiction, The Things They Carried obsesses over the idea of a true war story. One chapter – appropriately titled “How to Tell a True War Story” – goes so far as to layer successive, often contradictory, arguments as to what makes a war story true. At one point, the reader is told that in a true war story “it is difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.” At another, the reader discovers a true war story is actually not even about war, but about “sunlight” and “the special way the dawn spreads out on a river.” During a particularly desperate moment, the narrator asserts with vague spirituality, “a true story makes the stomach believe.” Throughout the chapter, no definitive positive verdict is rendered. O’Brien instead turns to negative affirmations like an apophatic theologian defining God. Thus described, a true war story “does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest proper models of human behavior.” In other words, “if a war story seems moral, do not believe it.” It is O’Brien’s contention that an author or director who chooses to focus on camaraderie among US troops or the enemy’s sadism actually idealizes war. A story’s moral uplift, however subtle, excuses mistakes made along the way and justifies the entire war effort. Hence O’Brien’s warning to would-be-war-story readers and watchers: be wary of making sense of war’s nonsense lest you end up “the victim of an old and terrible lie” (and in Vietnam or Iraq or where have you).
But there’s a problem. O’Brien’s own book has a moral. If considered as a whole, The Things They Carried must be read as a condemnation of the Vietnam War, himself for fighting in the war, and war in general. The book’s uplift is quite clear in this respect even through the fog of fractured narrative and unreliable narrators. This is why people are so drawn to the novel – it encourages readers into empathy and introspection; it makes them think about war and its consequences. Likewise, movies to emerge from O’Brien’s war, movies one suspects O’Brien would agree with (Deer Hunter, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now) quite obviously have a moral as well– mainly, the Vietnam War was a stupid and horrible war and we should think long and hard about what war does to young men before starting another. I am not old enough to vouch for how they were received at the time of release, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that they were interpreted as movies with a message. Yet in the intervening years something has changed. They have been turned into War Art, divorced from their original motivation, their original justification, and, unbelievably, have been used to justify exactly what they sought to condemn. This is possible, I believe, because Americans sincerely imagine true war stories to be without morals, an experience rather than a re-presentation, which can be enjoyed or appreciated rather than confronted.
Just because war is about as moral as two pit bulls tearing out each other’s throats, we should not assume stories written about war will lack morality as well. Unless the director/writer happens to be a computer or camera, the very act of re-presentation requires an argument on the part of the writer/director. Yet if one believes a true story is never moral – that it mirrors the violence it purports to represent – then one can conveniently ignore uncomfortable intellectual arguments made by the writer/director or any intellectual investment whatsoever. A liberal can enjoy Lone Survivor and a conservative can appreciate Platoon. This would be a fine moment of open dialogue if any attempt were made by either party to engage with the moral and intellectual arguments in these movies. Sadly, this is not the case. The viewers shut down that part of the brain and simply enjoy being party to pure violence for several hours. They use the fiction of the amoral war story to fantasize about what they would to in a world without morals. They pretend at broadmindedness while uncomprehendingly confirming their own desultory morality.
This disconnect extends to the soldiers as well as civilians. Even before 9/11, the US military consisted (and still consists) of culturally conversant generation Xers and Yers. We are not talking about Stephen Crane’s Henry Fleming here. There is no need to keep them down on the farm as the Internet and television already took them off the farm. They knew of Kubrick, Stone and Coppola before they even volunteered. Thus, the same soldiers can schizophrenically reference Full Metal Jacket and then cry like a baby at the end of the Notebook (which is the point of Kubrick’s “Mickey Mouse Club” ending I think). They can laugh hysterically at Team America and then order their soldiers to do exactly what the movie mocked without feeling the least sense of contradiction. Soldiers can do this because they truly believe a war story – like war itself – has no inherent moral so they can use these movies and literature as they see fit. Soldiers can ignore the moral messages in these movies – indeed celebrate movies with what they might consider offensive moral values – by telling themselves and being told by others the movies don’t really have a moral to relate.
Toward the end of In Pharaoh’s Army, Tobias Wolff, a Vietnam veteran like O’Brien, has a conversation extraordinarily similar to that of O’Brien’s in The Things They Carried. Wolff cannot quite pin down the best way to tell a story about the role he played in the destruction of a Vietnamese village. Wolff feels terribly sorry for what he did, but even as he tells the reader about his sorrow, he pauses to ask: “isn’t it just like an American boy, to want to admire his sorrow at tearing other people’s houses apart?” Wolff is not talking about what he did anymore – if he ever was – but how he can relate to the reader what he did without being insufferably moralistic about it. The very act of apologizing becomes an act of conquest and, therefore, justification – look how deeply sorry the American soldier feels about what he did! How uniquely and inspirationally American this introspection is! Yet Wolff does not skirt this very real intellectual and moral dilemma – arguably the heart of the war-story genre – by an appeal to the idea of an “amoral” war story. To do so would divorce war and those who fought in it from any larger context of morality. War, in this reading, just happens, like a miracle or spontaneous combustion; it saves the soldiers and those who sent the soldiers to war – civilians, politicians and generals – from thinking about why they tell these stories and who can’t tell these stories, those benighted souls in Vietnam or Iraq who don’t have the capacity or genius to admire their own sorrow at being immoral. These stories allow us to learn much about ourselves all the while thinking not at all about changing who we are.
So the next time you go and see Lone Survivor or read Yellow Birds, don’t ask yourself if the movie or book has successfully captured war’s authenticity. Do not get hung up debating whether or not the movie’s or book’s moral overwhelms its accurate representation of war’s horrors. Do not ask if it does or does not have a moral. Don’t be stupid. Of course it does. Ask yourself instead what the moral is and if you agree with it. Ask yourself in which way you have been uplifted and if you want to go in that direction and – if you don’t – why or why not? Otherwise, you will walk away believing war to be the one place where morality does not matter, when war – and questions of war’s justification, prosecution and remembrance – should be the one place where morality matters most.
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Michael Carson is an ex-soldier who studied history and now writes fiction on the Gulf Coast. He regularly contributes to and helps edit the Wrath Bearing Tree along with a philosopher and a journalist.
After I read “The Things They Carried” it seemed to me like O’Brien, after experiencing war, did not necessarily know the “point” himself. The “point” and the moral aren’t necessarily the same. Based on the experiences he shares, the moral would likely come across as yes, “war is bad” and in particular, Vietnam was devastating, but also that he, as a young man, felt a sense of duty that drove him to go to war in the first place. The “point” is a lot more difficult to get at. O’Brien is revealing to the reader at the end of the book that stories are really just stories and they’re told to make people (including yourself) feel better, to feel more connected in this life of random, disjointed experiences. For example, his experience of flying across the world as a young man to fight for something he didn’t necessarily believe in and then being responsible for the death of an innocent is rather surreal and difficult to reconcile with past experiences. Humans weave narratives to help us understand our experiences in a universe that is random and cold.
The readers of “The things they carried” breathe meaning into the book, which is why it resonates with so many different audiences.
Also, I don’t know if this book has the same impact as the movies mentioned – its more open-ended and I would argue, more post-structuralist. The directors of the movies mentioned are all known for powerful, meaningful movies and they are setting the narrative for the viewer. There are not as many varied interpretations as there might be after a reading of “The Things They Carried.”
I do agree that the authenticity factor is a big one in war memoirs, and O’Brien also does a good job of calling that into question with the structure of this book, and of another of his Vietnam-era stories, “Going After Cacciato.” You want to believe him, but there’s a fantastical element that makes you question the narrator as a reliable source of information.
Thanks for the comment! I for the most part agree with your reading of O’Brien; but how would you distinguish between a point and a moral? Is one higher or lower than the other? Does one apply to aesthetics and the other to ethics? Let’s say he wanted to get across that we as humans weave narratives to help us understand a random and cold universe (war being to O’Brien the universe at its coldest and most random), would this be his moral or his point? If it’s his point, how does this not lend meaning and significance to the idea of storytelling about war? I’m only wondering because I don’t think O’Brien has any clear idea himself. I do understand the word moral has an old-school – religious or philosophical – flavor to it, but that’s the word O’Brien used, not me. While I personally don’t believe books should be read for their social utility alone – and get frustrated with people who do – we can’t ignore that this is how people read them – us being lost in a cold universe in need of stories and all – and to act as if they can be read and written neutrally or objectively or open-endedly strikes me as an absurdity with dangerous social and even aesthetic consequences.
As for the impact of Vietnam movies versus The Things They Carried: yes, they have different impacts and are meant for different audiences, but they both have arguments. I don’t think we should pretend one does while the other does not. I admire O’Brien’s work, but I don’t believe his work is some kind of blank slate for us to read as we will either.
I read Wolff’s memoir a long time ago, but I really liked it, in part because he was pretty adamant about war not making people more moral or smarter. If I remember right he talked a fair bit about how his wartime experience mostly made him want to zone out in front of the television and not think; he presented war as making him less authentic, more banal, and stupider.
I like what you’re saying about the importance of war stories grappling with moral issues. But I also feel like war stories (even anti-war stories) sometimes present war itself as a kind of moral truth, or a quintessential moral experience. I think there is a line between “moral war story” and “war story as morality”, but I also think it can get blurred in unfortunate ways.
I’m curious about how literature or film can be read ‘amorally.’ I also get frustrated about how consumers can ‘tune out’ the meaning of a work, in order to be entertained by it, or to be included in social enjoyment of this work. I’m not sure if they are enjoying it ‘amorally’ though– perhaps selecting certain facets while completely ignoring others, in order to spin a new kind of morality. Like what is done with The Bible every day.
A morality, or at least a ‘better’ and ‘worse,’ is needed to underwrite desire, or loss, which are wrapped up in the very structure of most narratives. Narrative is a way of navigating or articulating these concepts, and they are essentially what make stories meaningful. Although, I invite people who disagree to argue with me on this— I’m sure this is a little outdated.
I’m wondering if people are using stories that contradict their own beliefs as ‘raw material,’ to restructure into a story that does. The stakes for this would be very high with war movies– as people conflate film and literature with meaning, and may actually try to realize war as a way to make meaning. I think Noah’s written on about this. But I think it affects many other non-war stories– The Christmas Carol for example. There’s tons of evidence of how it happened to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is culturally remembered more for the contortions its readers imposed than the qualities of the original text.
Noah, I much prefer Wolff’s memoir to The Things They Carried for exactly the reasons you describe. If I had to sum up my reading of each: war does not make you moral but it does have a moral, namely, that it does not make you more moral (Wolff) versus war does not make you moral and does not have a moral, so we should avoid morals and morality entirely (O’Brien). I was trying to get at that in the penultimate paragraph. Don’t know if it came across.
Also, the problem of anti-war stories that still present war as a moral truth: I think this happens because we assume war to be the one place where normal morals and morality don’t apply. It’s our culture’s last link to the sublime. Boring pedestrian lessons of badness and goodness fade before the awful majesty of combat. Wolff was having none of this. This is another reason why I prefer him to O’Brien.
Stanley Hauerwas (a pacifist) talks a good bit about how war is the last place where morality is taken seriously in our culture, or where moral experience is validated.
Do you mean a moral a like a lesson, as in a fable?
Interesting. Confirm the moral order through periodically abandoning it? I really have to check out Hauerwas.
Osvaldo, yes, as in a fable. Though not always as obvious.
I think I count myself in O’Brien’s camp. As he wrote in that very piece, ““To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true.”
He’s not arguing that there is no attempted moral to be found in war stories, but that they are all narrow and can ultimately be contradicted by a different war story, and that they all (including his own) need to be engaged with critically as to not be swayed by oversimplified platitudes. To narrow down O’Brien’s work to simply condemning the Vietnam War and war in general is to oversimplify what he is saying about the experience of war as to narrow it down to a singular meaning “War is bad.” We all know “war is bad.” I see him actually saying something close to what I think you are trying to say here (and ascribe to Wolff, which I have not read, but sounds good), “How we talk/write about war is fraught with problems because the idea of a single overriding moral is myopic and the very way that war is sold.”
Mike, I think of the moral as a lesson. And I agree that many war memoirs/stories are moralistically anti-war. I would put O’Brien’s work in a different category philosophically or stylistically than say, WW1 British poets like Wilfred Owen or even Erick Maria Remarque. When I say a “point” to the story, I would classify O’Brien’s tale as more nebulous, which makes it read more like a string of experiences than a solid narrative.
I don’t know if I would necessarily classify one as more important than the other. The narration style is more aesthetic and a moral, ethical, agreed.
I would agree that the book does not exist in an objective vacuum. I also would argue that O’Brien is basically saying he doesn’t know what to say about his experiences, except that they happened, and he tried to give himself some closure by writing them down. We read them and interpret them ourselves. They’re evocative, they’re touching, and in the end, he’s saying it’s ok to be emotionally invested in them, as long as we also have a meta-awareness of their triviality.
To look at the last line of the book:
“I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story.” I think he’s saying, if I may paraphrase, “I am trying to write this story to validate my experiences that I don’t understand,” and I think that’s what draws me in so much to the book to begin with – that he’s aware that he’s weaving one thread out of the many thread possibilities that he could have chosen, and he’s aware of that (because it may be preserving his sanity?).
Osvaldo, I think he’s trying to say something similar to that as well. I’m just starting to think after years of reading him and re-reading him that he’s not saying it as well as he could and should. I think in his effort to get beyond the simplistic “war is bad” narrative he ended up beyond good and evil and judgment all together; and war, whatever it is, deserves to be discussed as something that happened. But, as you point out, I think he would be the first to be happy with someone criticizing his writing, as he spends most of his work pointing out its limitations and encouraging others to question their own assumptions.
Yep, I’m with Noah and Hauerwas. People always tune out the ostensible excuse (aka moral) for the pleasure of exploding heads. It’s a pure present of bodily rupture, like porn. Porn is not watched to solve the mystery of whether the lady gets her sink fixed and whether she tips well.
Could you argue a war story is like porn in the sense people can enjoy the pleasure of watching people get killed without much caring about the moral or the story while also believing they are doing something moral or learning some essential truth about themselves? And by telling people no moral exists, we allow them to watch the movie as they would porn all the while confirming a disgusting morality predicated on killing and dying to cleanse ourselves of bourgeoisie problems and boredoms? I think the main issue here is everyone – including O’Brien – seems to equate moral with good. You can have bad morals and a story can have a bad moral. A war story like O’Brien’s or Wolff’s attempts to encourage good morals, trying not only to hate war (i.e., simply say war is bad), but to see war as enfeebling, boring and petty, by continually questioning and undermining our assumptions about simplistically moral war (and anti-war) stories. A war story like Saving Private Ryan uses a façade of good morals – duty and sacrifice – to allow people the visceral pleasure of death and murder and dying, which would make its moral a less than desirable one from my perspective (maybe not others). A movie like Red Dawn does not even really bother with the pretense of morality and just gives the fantasy of the bad guy and the porn – a really bad moral in my book. None of these war stories lack morals. Thus, a true war story, in fact all stories – as Kailyn maybe suggested – true or false, porn or Dickens, have a moral, even if that moral is you don’t need to think about what you are doing right now and there’s a time and a place to watch heads explode for fun. The argument should be about whether we agree with this moral or lesson, not whether it lacks one altogether.
The idea that Tim O’Brien thinks war is a place where morality doesn’t matter seems completely at odds with the works of Tim O’Brien.
The foundation of Tim O’Brien war novels is not that there is no moral to be drawn but that we cannot extrapolate one soldier’s experience and understand the meaning, or moral, or justification (for or against) a war. I’ve read O’Brien over and over, and see no attempt to declare war to be an amoral landscape in his books. The character Tim O’Brien is plagued by questions of the moral rightness of war.
He makes moral judgments constantly, only with the requisite disclaimer that the narrative of an individual experience in the context of a war cannot correlate to Truth.
If you’ve read If I Die In A Combat Zone, you can see O’Brien’s moral voice everywhere. His damnation of his hometown is particularly enlightening. Cacciato’s entire plot is built around the morality of war.
It is not: there’s no moral lesson to be found in war. It is: how do I, personally as one soldier in a war, penetrate the Truth that this war is built upon.
Anyway. That’s my O’Brien take. Love to see folks talking about his work.
I haven’t read his books. But I certainly take Mike’s point that war stories almost always project a moral (whereas for porn plot is explicitly decorative)– and, to hoist myself petardedly, I am a fan of Simone Weil’s analysis of the Iliad. But I absolutely think that the appeal of the Iliad has everything to do with exploding heads (or dragging corpses behind chariots, etc.). I guess if the Iliad (and The Red Badge of Courage, already mentioned) has a moral then any war story can have a moral. I support boring, enfeebling, and petty as a good end to strive for.
Couldn’t agree with you more, Christopher. He finds morality and morals very important. War horrified him before he even went to war. This is what makes his refusal to commit to any moral reading of war so compelling. He wants to so badly but refuses. And this is why I said in my article that his story does have a moral even though he claims a true war story is never moral.
I should mention that we are now arguing what his exact moral is, which is an infinitely better conversation than people usually have about his work and war stories in general. We have done a terrible disservice to O’Brien’s own argument by putting his work on a pedestal, and we do a terrible disservice to ourselves by placing any other war story up there with it.
I’ve been around the DoD for 32 of my 59 years, and I’ve never been “pro-war.” And it appears that my life-long philosophy actually dovetailed quite nicely with the overall philosophy taught to officers and enlisted members during their various levels of leadership training. War was always cited as the last resort a nation should take when it comes to a foreign policy dispute.
There are a number of practical reasons for this. First and foremost is the ultimate cost to both nations in both blood and money — not just for the military participants, but for the civilian non-combatants.
Most of the military people I’ve known weren’t particularly anxious to go to war — especially one where there is not a strong commitment back home, and/or it’s open-ended, and/or the rules of engagement make it almost impossible to end it quickly and efficiently.
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