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Tim O'Brien is a magical writer from the Midwest. His roots are in
rural Minnesota. He was born in Austin, Minnesota and raised in Worthington, Minnesota. In
1968, he graduated from Macalester College in St. Paul. He served in Vietnam as an
infantry soldier from 1969 to 1970. He has included aspects of the conflict in his
writing. O'Brien deals with the conflict though a coping mechanism, just as all human
beings deal with trauma. He creates a livable reality.
On occasion, O'Brien goes beyond reality by using his great gift of imagination. In
his writing we learn that war was a possibility for him just as much as peace was. Bravery
and valor were possibilities as much as cowardice and acts of reprehensible evil. Vietnam
held all of these possibilities as much as all life holds all of these possibilities. War
is only one of the various possibilities that life affords us. Life is choice. We choose
from the possibilities. We live with the results of those choices. The results are
tangible. They are a reality. How we cope with those realities is a further choice.
Tim O'Brien copes by telling stories. When he visited the Quad City Area in March
he told stories that caused people to listen. O'Brien used powerful readings from his
works to captivate the various audiences that had the good fortune to attend the lecture
and reading series that were held for three consecutive days. His simple and comfortable
presence is not indicative of the power that is present during his readings. It is evident
immediately that he is a story teller. His prose is indicative of the story teller. His
use of the narrative voice is extremely dramatic. His imagination is the "magic"
he uses to put the audience under his spell.
O'Brien started his super author residency at Teikyo Marycrest College were he
spoke to a large group of students and faculty and members of the community about the
Vietnam experience. He was joined by a panel from the school that had also experienced
Vietnam in diverse ways. His reading was combined with the viewing of a video tape that
was produced locally and dealt with the war in Vietnam. He signed books and spoke at
length to all those that approached him. He is quite approachable.
The second stop for Tim O'Brien was at Scott Community College in Bettendorf, where
he wore a Bettendorf High School baseball cap. He collects hats from his travels, and
added a local hat to that collection. This was a move that further endeared him to the
audience. He read from his short story "Faith" which recently was published in
The New Yorker and is a selection from his current work in progress novel. He spoke of the
use of self in fiction and got laughs when he said that the stories were all lies. He
comes from Minnesota where people fish. He says that the twelve pound walleye that was
caught often becomes fifteen pounds and soon it becomes a marlin.
The story adds to life, it becomes enlarged. The stories from self aren't always
good stories so the author embellishes them. He gives the example of "On the Rainy
River" a chapter from his novel The Things They Carried the character must make a
decision about going to fight in a war he doesn't believe in or running away to Canada. He
travels to the Rainy River area in northern Minnesota. O'Brien says he has never been in
that area of the state. He really spent the summer of 1968 golfing and worrying. That is
not a good story though and so he embellishes it.
He again stayed to autograph books and to speak to those people that approached him
after his speech. The evening presentation was at the Rock Island Public Library and was
attended by several Vietnam veterans along with other members of the local community.
O'Brien spoke of his youth in Worthington and going to the Saturday afternoon movies and
seeing John Wayne and other stars win the wars of our fathers. He talked about going to
the army surplus store and getting supplied to fight those wars on the golf course in
town. He talked about how the war movies from the Vietnam war were not so black and white.
He meant no pun. He meant that the films were not so easy to dismiss as the earlier
versions of the war is glorious era.
The films he discussed had clips that helped to serve his point well. He showed a
scene from Apocalypse Now in which the main character played by Martin Sheen goes through
a struggle with himself in a Saigon hotel room that was reminiscent of the narrator
Marlowe in the Conrad novel, Heart of Darkness. He also showed the famous scene where
Colonel Kilgore played by Robert Duvall says his infamous line, "I love the smell of
napalm in the morning."
The colonel represents, according to O'Brien, the officer that is too busy with his
digressions to be concerned with the reality of the war around him. He is waiting to go
surfing when he says these word in the movie. The character becomes a stereotype for the
leaders that were outside of the war through choice or playful diversion. The movie clips
from The Deer Hunter, helped to put an almost mythological twist of the past with the
present. The use of the symbolism in the famous Russian roulette scenes lends itself
nicely to the concept that for the foot soldier it was a game of Russian roulette. With
every step you were closer to death.
O'Brien showed both the scene in which Robert DeNiro and Christopher Walken play
Russian roulette in order to escape their captors in a VC compound and the later scene
where Christopher Walken dies in the Saigon gaming parlor. He spoke of the intense love
that the character played by DeNiro showed for his friend in the later scene.
The discussion that followed O'Brien's presentation was animated and exciting. The
questions from the audience showed a meaningful and authentic reaction to the film clips
and the introductory discussion by the author.
The following morning at Black Hawk College Tim O'Brien spoke to students and
faculty about the attitudes of the Americans to Asians in 1969 and what role it played in
the war. He also talked about how that attitude has changed somewhat. He spoke about his
going back to Vietnam in 1994 and touring the area where he had been a foot soldier. He
returned to LZ Gator and to the Batangan Peninsula and to the area know as Pinkville. He
read from The Things He Carried.
He read a selection from "Spin" about an old poppa-san that would lead
them through the local mine fields around an area known as Pinkville. "And like the
time we enlisted an old poppa-san to guide us through the mine fields out on the Batangan
Peninsula. The old guy walked with a limp, slow and stooped over, but he knew where the
safe spots were and where you had to be careful and where even if you were careful you
could end up like popcorn.
He had a tightrope walker's feel for the land beneath him-its surface tension, the
give and take of things. Each morning we'd form up in a long column, the old poppa-san out
in front, and for the whole day we'd troop along after him, tracing his footsteps, playing
an exact and ruthless game of follow the leader. Rat Kiley made up a rhyme that caught on,
and we'd all be chanting it together: Step out of line, hit a mine; follow the dink,
you're in the pink.
All around us, the place was littered with Bouncing Betties and Toe Poppers and
bobby-trapped artillery rounds, but in those five days on the Batangan Peninsula nobody
got hurt. We all learned to love the old man. It was a sad scene when the choppers came to
take us away. Jimmy Cross gave the old poppa-san a hug. Mitchell Sanders and Lee Strunk
loaded him up with boxes of C rations. There were actually tears in the old guy's eyes.
'Follow dink, ' he said to each of us, 'you go pink'" (37).
The war was fought by boys. Boys that were in a country as foreign as the face of
the moon. They were in the land of a people they didn't know or understand. They were boys
with too much fire power and too much fear that held on to them like the red dust that
covered their boots.
At Augustana College he read from In the Lake of the Woods. From the chapter in
titled "The Nature of Love," he read about the hero of the novel, John Wade. He
was celebrating a political victory and he and his wife were in a hotel room. "When
the party ended, well after midnight, they ordered steaks and champagne from room service.
'Mr. Senator Husband,' Kathy kept saying, but John told her it wasn't necessary, she could
call him Honorable Sir, and then he picked up a champagne bottle and used it as a
microphone, peeling off his pants, gliding across the room and signing Regrets, I've had a
few, and Kathy squealed and flopped back on the bed and grabbed her ankles and rolled
around and laughed and yelled 'Honorable Senator Sir!' so John stripped off his shirt and
made oily Sinatra moves and sang The record shows I took the blows, and Kathy's green eyes
were wet and happy and full of the light that was only Kathy's light and could be no one
else's" (64).
When John Wade sings My Way in the novel it is eerie. Everything that has happened
to John Wade is a direct result of doing things his way. When things didn't go John's way,
he performed magic to make things go his way. When Tim O'Brien reads it, it is just as
eerie because he is doing it his way. His way is performing his own magic and it works.
His stories grip the audience and force the listener to feel things. Sometimes they are
things that you may not want to feel. Real things. Life things. O'Brien does things his
way. It is magic.
The character John Wade is a man that desperately needs to be loved. He has done
many things to be loved. He has done wrong things in the name of love. His need for love
is so strong. It is a need we all have. It is human. It is sometimes painful. O'Brien
points out that the love that John Wade has for his wife is what leads to the mystery in
this novel. He also points out that a mystery is not solved. As he quipped, "If it is
solved, it is not a mystery anymore, is it?"
He further added that if we knew who Jack the Ripper was it also wouldn't be a
mystery. If we knew all about what happened on the grassy knoll, it too would cease to be
a mystery. Mysteries are there to engage our imagination, not to quell it. For that
reason, he says he has left options open for the reader. He has created a mystery novel
that uses choices. The choices are left up to the reader. Again, some of the slight of
hand that is Tim O'Brien has been accomplished.
Later that night at St. Ambrose University, O'Brien read from The Things They
Carried. This was an emotionally charged reading from the chapter entitled "The Lives
of the Dead" that held a large audience in a death grip of silence. His reading was
about his first viewing of a dead civilian in a village. An old man who was killed in the
bombing of the village. His platoon leader had ordered the air strike earlier in the
afternoon. He combines the casual, death mocking behavior of his fellow soldiers and the
stark reality of seeing death up close in a war zone with a memory of his first dealing
with death back in Worthington, Minnesota.
He read through the story of Linda, his nine year old girl friend who died from a
brain tumor. He added the story of Ted Lavender, a platoon mate that choose to avoid the
war by spacing out on tranquilizers. He was stoned so that the war could be
"mellow" for him. These are the stories of the dead. They are stories of
purpose. As he says in the novel, "That's what a story does. The bodies are animated.
You make the dead talk. They sometimes say things like, 'Roger that.' Or they say, 'Timmy
stop crying,' which is what Linda said to me after she was dead" (261).
The magic that Tim O'Brien uses is the magic that is part of all human beings. It
is the magic we all need to survive. With his magic he can make Linda alive, skating on a
pond in Worthington, Minnesota. He ends the novel with this selection. "She was nine
years old. I loved her and she died. And yet right here, in the spell of memory and
imagination, I can see her as if through ice, as if I'm gazing into some other world, a
place where there are no brain tumors and no funeral homes, where there are no bodies at
all. I can see Kiowa, too, and Ted Lavender and Curt Lemon, and sometimes I can even see
Timmy skating with Linda under the yellow floodlights. I'm young and happy. I'll never
die. 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 some thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with
a story" (273).
O'Brien is saving the Timmy in all of us. His writing is saving more of them all
the time. Many veterans that hear him speak feel a sense of healing that has been a long,
long time in coming. He has been called the "voice of his generation" and
rightly so. The love that his characters need is the same love that the author needs. He
has a clear need to please his audiences. He gives great drama to his reading and
thoughtful reaction to those who ask questions after his readings.
After the reading from The Things They Carried, he was asked by a member of the
audience if death and pain were all he wrote about. He had just read a selection that
dealt with love and loss, but rather than debate that with the questioner he choose to
mollify him. He answered that the subjects do represent a basic element in life. The
elements we must all ponder. He also choose to read a selection from his current work in
progress. This was an effort to please his audience, an extra, a push, a way to show the
other lighter side of Tim O'Brien.
He told an anecdote from "Faith", a short story published recently in The
New Yorker. It was a humorous story that had the very same audience laughing. It was a
story that deals with the meanings of words and how those words come to mean different
things to us because of events in our lives and how sometimes they take on subconscious
meanings that will be with us for the rest of our lives. The altered meanings can create
more new realities for the reader because, we adapt as we grow and language is just one
measure of that adaptation. All of those present will now have a new meaning for words
like; "Pontiac," "cornfield," and "Indian head."
Saturday morning the super author was at the Davenport Public Library to speak to a
group that was gathered to hear about the role of fiction in story telling. He was
becoming hoarse from all of his presentations, but he was game and willing to entertain
and enlighten the people that were there. He spoke about the use of the war in his writing
and how the stories were just that stories. He spoke about the role of story telling in
our lives and the value of it in our culture. He spoke about how history gives facts that
after time may become doubtful or at least revised view. Stories get to your heart and to
your lungs, and liver, and pancreas. Stories are about people and how they feel. If
stories work they give the reader or the listener these feelings. His stories again did
that.
After he spoke, people stayed to ask for his autograph and to speak to him and he
again obliged. The afternoon session at the Quad City Art Center in the District in
downtown Rock Island found Tim O'Brien in his element. He was amongst writers. In a room
with twenty-five members of a local writer's group O'Brien seems to gather strength after
a vigorous three days as he spoke of his writing and his dedication to writing and to
story telling. He spoke to them about how his stories come from images and how they grow.
He helped to lead the group through some of the writing exercises that he employs while he
is working at his craft. He gave them two writing exercises and responded to the reading
of the exercises written by the participants in the workshop.
He is now Tim O'Brien, the teacher. He is again magical, because he is good at
teaching too! He works with the group for ninety minutes and spends time at the end
signing books and speaking again to those that approach him. He gives much of himself in
this session. He has given much of himself throughout the three days.
The last event that Tim is scheduled for is the dinner at the Moline Club that is
catered by Le Mekong, a Vietnamese restaurant in downtown Moline, Illinois. Tim reads from
The Things They Carried. Again he holds the audience spell bound. He has a special
audience at this engagement. An audience that has come all the way from Iowa City.
Asian-American Students from the University of Iowa have traveled to hear Tim O'Brien
speak and they work as wait staff in order to hear him.
When the people again gather to ask for autographs and to speak with him there are
a few faces that have had a long ride and will have a long ride back that are waiting to
speak with him also. The magic that O'Brien has worked in the Quad Cities has lasted until
the end.
Tim O'Brien writes about pain, love, and growth. For three days he shared those
topics and those emotions with a very fortunate mixture of Quad City teenagers, college
students, parents, teachers, professors, retired people, Vietnam veterans, a local
writer's group, and even a contingent of college students that drove over from Iowa City
to hear him speak at the dinner session.
He says that there is not one Vietnam experience, but millions of them. He says
that every soldier experienced his or her Vietnam. He says further that Vietnam is a state
of mind. It is more than a place or a war. It represents to him the very nature of
humanity. It is where people are forced to make moral choices. We all have our Vietnam. It
is a place of pain, love, and growth. He has added some of his humanity to the local area
with his visit.
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Do you know someone in the service? |
My Vietnam Related Websites: Women in
Vietnam ~ Read about ALL the women who served . . . Dusty's Home
Page ~ Poetry and prose by a woman who was a nurse in Vietnam The
Irish on the Wall ~ An effort to locate the Irish who died in Vietnam Tim
O'Brien's Home Page ~ National Book Award Winner and Americal Vet Emily's Poetry
~ By a Red Cross Donut Dolly Shrapnel in
the Heart ~ The most moving book you will read on Vietnam All About
Vietnam ~ An annotated bibliography of books about Vietnam for
sale thru Amazon Worldwide! Battle
Dressing ~ The Journey of a Nurse in Vietnam Project Hearts
and Minds ~ Help put Viet Nam back together Photos
from a Holts' Military History Tour ~ My trip to Vietnam, February 1998 |
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My Other Websites:  Maybe
Later . . . ~ My Creative NonfictionIrish
in Korea ~ Irish men and women who gave their lives in the Korean War Literature
of the Korean War ~ Don't let the literature be forgotten Samuel
Pepys ~ One of my favorite authors Chicago
Theatre Z - A ~ This is the best theater town in the country! Soccer
Literature ~ I'm a fan and I read O'Leary Lantern
~ Fire! Fire! Fire! Gil
Thorp ~ THE Coach (apologies to The General!) Poetry
of the First World War ~ Owen, Hardy and others Chi-COW-go
~ Cowz plus Commentary (this used to be a cow town) Graham
Fulton, Scottish Poet ~ Charles Manson Auditions for the Monkees |
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Other Important Websites:  The
Truth About Caroline ~ a really good Young Adult book by
my niece, Stacey M. Lane Grosh Remember
Oklahoma City ~
The Civil Service and Military will
NEVER forget! Milton
L. Olive III ~ Posthumous Medal of Honor Recipient |
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