The Things They Carried Warfare: The Vietnam War Quotes

Notice that O'Brien says "almost sweet" here. The story about Azar and the little boy isn't exactly sweet. Azar does give a chocolate bar to the little one-legged kid, but then he sympathizes with the soldier who shot the child, ran out of ammo, and couldn't finish the job. The war isn't transformed into sweetness and light, it's spun. All of the happy, funny moments that the men have—and some of them really are happy and really are funny—are rooted in the inevitable fact that the men are at war.

War is boring, but it's a nervous, terrified boredom. Hollywood often presents war as a Stallone-fest, complete with Uzis ripping through the air and lots of screaming and blood and gore. It's not that there isn't a lot of blood and gore in The Things They Carried, but mostly the war is presented as it is in this quote—as a lot of downtime and marching during which you could unexpectedly die.

We have a feeling that this quote is part of O'Brien trying to use story-truth to convey something that civilians just can't understand. In the middle of a firefight, you've never felt more at peace? Yeah, all right. But we'll buy it—it's not like O'Brien's the first former soldier to write about the inherent contradictions in war or the first to use nature as a medium. Erich Maria Remarque did it more than sixty years earlier, in All Quiet on the Western Front.

Tim O'Brien keeps introducing us to characters we love and want to hang out with. He tells us about the brotherhood among these characters. And now he's telling us that there's no rectitude or virtue in the war at all? It's a little confusing. Use Kiowa as an example, though: O'Brien takes the most virtuous, moral character in the book and drowns him in poop. When O'Brien says that the war isn't moral, he doesn't mean that none of the people in it are moral. He means that the war itself destroys morality.

Here we get more about the crazy things that happen in war. We also hear that soldiers know they won't be believed when they talk about the war. They consciously make up "normal stuff" so that they have a chance of communicating with civilians. 

Tim O'Brien is kind of telling all of us who analyze stories to shut up and go home. If he's really succeeded in telling his true war story, then all there should be to this Shmoop learning guide is the word "Oh" in giant letters. Fortunately for us, how he makes us say "Oh" is as interesting and meaningful as any moral could be.

Here, as in the earlier quote about war being boredom, O'Brien is skewering the conventional wisdom that war is hell. The eye appreciates the aesthetic beauty of things like napalm and rockets—they're like fireworks!—and it's not like you can shut that part of you off. Just because something is beautiful doesn't mean it's nice.

We've got the "civilians will never understand" thing again with the part about sisters who don't write back and people who don't listen, but we also have the idea that war, at its heart, isn't about war. It's about the people who are caught up in war, with their love and their memories and their sadness.

Bowker keeps saying he wants someone to talk to about what happened to Kiowa, but he just can't. Even when the intercom at the A&W asks him to talk—an inanimate and therefore non-judgmental object with all the time in the world—he's still unable to speak. And finally, he realizes it. Unable to speak, he is folded into the war just as much as Kiowa is.

So in the middle of a prank that he's playing on Bobby Jorgenson, in which he's pretending that dead soldiers have risen from the dead, O'Brien becomes the atrocity and horror of the war. By reanimating the soldiers for the wrong purposes—not memory and respect, but revenge—he's made the memory go rotten. His trick of using stories to bring the dead back to life has backfired, and he's been dragged down into the moral vacuum that is the war.