‘Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong’ by Tim O’Brien

The title story of O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is heavily anthologised and studied and pored over but, for me, this is the collection’s standout tale. A young medic in Vietnam, Mark Fossie, smuggles his all-American sweetheart Mary Anne into his jungle camp. All is oddly frolicsome and gambolling, there is a wedding proposal, Mary Anne learns to cook and dress wounds and then things go tar-black dark. Haunting and unforgettable. ‘Build Your Own Gook’. My skin still crawls.

Published in The Things They Carried, Flamingo, 1991

‘In The Field’ by Tim O’Brien

Leaving Lauren and her friends partying in a field behind a pub in southwest England, we move to a very different field, in the Vietnam War, where the mud is even worse than that endured by Chekhov’s soldiers in ‘Dreams’.

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is my favourite linked story collection, and one of the most effective of all fictions I know at conveying the experience of war.

The protagonist of ‘In The Field’ is an entire platoon, up to their thighs in excrement, in continuous heavy rain, searching for the body of one of their number, Kiowa.

“He was under the mud and water, folded in with the war, and their only thought was to find him and dig him out and then move on to someplace dry and warm.”

Their reluctant First Lieutenant, Jimmy Cross, is mentally composing, editing, and rewriting a sanitising letter to Kiowa’s father. He has been ordered to think of the men under his command as “interchangeable units of command”, but prefers to see them as human, which makes this more painful.

As is pointed out by one of the soldiers, the “shit field” is a metaphor for the war they are all moving through, or trapped in, like Kiowa, or floating on top of, like Cross does at the end, contrasting his stinking present to memories of a golf course.

“But they also felt a kind of giddiness, a secret joy, because they were alive, and because even the rain was preferable to being sucked under a shit field, and because it was all a matter of luck and happenstance.”

First published in Gentleman’s Quarterly, 1989. Collected in The Things They Carried, Penguin Books, 1991

‘The Things They Carried’ by Tim O’Brien

Taken as a pair, this collection of shorts and O’Brien’s raw-as-fuck memoir If I Die In A Combat Zone (1973) are some of the best and most important literature about war ever written for me. These stories are meta-fictional to the nth degree; he says they are fictional and yet dedicates the book to some of the characters in them, for example. The title story is a masterpiece, much of which is given over to listing the equipment that the grunts had to lug around Vietnam with them, almost always specifying how much each item weighs. Added to the catalogue of equipment is a list of metaphysical baggage: “He carried a strobe light and the responsibility for the lives of his men.” A list of weapons blends the physical and the metaphysical, ending with “They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.” Death is ever-present and happens suddenly, without fanfare.

….just boom, then down – not like in the movies where the dead guys rolls around and does fancy spins and goes ass over teakettle – not like that, Kiowa said, the poor bastard just flat-fuck fell. Boom. Down. Nothing else.

It’s nothing more than a simple fact of life, brushed aside with the cynicism and black humour that the men use to keep themselves sane. If you’ve never read him before I’d urge you to seek this out – he’s a phenomenally gifted writer and you can only marvel at the fortitude of the man to endure what he did and be able to write about it so well in the aftermath. His surreal, National Book Award-winning Vietnam novel Going After Cacciato is well worth tracking down too. An honourable mention is due here to Bosnian writer Faruk Šehić. I’d have loved to include something from his brilliant collection about the Balkan wars of the 90s, Under Pressure, but I figured one war story would be enough, and it had to be this one.

In The Things They Carried, Houghton Mifflin, 1990

‘On The Rainy River’ by Tim O’Brien

The Things They Carried is both true and entirely fictional. After being conscripted to fight in the Vietnam War, ‘On The Rainy River’ tells the imagined story of the twenty-one-year-old O’Brien fleeing to the Canadian border and staying at a dilapidated lodge for six days where he agonises over whether or not he should avoid the draft by crossing the Rainy River which separates Minnesota from Canada. His host is the owner of the lodge, an old man named Elroy Berdahl, who while understanding the narrator’s predicament remains steadfastly silent on the matter, making no attempt to sway his decision either way. O’Brien writes about Elroy and the narrator’s dilemma: “…, the man understood that words were insufficient. The problem had gone beyond discussion.” I won’t go as far as to reveal what he finally decides to do—though you might guess—but what I will say is that O’Brien’s account of the inner turmoil experienced by the narrator as he finally arrives at his decision is among the most authentic and gut-wrenching writing I have ever read. Indeed, I would count The Things They Carried as not only the best war literature I’ve encountered, but also place it high among the finest works of literature created by any author.

First published in Playboy, January 1990. Collected in The Things They Carried, Collins 1990

‘What Went Wrong?’ by Tim O’Brien

This story, which I first read in O. Henry Prize Stories 2003, edited by Laura Furman, later became a chapter in O’Brien’s uneven late novel July, July. It is among the most elegant very short stories I’ve ever read. It concerns a group of friends and their preoccupation with a couple among them who married, divorced, and then continued to love each other forever. It is a story in part about the impossibility of knowing the people who come in and out of our lives, and the wonder and mystery that attaches to trying.

First published in Esquire, 2002. Collected in July, July, Houghton Mifflin, 2002/Flamingo, 2003

‘Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong’ by Tim O’Brien

In her ‘white culottes and sexy pink sweater’, seventeen-year-old blonde Mary Anne is smuggled into Vietnam by her medic boyfriend Mark Fossie. They spend weeks sleeping and sunbathing together while the other GIs stationed there go green with envy. But Mary Anne is curious. She visits the local village and asks about weapons and the war. She learns to disassemble an M-16. She cuts her fingernails and her hair, wrapping it in a dark green bandana. She starts fraternising with the squad of six Green Berets also stationed there. Mark gets nervous and suggests it’s time for her to return to Cleveland, but she refuses and, after a showdown, Mary Anne disappears the next morning with the Green Berets. It’s three weeks before she returns and Mark knows by the dead look in her eyes that she is lost to the jungle. In the end, Mary Anne goes out on nighttime raids that even the Green Berets balk at. Eventually, she never comes back at all, but some swear they have seen her ‘sliding through the shadows … wearing a necklace of human tongues. She was dangerous. She was ready for the kill.’

In The Things They Carried, Broadway Books, 1990