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.”
