Quote of the Day (Tim O’Brien, on the Vietnam War and Remembrance)

“[T]he [Vietnam] war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”— American novelist Tim O’Brien, “Spin,” in The Things They Carried (1990)

Fifty years ago today, within 24 hours of a massive airlift operation evacuating 6,500 people, including nearly 900 Americans, Saigon fell to the Communist forces that had already overtaken the rest of Vietnam. The governmental seizure concluded a conflict that had preoccupied the United States, the USSR, and Red China for more than a generation in the Cold War.

Estimates of the number of Vietnamese who died in the war vary widely, with one official 1995 count putting the total as high as 3 million. Unfortunately, their stories are largely unknown half a world way here in the United States.

Naturally, the focus in our country has been on the more than 58,000 Americans who perished in Vietnam—names now inscribed on the wall in the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. But these are only part of the casualty rate of the conflict. They don’t reflect the wounded—physically or, in the case of Tim O’Brien, psychologically.

The Things They Carried was published 35 years ago this spring, a full generation after O’Brien’s service in Southeast Asia, and I was lucky enough to hear him read from and discuss the book in an appearance at Fairleigh Dickinson University at the time. But he needed to come to terms with his memories repeatedly through the act of storytelling: not just in this acclaimed group of interconnected semi-autobiographical short stories but also in a memoir (If I Die in a Combat Zone) and a novel (Going After Cacciato).

Even from reading The Things They Carried and hearing him speaking, I had no idea of the intensity of his memories—so painful that they required extensive and expensive use of the anti-anxiety prescription medication Oxazepam, I discovered in a 1994 essay he wrote for The New York Times about a return visit to Vietnam.

But O’Brien has survived to tell about the hell that he and his brothers in arms endured, their grief over fallen comrades, and the postwar adjustment in a nation with civilians who could never begin to understand what they had gone through.

Or, as O’Brien wrote in another short story in The Things They Carried, “How to Tell a True War Story”:

“In the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”