Writer and Vietnam Veteran Tim O'Brien Spoke About Truth, Fiction and Experience at Central Library

Is fiction sometimes the key to truth? For Vietnam veteran Tim O'Brien, it is. “Fiction is true to nightmares, dreams and memories,” he said. Vietnam left him with a set of memories and experiences that were very different from the realities of life in the United States, and the trauma of those experiences was difficult to grasp.

In fiction, O'Brien could, “assume responsibility in story, confront complicity and feel again in a way that he couldn't do in reality.” In “The Things They Carried,” he could speak about Vietnam, and while the stories in the book might not be real, they were true. He could create the character of a child to ask the the blunt questions that an adult would know not to ask, such as, “Have you ever killed anyone?” By blurring the line between fiction and reality, truth could emerge.

 O'Brien began his presentation by talking about the new book that he is writing about being a new father as an old man. He says of being an older dad, “It's a lot like Nam in many ways.” He has a sense of his own mortality, similar to what he felt when he went to war. When his first son is entering college, he will be well into his 70s, if he is even still alive, and that gives him a new and different perspective on life.

When O'Brien was just barely an adult, he was sent to war. He remembers the moral ambiguity that he felt at the time and how he just seemed to end up in a far-off country, fighting people who he knew nothing about. O'Brien read a chapter from “The Things They Carried,” in which he kills a young Viet Cong soldier in an ambush, and how years later, he still sees that young man in the fog. The story didn't actually happen, although O'Brien did participate in many ambush operations in Vietnam and still remembers the “nights of waiting to die or to kill.”

 What the story of these two young men on a foggy morning in Vietnam does is bring out the truth of the guilt, the terror, the sympathy and the death in the war. He could be “faithful to the emotional, physical and spiritual truth through fiction in a way that non-fiction could not.”

 O'Brien wants to undermine the black and white notion of truth, because “what is true when you are crouched in a rice paddy with a rifle?” His minister back home told him that the truth was that he should not kill, and his sergeant told him that the truth is that he better pull the trigger and kill, so which is the right truth, or are they both right in some way?

 O'Brien doesn't believe in absolute truths and he certainly gave his audience plenty to ponder as his presentation ended.