I really liked this interconnected collection of short stories. They weren’t self-aggrandising or filled with bravery and machismo. The tone was matter of fact and quotidian even though the content is a long way removed from the everyday facts of my own life. Nonetheless, O’Brien draws you into his world smoothly and skilfully.
Beyond the stories themselves, which are well told and frankly relaid, I also found the book to be full of interesting reflections on the nature and function of storytelling itself. The soldiers tell each other stories to alleviate their boredom, attempt to understand their situation and to make sense of their fear and exhilaration. O’Brien writes these stories later as a way to comprehend his own memories and experiences of the war. In both cases, the stories needn’t necessarily be true. Perhaps it’s in some sense necessary that they’re not factually accurate. Facts, empirical accuracy, perception and truth are all slippery concepts and this is acknowledged and explored exquisitely in the book. A story can be true that never actually happened. Something that really happened can be false in terms of what it represents or how it’s portrayed. Between the occurrence and the retelling there is so much in between. O’Brien states clearly that war stories with neat morals are almost certainly false for this reason. For example, his detailed, presumably imagined, description of the man he killed with a grenade seems infinitely more ‘true’ to him than the bare facts of the incident.
Beyond the tales of life in Vietnam, there are also stories about where these stories and experiences sit within a person’s life after the war. How do these experiences change a person? How do you talk about them? How do you understand them in such a violently different context? How do you make sense of your life and the experiences you’ve had? The answer seems to be through stories. Whether these are the stories O’Brien composes as a writer or through the narratives we all tell to ourselves about our lives; the need for a narrative seems ubiquitous. O’Brien doesn’t hide this away behind the stories he tells. He discusses it explicitly. Showing the reader how things are altered, adjusted and reinterpreted so they make sense. So they can become true in the sense that O’Brien understands the word. The simple dichotomy of true and false being inadequate to express the nuance of life as it’s really lived.
Of course, I can never know what it was like to fight in the Vietnam war. However, reading this book I did feel like I was closer to comprehending one man’s experience of it. Through the stories he heard, the stories he lived and the stories he created to make sense of all the other stories. It feels like an honest and unedited account and this gives it the quality of truth. Even if there isn’t, or can’t be, such a thing when dealing with a subject as complex and incomprehensible as war.
