Tim O’Brien : Writing Through War and
Trauma
Tim O’Brien has real life experiences as a
soldier in Vietnam War. The trauma behind his
stories in ‘The things they carried’ stems from
his personal history of loss of his loved ones. He
himself carried the weight of being the survivor
in the war. He deals with the moral confusion
and guilt of spreading violence and survival
when others did not. Just to process the bitter
experiences of the war, he uses his storytelling
to blur the lines between truth and fiction. His
stories explore the lasting effects of war on
human psyche after witnessing the loss of close
friends. This research paper shows how Tim
O’Brien gets motivated to write his own war
experiences after an emotional survival from
Vietnam War. His stories reveal the truths
about the soldiers that are often kept hidden.
1. Tim O’Brien explains that the art of
storytelling from the beginning helped him to
shape up his identity even before he went to
Vietnam War. As a child he was very
imaginative, this quality helped him writing
Vietnam war. He admits, “ Yes, it was probably
the first glimmering of a possibility for my life
as a writer.” (Herzog 90). The art took him out
of the horrors of war. He could thus bear those
traumatic memories of the war and freshape
them in a fiction. He also said that the Vietnam
War shattered him emotionally and his
storytelling helped to rebuild it.
2. The emotional trauma of war was
represented by the loss of a loved one that left
O’Brien emotionally shattered. His close friend
Merricks died during the Vietnam War. O’Brien
admits, “ I came homedisconnected andnot
knowing what I would do concerning what I’d
been through, but knowing I’d do something
with it to try to make something good out of
this horror called Vietnam. (Herzog 106). This
was reflected by the characters like Rat Kiley
who tried to cope up with Curt Lemon’s death.
Through Rat Kiley’s character O’Brien tried to
relive the moment of grief of his own friend’s
death. In his story ‘The Things They carried’
O’Brien explained that nobody understands the
feeling of a survivor of the war. He just tried
fiction as a mean to preserve the moments of
grief that he experienced during the war. It left
him with so many unresolved moments of grief
and he tried to communicate them through his
fictional writings.
3. Tim O’Brien reflects the difficulty of making
sense of the war and its aftermath. This was
one of the earliest sources of Tim O’Brien’s
trauma. He confesses’ “ There was a kind of
gravity- fear of exile,of hurting my family, of
losing everything I held to be valuable in my
life. (Smith 8). He did not support the war of
which he was forced to be a part. Because of
the family pressure, he fled to Canada in 1968.
He wrote about his experiences of moral
confusion and also shared how he lacked
courage to run from the field. The dilemma of
morality as a soldier and the pressure from his
hometown became the theme of this fiction.
O’Brien also shared that he did not survive as a
hero but he survived the journey of war with
ethical shame and moral confusion.
4. Tim O’Brien realizes that it is difficult to judge
between good or bad. War distorts morality of
a person. Many ethical questions come to your
mind. He says, “ I learned to love acts of virtue,
because I realized in part how difficult it is to
do, to be brave in a moral sense and in a
physical sense.” (Herzog 107). Herzog also says
that Obrien’s stories are not about the winning
or losing always. It is about being a human in
any way. His fiction raises many moral
questions and ethical confusions to see beyond
the battlefield.
5. The emotional scars of the war never fade. In
1994, Tim O’Brien returned to the same place
where the war was fought. He described this
journey in ‘The Vietnam In Me’ and brought out
his emotions in many interviews. He came to
the same river where a character of his fiction
tried to wash away his guilt. This journey was a
step towards the healing from the traumatic
experiences of war. In If I die in a Combat
Zone , he writes “ I was a coward . I was a sick.”
(O’Brien 68). These words carry the weight of
guilt faced by a person and show the fear he
hides inside him.
6. Writing fiction, for O’Bruen, served as a tool
to cope with the traumatic experiences in
Vietnam. It gave him a way to survive out of the
tragedy he faced in battlefield. In an interview,
Tim O’Brien himself said, “We all stub our toes,
we all have people who don’t love us enough.
There are all kinds of suffering: life is a bunch of
suffering.” (Smith 72). This quote shows that
O’Brien suffered his pain through his writings.
He could now think his pain makes sense which
otherwise wouldn’t have made any sense at all.
For him, fiction wasn’t an escape from fear and
pain but a survival from pain and fear.
Conclusion :
To conclude, we can say that Tim O’Brien
explained his war experiences through his
fictional writings. Through different characters
of his stories he reflected his own decisions of
going to the war, losing close friends, fleeing to
Canada, social pressure, unresolved moral
confusions and mis-communicated emotions.
His fiction helped him to cope up with the
traumatic experiences of war , to preserve the
memories of war, to confront his guilt and to
explore the complexity of truth during the
wartime. The readers thus have a taste of the
truths about the war that it is not only about
the guns and battles but it reveals the burden
that a soldier carries on his shoulders.