University of Calgary

PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository

Graduate Studies The Vault: Electronic Theses and Dissertations

2018-03-05

Carried in Common: Blame, Responsibility, and the

Body in Tim O'Brien's Vietnam War Novels

Brewer, Zachary

Brewer, Z. A. (2018). Carried in Common: Blame, Responsibility, and the Body in Tim O'Brien's

Vietnam War Novels (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB.

doi:10.11575/PRISM/20269

http://hdl.handle.net/1880/106429

master thesis

University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their

thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through

licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under

copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.

Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca

UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

Carried in Common: Blame, Responsibility, and the Body in Tim O’Brien’s

Vietnam War Novels

by

Zachary Brewer

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN ENGLISH

CALGARY, ALBERTA

MARCH, 2018

© Zachary Brewer 2018

ii

Abstract

Guilt and blame are two significant thematic concerns for Tim O’Brien in his Vietnam war

novels Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried. However, both novels depict

characters who interact with a vibrant world of ambient things which have a remarkable ability

to effect change and influence the actions of the humans who nominally control them. Under the

theoretical rubric of Object-Oriented Ontology (including the scholarship of Graham Harman,

Bill Brown, Jane Bennett, and Karen Barad), this project challenges the uniqueness of human

agency in the world while also considering the dubiousness of assigning singular blame and

responsibility to human agents acting within a network of causal actors. While the majority of

readings of O’Brien take a post-colonial position or investigate the author’s construction of truth

through metafictional literary practices, this approach takes a broader view of O’Brien’s literary

world, and the place of the human agent within it.

iii

Acknowledgements

I have been beyond fortunate to have had so many talented, inspiring, patient, and, above all,

generous individuals assist with this project in ways both direct and indirect, great and small.

Rather than commit the blunder of oversight, I shall say simply that you know who you are.

Although the words do not seem like enough, to you I offer my most sincere and humble thanks.

iv

Table of Contents

Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iii

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION AND THEORY REVIEW ......................................1

CHAPTER TWO: OBJECTS IN CONFLICT: THE LIVES OF MILITARY AND NON-

MILITARY OBJECTS .............................................................................................23 i. Social Networks ..........................................................................................................25

ii. “Harlem Globetrotters Bring Their Travelling Show to Bic Kinh Mi”: Objects of

Leisure on the Field of Battle.................................................................................32 iii. To Pull the Pin: Grenades and the Matter of Metal ..................................................40

iv. Losing the Silver Star: Seeking and Speaking Courage ...........................................53

CHAPTER THREE: WASTED: THE HUMAN BODY AS OBJECT.............................61

i. Who is the Man I Killed? ............................................................................................67 ii. Body Parts: The Allure of Disfigurement and Captivating Fragments .....................73 iii. Humping the Boonies: “The Way it Mostly Was” and Questions of Free Will .......86

iv. Everyone and No One: Locating Blame for the Damaged Body .............................92

CHAPTER FOUR: THE LAND IS YOUR ENEMY......................................................100

i. Folded in With the War ............................................................................................106 ii. Carrying the Land and the Sky ................................................................................115

iii. Being Borne: The View from the Freedom Bird ....................................................127

REFERENCES ................................................................................................................131

1

Chapter One: Introduction and Theory Review

In an interview which became part of Tobey Herzog’s 2008 book Writing Vietnam,

Writing Life, Tim O’Brien states unequivocally that his own participation in the Vietnam war

came as a result of guilt and cowardice, the refusal to reject the many pressures of the domestic,

ideological, and political milieu that characterise the Midwestern, baby-boom United States

(Writing Vietnam 112): “I didn’t want to feel embarrassed in front of not just the town but maybe

Minnesota as a whole or maybe beyond that the whole country” (Writing Vietnam 97-98).

Although O’Brien has faced significant criticism for his focus on the hardships which American

servicemen, rather than Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, suffer during the war, his work

regularly drifts into strong critique of the civic authorities which create and escalate the

American military effort in Vietnam. He remains firm in his commitment to his own culpability

in complying with the draft notice for a war lacking, in his words, “just cause” and overflowing

with “myriad ambiguities” (Writing Vietnam 98). O’Brien is not alone in his misgivings, nor

have the questions of just cause and myriad ambiguities – moral, political, and strategic, to name

but a few – been adequately resolved even now in the midst of the Vietnam war’s semi-

centennial. Indeed, the same questions of America’s interventionist foreign policy, the

paradigmatic alignment of nation-states into “friendly” and “enemy” categories, and the nation’s

unapologetically self-interested approach to global affairs continue to be of interest decades later,

even if the nationality, ethnicity, and political orientation of the adversaries have shifted in that

time.

Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried ultimately explore the ideas of

causality and culpability in the context of war, but also within the unusual social arrangements

which war creates between individuals. Investigating how and why things happen, the novels

2

resist the easy censure of “the government” or “politics” or “good economics” and construct a

network of responsible entities ranging from President Lyndon Johnson to a forgetful Nebraskan

who doesn’t cast a vote; indirect fire from unseen enemies hidden within a hostile landscape;

bullets, rifles, grenades, helicopters, a basketball, pebbles, dust, absent medals, bacteria,

unanswered letters, imagined possibilities, and war stories which all contribute to the

development of the ever-changing and mercurial being that is the Vietnam war: these are, in

short, some of the things that make things happen. Contemplating the “how” and “why” of

things happening is not without a certain resonance given the apparent swerve of global politics

in the 21st century, a time in which it is incredibly easy to be skeptical of the supposedly innate

and unassailable value of human reason, and also easy to feel particularly disempowered and

overwhelmed by a near-monotonous global symphony whose only notes seem to be austerity,

xenophobia, and isolationism, with the shadow of Cold War-era nuclear holocaust replaced with

the current looming crisis of human-caused climate change. Thinking through the way things

happen demands a questioning of the literal nature of things qua things: in other words, what are

things, what is it about things that makes them do what they do, and how does revising notions of

the being of things allow for a more inclusive understanding of how things make and affect

change in the world? Heideggerean questions about the “being” of things, which contemplate

how things “thing” (and which both Heidegger himself and, more recently, Graham Harman

posit), suggest that the material and conceptual objects that populate the universe, far from

existing exclusively as human instruments for change, are in fact only minimally responsive to

human intentionality, and that the relationship to humans is but one among an object’s multitude

of relations. Thus, “human consciousness turns out to be a thin layer of awareness atop a

massive assemblage of things unconsciously taken for granted,” and using the rational human

3

subject – whose myriad limitations match its myriad capabilities – as the measure of all things,

and rationality itself as a justification for manifestly harmful actions, ignores the values which

exist in entities other than Homo sapiens (Harman 190). The aim of this study is to frame some

preliminary inquiries into how shifting the focus away from the human subject as a unique and

especially powerful agent and toward other, non-human actors may provide a means of

investigating Tim O’Brien’s complex attitudes towards personal blame and responsibility in an

event as large as the Vietnam war, and also how O’Brien’s treatment of various non-human

actors in the conflict might influence future thinking about these entities in and of themselves.

While there is an abundance of theoretical work on “thingness,” the individual critical

and philosophical works tend to gravitate toward two poles, either contemplating the notional

and physical existence of things, or the ways in which things perform their “thingness” in the

world, and the implications this performance has for rethinking human ethical and cultural

systems. Expanding perceptions of the metaphysical nature of things allow for a greater

appreciation of how things exist and how they affect the development of the world, indicating

that human agency is not the sole means of physical change with philosophical importance, and

also challenging interpretations of moral and ethical responsibility which hold the human subject

as a unique causal agent singularly accountable for the world’s state of being. The breadth of

scholarship concerned with the relationship between human and non-human entities beginning in

the Classical period and continuing into modernity indicates a persistent fascination with the

things which humans encounter (and of which humans are composed), and it is of the greatest

intellectual value to consider both avenues of investigation into the “lives” of things.

Admittedly, the bifurcation between works which consider the conceptual existence of things

and those which consider their practical and ethical dimensions is somewhat artificial, but it

4

makes the process of understanding the importance of things more manageable. The larger

question of the importance of non-human things to the human worlds of ethics and responsibility

becomes a composite of investigating how things exist and behave in and of themselves, and

then how this “behaviour” affects the conceptions not only of the uniqueness but also the relative

strength of the human ability to make change in the world. The development of thought around

“thingness” outlined below does not represent a chronology but rather a broad progression,

through Lucretius to Jane Bennet to Karen Barad, from the least to the most radical conceptions

of the causal power of things; and through Martin Heidegger through Graham Harman to Bill

Brown, from the abstract metaphysical nature of things to their philosophical and notional

significance as human counterparts in the world and, finally, to their operation in the symbolic

realm of literature. All of these scholars have a role to play in the object-oriented analysis of

Tim O’Brien’s work, an analysis which will endeavour to explore the nature of human

responsibility in relation to the physical and metaphysical world of things.

It is perhaps a temporal quirk that investigating and redefining human ideological and

epistemological constructs through a theorising of non-human entities falls essentially within the

purview of contemporary posthumanism since the Roman poet Lucretius, finding the basis for

his work On the Nature of Things in the classical philosophy of Epicurus, envisions a shockingly

modern world which is centered on neither God nor man. Frank O. Copley explains this

particular branch of Epicureanism as considering “all being as material being,” an idea which

itself follows from the theory of Democritus that everything is “an aggregate or a combination of

atoms” (x, xi). Epicurus departs from Democritus in his description of the movement of atoms,

which the latter sees as stuck on predictable tracks, by suggesting that atoms “swerve” into new

combinations with other atoms “without the intervention of any outside force or guiding

5

intelligence” (Copley xii). According to Copley, Epicurus considers this “swerve” to be the

basis of free will, an inherent capacity in the most basic units of matter to depart from systematic

and purely predictable behaviour. Lucretius adds to the power of atoms the notion that, in

addition to the human body, the soul, thought, dreams, and visions are all “atomic” as well,

meaning that these entities have an existence just as material as the body (Copley xvii-xviii).

While modern science will debunk the notion of the materiality of thought and feeling, the idea

of all entities being materially alike has significant implications for the consideration of ethical

and moral value outside the squared circle of Vitruvian Man: if all entities are made of the same

matter, why is the discourse of “mattering” limited to only a few material assemblies, and even

then differentially applied to certain sub-groups within those assemblies?

Jane Bennett’s influential 2010 book Vibrant Matter takes up these same issues of which

elements combine to make things, what makes things happen, and how the consideration of

things as entities that have an existence discrete from “the contexts in which (human) subjects set

them” can affect and influence anthropocentric notions of ethics and morality (5). Bennett’s

philosophy is based on two particular concepts, the first of which is the efficient but “curious

ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” which she

calls Thing Power (6). The notion of an inanimate/animate thing may seem confusing, but she

explains this concept with the particularly effective example of the Gunpowder Residue Sampler,

a chemical which indicates whether a suspect in a shooting has been in the vicinity of a

discharging firearm and is thus able to “testify” for or against a suspect and become “vital to [a]

verdict” (8-9). Supplementary to Thing Power is the broader, ethical concept of Vital

Materialism, which seeks to subvert the “intrinsically hierarchical order of things” that

traditionally places the human subject at its zenith, and proposes a broader and more distributive

6

system of moral value rooted in the consideration of the human body not as a single entity but as

an assembly of minerals, chemicals, electronic impulses, and colonies of bacterial life that

combine to produce effects (12, 13, emphasis in original). While this mode of thinking might

appear misanthropic as it proposes that human bodies are systems of objects not unlike any other

animal, machine, or structure, Bennett not only points out that moral philosophies which

consider the human as having the highest value “[do] not have a stellar record of success in

preventing human suffering or promoting human well-being,” but also suggests that rethinking

the ontology of the human fosters a sense of commonality between humans of all kinds while

simultaneously militating against the predilection to relegate ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic

others, as well as non-human animals and entities in the natural world, to a secondary order of

existence, and also to instrumentalise these differences (12).

Bennett’s ontological redefinition of humanity and, thus, human agency, has significant

implications for notions of causality, which becomes “more emergent than efficient, more fractal

than linear,” meaning that a (traditionally human) agent attempting to create material effects in

the world is not immanently and singularly able to do so, but in fact depends upon – and may

even be at the mercy of – the agential capacity of other entities present in the network of

relations that surrounds any event (33). Bennett contends that “autonomy and strong

responsibility seem … empirically false” in networks of distributed agency, and further argues

that rethinking the singular nature of the human agent “broadens the range of places to look for

sources” of responsibility (37). Going on to question the ethics of singular agency, Bennett’s

Vital Materialism seems on the one hand to be a means of diverting or lessening blame for

unfortunate or harmful events, but, on the other, intensifying it by locating guilt in additional

parties. Bennett further enlarges the notion of liability to include “one’s response to the

7

assemblages in which one finds oneself participating” in order to accentuate the blameworthiness

of agents involved in networks that produce harm, even if the agents themselves do not produce

it directly (37). It is very interesting to note that Bennett’s model of distributed and broadly-

dispersed blame is exactly the system of culpability which Tim O’Brien develops in Going After

Cacciato and expands to full effect in The Things They Carried, in that both works depart from a

predictable model of the unwilling conscript opposing the forces of a hawkish government (or

the patriotic soldier opposing the dovish philosophies of the same government) in order to

question the origins of hawkish martial philosophies, and how responsibility for wartime

atrocities goes far beyond the finger that pulls the trigger.

Bennett’s musings on the nature of metal are of particular interest to the study of war

literature since metal is very often the actant (i.e. the entity or assembly which has some capacity

to effect change without possessing intentionality per se) which is employed to do the dirty work

of the war’s nominal agents, and metal things are constructed specifically for the purposes of

destruction. The strangely “suicidal” natures of things like bullets, grenades, and land mines is

often hidden beneath the visible and material manifestations of their effectiveness, what Bennett

calls the human “need to interpret the world reductively as a series of fixed objects,” since the

means by which these things enact their own internal systems of causality and being typically

occur beyond “the threshold of human discernment” (58). For example, the changes that occur

in metal during its destruction – say, during the explosion and fragmentation of a grenade – have

as much to do with the crystalline structure of the metal at the atomic level as they do with the

human act of actuating the fuse. In other words, rather than punctuating a long string of

causally-linked events, the metallic structure of the grenade as it self-destructs adds another,

emergent dimension to the network of political and material things that have combined to

8

produce a temporally-specific event. Thus, the events which come to be as the nominal result of

the agential capacities of human organisation are not entirely “under the control of any rational

plan or deliberate intention” since the quality of happening is not purely responsive to, nor

entirely predicated upon, the presence and the actions of human beings (100). While things like

a grenade are both a conception and a product of humans, the degree to which human agents

control their ultimate effects is somewhat limited (particularly in the case of, for example,

unexploded ordinance which threatens or harms civilians decades after it was deployed). Vital

Materialism – rightly – stops short of delegating full and equal autonomy to things, and instead

creates a degree of vagueness surrounding action and the ethical responsibility for the effects of

that action. This ambivalence has particular relevance in O’Brien’s literary worlds, where blame

and responsibility, located generally with “America,” never comes to rest on any particular

individual or party. Singling out certain elements within a larger assemblage, Bennett contends,

would in fact be “tinged with injustice” (37).

Karen Barad attempts to transcend or, at least, broach the problem of injustice by

grounding her theory of agency in the presumably objective science of physics. Barad’s thinking

serves as an interesting companion to Bennett’s considerations of the ethical implications of

agentic capacity distributed among systems of humans, non-humans, and objects. Barad’s

Agential Realism is a model for the functioning of agency that rejects the anthropocentric

privileging of human capacity for action and intention through its suggestion that the ability to

effect change is not solidly located in varying degrees in certain entities, but is itself an emergent

quantity which emanates from the “intra-actions” of things in space and time. Phenomena are

indeed “not the consequence of human will and intentionality or the effects of the operations of

Culture, Language, or Power. … [Humans] themselves are part of the ongoing reconfiguring of

9

the world,” meaning that agency, and particularly the transcendent, rational human agency which

is central to humanist thought, is a “matter of intra-acting,” which is to say that it is not pre-

existing but actually a product of the encounter of material bodies in space and time (171, 178,

emphasis in original). Moreover, the construction of agency through intra-action, rather than the

manipulation of interaction via durable poles of agency, creates a kind of unpredictability or

uncertainty in which “the future is radically open at every turn” since possibility itself is re-made

as the relationships between bodies constantly refigure the material world (178). The idea that

agency is something which is always emerging rather than always (and rigidly) extant leads very

significantly to a complete reconsideration of how things happen. In the same way that

Newtonian calculus expands a mathematical expression of a rate of change by describing the rate

of change of change, Barad’s Agential Realism describes agency not merely as an efficient force

but as a force which “[changes the] possibilities of change,” meaning that the seemingly

inevitable trajectories of things are not as iron-clad as they seem (178, 181). This may explain,

at least partially, why the human relationship to the natural world, a world of which humanity is

a part, presents an inexhaustible challenge since the constant manipulation of variables through

technological power and mechanical ingenuity does not create a predictable order but is instead

ceaselessly generative of new variables with which to contend.

Barad extends these notions to include a rethinking of ethics, since, like agency, ethics

are uprooted from their previously firm location and become differentially constituted with every

intra-action of material bodies. She suggests that “changing possibilities entail an ethical

obligation to intra-act responsibly … [and] to contest and rework what matters, and what is

excluded from mattering” as the systems of causality and value break down (178). Barad is

perhaps somewhat unclear in her explanation of what these new ethics might look like in

10

practice, but she does suggest that the distinctions between self and other must collapse if intra-

actions within phenomena are constantly redefining or re-producing the bodies which engage in

them (178). Barad’s conception of the constant “re-making” of the present moment has

interesting implications for convention and precedent (particularly in terms of criminal justice) in

that the really-existing events in the present moment to which principles are applied are always

changing. This constant, dynamic change challenges the moral currency of past intellectual

paradigms and decisions which are based on different conditions, conditions whose relevance

becomes questionable as, to an increasing degree, they become temporally and philosophically

remote. Moreover, this theoretical approach resonates with O’Brien’s method of repetitive

storytelling, where the re-telling of the same story does not reinforce one particular moral

construction or narrative of blame, but generates new ones as the iterative mode of narration

actually resists reaching consistent conclusions. Barad’s Agential Realism, in its construction of

the world as having no location – be it spatial, temporal, or subjective and agential – which is

insulated from its own constant becoming, intensifies the broadening of blame and accountability

for actions which Jane Bennett suggests since there does not seem to be any place, or any thing,

which is not contributing to an emerging state of affairs, meaning that notions of blame may

regress infinitely. Furthermore, the physical boundaries between bodies that are seen as defining

self and other, subject and object, are, in the words of Richard Feynman, “only in our own

psychological makeup” and exist solely as a result of the limited capacities of human sight (qtd.

in Barad 156). If the hard edge between bodies does not exist at the microscopic level, then

bodies in physical contact become extensions of one another in temporary assemblies of agential

power. Entities in contact with one another always enact a prosthetic function in that they enable

or expand one another’s capabilities, thus it is worthwhile investigating these relations and the

11

capabilities they produce if human entities have ethical obligations to approach the world in the

least harmful manner (Barad 158).

“[P]ressing ethical and political concerns … accompany the scientific and technological

advances predicated on new scientific models of matter” suggest Diana Coole and Samantha

Frost in their introduction to New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, and it would

seem that such concerns should accompany the psychological and philosophical models of

material being which also challenge the “presumptions about agency and causation implicit in

prevailing paradigms [that] have structured our modern sense … of the ethical and the political

as such” (5,6). This statement encapsulates the general questioning of the operations of power

and morality in relations between bodies which both Vital Materialism and Agential Realism

seek to destabilise. As these ideas interrogate systems of human value and order, along with the

models of accountability and entitlement which such organisations engender, rethinking

materiality also undoes narrow, anthropocentric constructions of value which have political as

well as ethical implications. Coole and Frost, referring to the network of Latourian actants that

participate in the happening of things and contribute to the making of things into what they are,

suggest that the “enormous macroscopic impact of myriad mundane individual actions provoke

critical, political, and legal reflection not only upon the nature of causation but also upon the

nature of the responsibilities that individuals and governments have” (16). While this is a

compelling question for individuals and communities in the world at large, such thinking is

surprisingly compatible with what appears to be one of Tim O’Brien’s central political projects

in both Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried, novels where the presumably self-

evident and self-authenticating rationality of resisting Communism, the protection of American

interests, and the ruthless logic of military organisation are all revealed to have questionable

12

moral and political grounding. Furthermore, uncertain moral and political justifications

problematize the bioethics of war and contemplate not only the ways in which (human) bodies

are instrumentalised and objectified in combat, but also what inherent “right” emotional,

psychological, intellectual, and political constructs (which are products of, or inhabit the mind)

have over the bio-matter of the body.

Set against these absorbing questions of the relational capacities of things, as well as the

ethical implications for rejecting a notion of causality with rigid agential locations (typically in

the human subject), are the more metaphysical questions of what constitutes the “being” of

things originating in Martin Heidegger’s deceptively simple question, “[what] is the thing in

itself” (167)? Both Bennett and Barad have suggested, in line with Heidegger, that the power of

things is obscured when a thing becomes an object, which is to say, set against the perceiving

human subject and “[represented] in our minds” as an object (Heidegger 167). Defining a thing

as “that which is at all and is something in some way or other,” Heidegger goes on to suggest

that the “thingness” of a thing actually pre-exists its physical manifestation, and that the form of

an object is instead a means of occupying space and time that is quite vulnerable to

objectification through the operation of the human perceptive faculty (173, 167, 170). Heidegger

provides a tantalising description of his well-known jug as being defined by its void since this is

the “part” of the jug, or the part around which the jug is constructed, only to pull the rug out from

under this suggestion as he explains that the jug’s void, which is the site of its material efficacy

(its “holding”), defines “jugness” only in terms of observational and scientific empiricism (169).

Rather, the “thingness” of a thing lies in the highly-abstract “fourfold” of earth and sky,

mortality and divinity (173). In order to avoid becoming too entangled in the implications of

Heidegger’s thought on the fourfold, it may suffice to suggest that the “thingness” of a thing is

13

always under production somewhere within these four corners of natural, material being and an

ineffable, transcendent being and that fixing a thing through the human perceptual faculties or

linguistic and intellectual representation denies its inherent powers and qualities.

It is not surprising that most contemplations of things, even if they do not acknowledge

Heidegger directly, ascribe to the dual idea that there is a conglomeration of fundamental

components and conditions at the heart of entities and that the human is not uniquely equipped to

apprehend or manipulate them. Graham Harman’s argument for object-oriented philosophy,

more popularly known as Object-Oriented Ontology, partially reprises the ethical-materialist

arguments of Bennett, Barad, and others, while also deepening the metaphysical, Heideggerean

investigation into how things exist in the world. Harman’s meditations in Guerilla Metaphysics

encompass several notions which other theorists posit individually, and begins from a slightly

different intellectual position. Noting that “[human] activity is object-oriented by its very

nature,” Harman declares that “[anything] … real can be regarded as an object,” a statement

which places the human not only as a party to the relationality of objects, but as an object itself

(237, 76). While both Bennett and Barad may agree that the human is both participant and

observer in the becoming of events, their conceptions of things are not as granular as Harman’s.

Bennett is interested in a pragmatic approach to dissecting the interactions of actants in a

network, and Barad sees an event as an instantaneous stop on the road to becoming which

generates new possibilities for that becoming, Harman considers a thing or an event as an entity

which always transcends its relations. If time could be stopped, and a thing could be “endlessly

explored from numberless perspectives,” it would never be “exhausted by the sum of these

perspectives” (Guerilla Metaphysics 76). In trying to explain the fundamental existence of

objects beyond their relational capacities, Harman suggests that objects do not encounter one

14

another per se in relations, but only present “elements” of themselves to one another, and that

these elements serve as the means of “interface between two completely separate objects,” thus

becoming the “glue of the world, the vicarious cause that holds reality together” (166, emphasis

in original).

Even though, in Harman’s metaphysics, a thing is not reducible to its relations, he is not

entirely willing to discount the importance of relationality. Heidegger, it seems, is too quick to

dismiss the void of the jug, the fundamental element of its material efficacy, as beneath the

attention of philosophy. Whether or not the void provides a meaningful articulation of the jug’s

“jugness,” the idea of the void, going as far back as Epicurean philosophy, is a fundamental

element of existence in the universe. Whether one considers the universe as an organisation of

matter and void, as Epicurus does, or contemplates the Thing Power of the void between atoms

as generating an emergent causality in an object, or an agential void in a phenomenal intra-action

generating possibility, the empty space within and between objects has a significant impact on

the production of reality. In particular, the void has a substantial capacity to influence

relationality since it is the medium in which relationality occurs. The removal of the void, for

instance, is what allows one thing to become a prosthetic for another (or two things to become

prosthetics for each other), and the organisation of things within the void makes space what it is:

without void, there would be nothing but undifferentiated matter. For Harman, the relations

between things are not without an ethical element: if “all entities … generate surfaces of qualities

that fuse together or signal messages,” then “some imperative speaks to us in every situation,

even if we choose to flout it,” meaning that there is no truth to the notion that “we meet a world

of raw sense data with arbitrary behavioural choices” (58, 63). Like Bennett and Barad,

Harman’s philosophy may suffer from a degree of vagueness in terms of these ethical

15

obligations. While Bennett seems to be concerned with mitigating harm, neither Barad nor

Harman clearly suggest how emergent agency, or the deep metaphysical being, of things should

guide the activities of sentient entities in their relationships. Perhaps the implication is that hard

morality and rigid ethics wither away with the rejection of the human subject as the centre from

which all other entities are evaluated, and as much as agency, significance, and causation are

constantly developing, moral and ethical obligations are also always conditional and in a

constant state of flux.

Harman suggests as much in his contention that “there is no privileged layer of tiny

parts that explains all else, and that physical efficient causation is only a special case of

metaphysical formal causation” (79). The physical reality of “things happening” is only a minor

part of the operation of the universe since the essential being of all objects only ever manifests

itself tangentially through the elements which engage in relations with other objects. Moreover,

Harman refigures Heidegger’s fourfold as a relationship between a thing’s substance and

relation, as well as its unity and its plurality of features (78). It is important that Harman does

not reject the importance of an object’s relational aspect to its overall being, but this visible and

effective dimension of an object’s existence is always in tension with its essential qualities,

qualities which always recede from view. At the same time, an object is always subject to the

internal tension of its existence as a unitary system and as a combination of smaller, self-

contained systems. The “thingness” of a thing is located in some uncertain position within these

four poles, and any relation with another object is not a meeting of “sheer pristine qualities” but

rather the meeting of two entities navigating the “strife between [their] unitary reality and [their]

specific notes” (174). This meeting of uncertainties accords well with the concepts of emergent

causality and distributed agency for which Bennett and Barad argue, and also sheds some light

16

on the quandary of ethics in an object-centred philosophy since the relations or networks of

relations which create events and the material presence of things are never a given and thus

always possibilities. This thought in particular fits very well with the notions of the Lucretian

“swerve,” Bennett’s Thing Power, and the emergent agency of Agential Realism, all of which

attempt to describe the elements of uncertainty that are the basis of the fundamental disorder

which causes chance occurrences.

Harman’s contention that human beings not only are objects (albeit complex and “quite

special” ones) but that they wish to be objects stands out as a provocative idea (84, 140),

particularly in terms of Marxist and feminist approaches to literature which are interested in

questions of instrumentalisation and objectification of the human body, actions which reduce

some bodies to a means of serving other bodies and certain privileged structures of power in

human society. Susan Jeffords’s 1989 study The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the

Vietnam War remains one of the more popular feminist engagements with literature and film

from the Vietnam era, although it does not engage with Tim O’Brien’s work directly.

Contending that artistic representations of the conflict are “only topically” about the conflict and

that the “true subject is the masculine response to changes in gender relations in … recent

decades,” Jeffords suggests that these representations are essentially conduits for oppressive

politics exemplified by the recuperative manliness of Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris in the

Rambo and Missing in Action film franchises (167). Ultimately, it is difficult to read Tim

O’Brien’s novels as advocating for the resurrection or preservation of a cultural heritage of

robust masculinity like the “John Wayne” frontier hero: rather, they are quite adamant in their

assertion that such a paradigm of masculinity is not only a complete fabrication, but also a

harmful cultural paradigm. However, Jeffords is quite correct in her claims about the insidious

17

uses of the Vietnam war narrative in certain media, and her argument has continuing relevance in

a political climate where reactionary, revisionist history and ultra-masculine, ultra-nationalistic

accounts of war such as American Sniper, along with notions of “Supporting the Troops,”

participate in the epistemological simplification of concepts like heroism, nobility, and sacrifice

while skirting the more difficult political and ethical questioning of the events which necessitate

such activities. In addition, her observation that women, if not omitted entirely from Vietnam

narratives, play only subordinate roles in the story is not only fair in terms of Going After

Cacciato and The Things They Carried, but patently obvious. Jeffords expresses some concern

over this gender monoculture, suggesting that male characters participate in a narrative of

victimization which is not only disempowering for those who benefit from progressive politics,

but in fact works to retrench the advances that progressive social thinking has achieved (84).

Jeffords suggests that the victimised male body is one of the most insidious constructs in

Vietnam representation, a politically retrograde entity which creates sympathy for the socially-

powerful and “becomes a rallying point for the reconstitution of masculinity in opposition to

civil rights, women’s rights, and class mobility” (116). While the link between these

observations and O’Brien’s works – works that are highly sceptical of vigorous machismo –

remains indistinct, one must remain attentive to the possible limitations of rejecting the central

importance of human agency to moral systems, particularly in terms of ethnic or political

minorities who have long struggled to achieve agential parity with the (typically) white, male

protagonist occupying a favoured speaking position in both art and culture. In other words,

while it is the intent of philosophies which are either object-oriented or which advocate for

distributed agency to minimise the importance of human agency to the events which transpire in

the world, it is important not to lose sight of the disparities of power, opportunity, and moral

18

value which exist between various subject positions within the human population. Further,

considering a wider distribution of agency in the world, though nominally undercutting the

power of the human subject, may foster an interrogation of why such subjective disparities still

exist.

Not much critical attention has been directed to Jeffords’s musings on the use of

technology and its effects in these narratives, a relationship between humans and objects which

is a source not only of diminished human importance, but also an undoing of the anthropocentric

discourse that assumes the technology to be the instrument of the human, and not the other way

around. Jeffords presages Bruno Latour’s argument in his 2002 essay “Morality and

Technology” that thinking of technology only as a means to an end both misunderstands the

functioning of technology as well as its essence as an object not entirely “amenable to [human]

mastery” (251): “If we fail to recognise how much the use of a technique, however simple, has

displaced, translated, modified, or inflected the initial intention, it is simply because we have

changed the end in changing the means” (Latour 252, emphasis in original). Jeffords sees the

use of technical objects in Vietnam narratives as skewing the focus away from nominal political

or military goals and emphasising the “efficacy of performance rather than … the quality or

character of results,” a habitual activity which makes these goals “less and less articulable” (5,

7). Since these technologies have the nominal purpose of killing the enemy, Jeffords sees the

affinity for technology as manufacturing human objectification through use of the “body count”

as a measure of combat effectiveness: “[because] the (enemy) body [has] meaning only as death,

its signification [is] fragmented – pieces of bodies [count]” (8). The “body count” method of

measuring efficiency is not only unsettling but also not particularly reflective of “kills” if body

parts count as a body. Although gruesome, there is an interesting double discourse at work in

19

which these things, removed from their participation in a larger assembly of objects, are given

significance in their own right, something which is one of the goals of object-oriented

philosophy. It may thus be productive, in the study of war novels which deal with wounding,

disfigurement, and dismemberment, to attempt to employ the re-thinking of objects to explain

what is philosophically and intellectually unsettling about considering the human body as an

object made of objects, and how this thinking changes conceptions of human being in, and

access to, the world.

Bill Brown’s thing theory, as articulated in his 2003 book A Sense of Things, is

instructive in its intellectual approach to the questions of representing, using, and attaching

significance to objects in a literary context. Although it lacks the philosophical depth of Graham

Harman’s work, or the firm ethical focus of Jane Bennett’s scholarship, Brown’s theory, which

entails a rejection of capitalist/consumerist culture as yet another human construct which

obscures the nature of things beyond their economic or utilitarian value, is principally concerned

with the development and the function of objects in literary texts. More specifically, he seeks to

investigate “the way objects become figures of thought and speech, and … the way that narrative

form reinvests the subject/object dialectic with its temporal dimension” and to “determine what

literature does with its objects” (16). While broadly concerned with investigating that

increasingly vague line between subject and object as well as the dialectic space in which human

and non-human objects interact and redefine each other, Brown’s work does not self-consciously

participate in the radical politics which other theorists envision. However, his model for

investigation is useful in that literary fiction provides a substrate for considering questions of

subjectivity and objectivity since it is a world in which the interactions of people and things not

only make things happen, but have symbolic meanings that transcend the instrumentality of a

20

self-other relationship. In other words, it provides an arena for investigating the relationality of

humans and objects removed from the material realities of quotidian life where things more

typically exist as possessions or objects of desire rather than philosophically significant entities.

Perhaps the most thought-provoking element of Brown’s work in A Sense of Things surrounds

the functioning and the importance of absent objects in relational networks, and the ability of

objects, by their absence, to create both effects and affects in the network’s other actants. This is

an important idea which supplements Thing Power and also the notion of emergent agency in

that withholding relations can have a degree of material efficacy equal to that which entering into

a relationship might generate.

These theoretical approaches to the lives of things all seek a reconsideration of the place

of the human subject in relation to the multifarious systems and networks of objects that make up

the material existence of the world, systems and networks that humans do not control, and of

which they are often only a part. While there is the persistent suggestion that dismissing the

monolithic human subject mandates a new formulation of ethics owing to agency and liability

either being distributed horizontally rather than hierarchically, or always in a state of emerging

and developing rather than existing as predictable quantities, these sources do not offer

particularly in-depth discussions of what the new ethics of an object-oriented world might look

like. Within the context of the literary worlds of O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato and The Things

They Carried, is there still a meaningful way to apply concepts of human justice to events in the

Vietnam war, which a whole network of actors and agential entities produce? And is assigning

singular blame or credit for these events actually “empirically false” and unjust, as Jane Bennett

suggests (37)? Furthermore, what are the values of social and cultural constructs like justice if

humanity has no inherent, ontological superiority over the world of non-human animals and

21

objects and is thus not a special, unique source of agency? And finally, is there any insight to be

gained into the power of things when they are deployed in a military context where the nature of

their relations not only resists ownership but is also necessarily destructive?

To gain some insight into these broad and general questions, the following material will,

with theoretical positioning generated from the arguments of the scholars discussed above,

approach three separate aspects of The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato. “Objects

in Conflict” explores the functioning of military and non-military objects as they coexist in a

martial environment, and how these kinds of things differ from one another as they and the

soldiers who wield them interact. In Tim O’Brien’s literary world, things appear stubbornly

resistant to the intentions of the humans with whom they coexist, and accordingly serve to

undermine senses of pure human will and responsibility while also challenging human attempts

to employ them as prostheses which may be used to gain a greater access to, and greater

influence in, the physical world. The second section, “Wasted,” extends and reiterates the notion

of seeking a basis for blame and responsibility beyond the rational human subject, but through

the consideration of the human body itself as a thing which exists as both a unified whole and a

conglomeration of unruly parts and elements. Focusing mainly on dismemberment and

disfigurement, “Wasted” argues that these novels may not be entirely amenable to readings

which suggest that the restoration of the damaged body to health, or the reconstruction of a

shattered psyche, are O’Brien’s central thematic concerns, and also explores the moral

implications broader notions of blame, and broader notions of identity as inherent in parts as

much as in a physical whole, may have in the larger world. The final section, “The Land Is Your

Enemy,” explores the relationship between American soldiers in Vietnam and the Vietnamese

landscape, a landscape which appears surprisingly malevolent in the absence of the human

22

enemy. Further, the section attempts to explicate the difficulty inherent in making moral

judgements based on the presence and influence of things. The idea of unclear moral influences

emanating from things mirrors the difficulty of extracting moral guidance from O’Brien’s war

stories which, in their telling and re-telling, have mercurial significance in relation to time and

the observer. “The Land Is Your Enemy” also explores the notional possibility of transcending

one’s own physical existence in order to blend with the land as symbolic of rejecting narrow

paradigms of thought and action, and concludes with a consideration of how the close tie

between people and land informs O’Brien’s political position in terms of race and ethnicity,

suggesting that a relationship between nation or ethnicity and things is not necessarily a cultural

liability.

23

Chapter Two: Objects in Conflict: The Lives of Military and Non-Military Objects

While Bill Brown’s A Sense of Things, as well as earlier studies of the being and meaning

of things such as Jean Baudrillard’s The System of Objects, focus very closely on the roles of

domestic and consumer goods in both life and literature, the cars, food processors, mirrors,

clocks, bottles, jars, paintings, and other functional, technological, and collectible ephemera

which co-occupy most of the spaces of human existence are in fact not the only things which

hold philosophical and critical interest. Although Graham Harman states that durability (and,

indeed, materiality) is in fact not an intrinsic quality of objects, there is a peculiar quality

attending all entities which are specifically intended not to be durable and, in the case of many

military things, intended to damage or destroy other things and to interrupt the functioning of

biological systems (Guerilla Metaphysics 85). This is quite different from the nominal nature of

relations between humans and the things which typically inhabit domestic life, and, in so doing,

enter into relations which typically serve to develop and sustain personal or historical narratives

of identity; prolong or in some way ease the act of living; or express a connection to place and a

relationship to time specific and significant to the human individual. Military objects, on the

other hand, are not involved in these same networks of voluntary accumulation, but rather are

systematically imposed upon those who interact with them. They are not necessarily the objects

of human choice or decoration or collection so much as they are instruments with a specific

purpose (often deployed with certain political or ideological aims) and imbued with both

symbolic and actual significance as elements which subvert individual intention and agency.

Objects not only subvert their presumptive “targets,” but also have the capacity to subvert those

agents who ostensibly employ and deploy them.

24

Contemplating issues of guilt and responsibility, Tim O’Brien engages deeply with

subversive things (military and otherwise) as his characters attempt to navigate the moral

complexities of military service and find that there are more challenges to their senses of self and

identity than those which are the ideological products of national politics and cultural mythology.

The characters of The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato find that the things with

which they interact not only trouble the causal effectiveness of rational human intention and

agency, but also serve to dislocate blame and responsibility from its traditional locations. Both

compelling and influential, the things that populate the novels create a broader moral world in

which responsibility may be spread across a number of entities, meaning that culpability, ethical

deficiencies, and even emerging states of affairs are not rooted solely in the agency of human

individuals. Thinking about responsibility as a relatively diffuse quantity suggests that, while the

notion of full individual blame may not be particularly convincing, it may be extremely difficult

to remove individuals from all blame for certain events, regardless of their physical ability to

intervene in the development of emerging circumstances. That things seem to have a curious but

effective ability to resist human efforts to control or employ them also suggests that their use as

prostheses for accessing and changing the physical world may pose some problems for nominal

human agents, particularly when the things with which they interact exert their own agential

capacities: acting in a community of causation but with some degree of independence from

individual intention, the behavior of things challenges current systems of ethics and signification

as the physical and conceptual otherness of the world proves to be resistant to singular, human

control.

25

i. Social Networks

In speaking of the functioning of things, one must allow the human subject or human

subjectivity to exist as a privileged quantity in the discussion of the ways in which objects relate

to one another in literary works, and the conclusions which may be drawn from those

interactions and applied to the systems of relationality which exist in the material world. After

all, it is the (presumably) rational, thinking human subject which is responsible for developing

philosophical discussions about the metaphysical being and political or material agency of

things, and thus creates this particular vector of relationality within the greater network (and

networks of networks) of actants which serve as the medium for observable existence in the

world. Jane Bennett appreciates such limitations, suggesting that one may not “‘horizontalize’

the world completely” since even if the ontological lines between human and non-human entities

are blurred or removed, there are still compelling “affinities” that exist between similar bodies of

any kind, even if there is an “[extended] awareness of [the] interinvolvements and

interdependencies” of unlike entities (104). In this light, it is impossible to develop a “perfect

equality of actants” since not all entities in an assemblage are equally powerful, but it is both

possible and productive to consider a “polity with more channels of communication between

members” (Bennett 104). These channels of communication, the means by which entities relate

to one another, are the basis of human society (an entity which is the presumptive subject of

most, if not all, humanities scholarship), and also serve to illustrate the relative quality of social

organizations within the paradigm of democracy, a political arrangement which – ideally –

allows all entities within an organization to have some contact with, and a particular influence

upon, the operation of that organization.

26

Both Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried exhibit a fundamental mistrust

of the mid-western American town, an assemblage which is a conglomeration of political, social,

material, and historical realities without being reducible to any one of those dimensions, and

which appears to be functioning more or less appropriately as a network of bodies with varying

levels of agentic capacity. Paul Berlin defends his participation in the war as an “obligation …

to people, not to principle or politics or justice,” an obligation which is “inextricably linked to

the attitudes of other human beings, to what they want, to what they expect” (320). He attempts

to absolve himself from blame and justify his innocence in the events of the war by suggesting

that he is “[guilty] perhaps of hanging on, of letting himself be dragged along, of falling victim

to gravity and obligation and events, but not – not! – guilty of wrong intentions” (263): even

though it is obvious that “something [has] gone terribly wrong [,] … the aims, the purposes, the

ends – [aren’t] these fully virtuous and proper?” (277). It should be clear that Berlin’s appeal to

family, friends, and co-inhabitants of Fort Dodge, Iowa, as well as his appeal to good intentions,

is quite meaningless. Berlin bases his eventual conclusions about his own guilt on known

uncertainties, and even though he is cognizant of the inscrutable motivations of the deserter

Cacciato – “[what] were his motives, or did he have motives, and did motives matter?” – he

ultimately decides to ignore the similarly vague justifications for his involvement in this military

action as well as the eminently palpable ignorance of the American servicemen towards the

people of Quang Ngai province (29).

Who were these skinny, blank-eyed people? What did they want? …

Wondering, [Berlin] put mercy in his eyes like lighted candles; … [did the

girl] see the love? Could she understand it, return it? But he didn’t know.

… It was all a sad accident, he would have told them – chance, high-level

27

politics, confusion. He had no stake in the war beyond simple survival; he

was there, in Quang Ngai, for the same reasons they were: the luck of the

draw, bad fortune, forces beyond reckoning. His intentions were benign.

He was no tyrant, no pig, no Yankee killer. He was innocent. Yes, he

was. He was innocent. … He didn’t know who was right, or what was

right; he didn’t know if it was a war of self-determination or self-

destruction, outright aggression or national liberation; he didn’t know

which speeches to believe, which books, which politicians; he didn’t know

if nations would topple like dominoes or if they would stand separate like

trees; he didn’t know who really started the war, or why, or when; or with

what motives; he didn’t know if it mattered; … [and] who did? Who

really did? … Who really knew? (262-264, emphasis in original)

Jim Neilson argues vehemently that Vietnam war literature in general “does not challenge

the fundamental morality of US aims,” and that the O’Brien novels under consideration here

have “come no closer to understanding the war” than any other similar texts (54, 206).

Furthermore, Nielson argues, while the morality of “enemy states” like North Vietnam is simply-

defined, “morality is seen as ambiguous, complex, and uncertain when it involves the United

States” (196). Nielson is nominally referring to an institutional unwillingness to adopt a

meaningful, radical stance against acts of American aggression. But, taken in another context,

his provocative statement is equally true: one of the reasons that suggestions of American moral

ambiguity, complexity, and uncertainty seem so compelling is that morality is often ambiguous,

complex, and uncertain. That Paul Berlin takes, and persistently defends, a morally problematic

position in which the unknowns far outweigh the facts does not translate directly to a moral

28

failure on the part of the novel. Mark Heberle argues that the Vietnam conflict stands as “one of

the most significant public policy catastrophes in American history” and Paul Berlin, in choosing

to honour his obligations to friends and family, provides some insight into why this is the case

(xiv). Even though Berlin remains committed to a network of family, friends, and townspeople,

and even though he is aware of a broader network of high-level politics, bad luck, speeches,

books, and states toppling like dominoes, the major ethical failing of his obligation to people

rests in a definition of “people” which is far too narrow. Berlin’s people, one may conclude, are

people more or less like him, and while he does not ignore the people of Vietnam entirely, he is

content to leave them undefined and over-value his own intimate social network. For Berlin,

musing on the domestic order of his family’s home in Iowa is quite literally a sentimental

journey as he remembers the vacuum cleaner, the black telephone and the sound of its ring,

various rooms in the house, pink formica countertops, and the kitchen sink (158-9). In the

chapter “Calling Home,” Berlin smiles at the sound of the unanswered phone as a symbol of

connection to the world of home, and though somewhat downcast that his one chance to make a

phone call from Vietnam is a failure, he is not crushed (159). This should, however, be a

meaningful symbolic moment: like the phone call, not one of the letters Berlin has written seems

to have received a reply either. Even though Oscar Johnson means to console Paul when he

suggests that “[the] world don’ [sic] stop” just because Berlin is no longer in it, this consolation

reveals a dysfunctional relationship between agent and network (GAC 159). Berlin, after all, is

under the significant influence of obligation to this network, but refuses to acknowledge that the

network has no apparent concern for his best interests. He is not only a member of a network

which does harm, but also committed to a network which harms him directly.

29

Tim, the narrator of The Things They Carried, has a much more antagonistic relationship

with his domestic community, reconstructing Paul Berlin’s questions of “who really knew” by

asserting that the town specifically did not know and, more importantly, did not want to know

any of the troublesome details of international politics.

[They] were sending me off to fight a war they didn’t understand and

didn’t want to understand. I held them responsible. … All of them – I

held them personally and individually responsible – the polyestered

Kiwanis boys, the merchants and farmers, the pious churchgoers, the

chatty housewives, the PTA and the Lions club and the Veterans of

Foreign Wars and the fine upstanding gentry out at the country club. They

didn’t know Bao Dai from the man in the moon. They didn’t know

history. They didn’t know the first thing about Diem’s tyranny, or the

nature of Vietnamese nationalism, or the long colonialism of the French –

this was all too damned complicated. (43)

While both Paul and Tim identify the persuasive feelings which attend thoughts of walking away

from friends, family, and tradition, the draft notice which arrives for Tim in the summer of 1968

is a much more compelling object, a material, agential entity which necessitates action: either

Tim must comply with orders the notice contains, or he must leave the country. The notice itself

does not have the physical power to force Tim to do anything, but it still has the ability to make

things happen by setting in motion the process by which Tim either becomes a soldier or a

criminal. The notice is able to mobilize political, legal, and even emotional powers against

Tim’s varying levels of personal accountability and his complex, perhaps irresolvable, moral

conflict. Tim’s negative relationship to the political aspect of the notice is patently obvious, but

30

his sense of obligation to its legal dimension is ambivalent as he does not disagree with the

nation’s right to wage war, only with the waging of this particular one: “The problem, though,

was that a draft board did not let you choose your war” (42). However, the draft notice is most

effective in its ability to influence Tim’s emotional state and bypass the intellectual and

philosophical objections he has to forced military service. This emotional effect is notable in

that it is not purely sensational but visceral: “I felt something break open in my chest. … [It] was

real. I know that much. It was a physical rupture – a cracking-leaking-popping feeling” (44).

This is quite an interesting moment in the story since the draft notice has combined with the

ambient political, judicial, and emotional entities to produce in Tim a palpable, physical

response. This physical happening is of course not medically significant, but nonetheless is a

somatic reaction which a community of actants produces in his body.

Tim’s physical reaction to the draft notice also leads to a pair of important intellectual

developments. He walks off the line at the Armour meat packing plant where he had been

removing blood clots from hog carcasses, and this action entails a rejection of the industrial,

capitalist pragmatism which not only informs the systematic “disassembly line” of the

slaughterhouse but also underlies the draft notice. Forcing him into military service presumably

to replace another individual who has become a casualty, the notice underscores war as another

system which seems endlessly capable of producing dead bodies. The notice also changes Tim’s

relationship to the domestic objects of the family home, and while the telephone, pink and white

formica counters, and other items are reminiscent of those which Paul Berlin remembers so

fondly, it is not the alienation of distance but rather the alienation of ethics that fractures Tim’s

relationship to them. Tim rejects the sparkling comforts of the domestic sphere as he no longer

sees “the familiar objects … [of his] house … [and his] life” as sympathetic allies but as adjuncts

31

of the larger socio-political network, with its logic of harm applied on an industrial scale, which

he is attempting to resist (44). This problem is magnified when Tim finds himself in the fishing

boat on the Rainy River, confronting the massive (if immaterial) accretion of people and things

“urging [him] toward one shore or the other” (56). The issue, in this scenario, is two-fold: Tim

considers himself a coward for refusing to commit to the anti-war act of leaving America and the

draft notice behind, but also recognizes that making a moral choice (or, more importantly, the

“right” moral choice) “just [is not] possible” (57).

As all the nation’s history appears to converge at this one particular point in space and

time, it should be noted that the narrative is not just an expression of incredible solipsism: the

choice not to jump overboard and swim for the river’s Canadian shore is not a simple and

blameworthy failure of nerve, but an expression of pre-existing and ahistorical national guilt for

the war. Alex Vernon notes that “acknowledging the soldier’s function as agent of the state and

society [might shift] some of the blame and guilt off [Tim]” (189). But, offering Tim some

partial forgiveness only reveals “that he never could have completely avoided some

responsibility for the war even if he had managed to evade combat duty” (Vernon 190). The

Rainy River represents (appropriately enough) a fluid boundary, a “dotted line between two

different worlds”: the world of shame and blame on the American side, and the world of

presumptive moral rectitude on the Canadian side (53). This in itself entails the impossibility of

escape, since there is no clear and impermeable boundary between guilt and innocence, no line

which Tim, as a body, can cross while these other elements that are constitutive of his social

identity, his ethics, and his politics, cannot: both Tim’s inability to jump out of the boat into the

river and the resilient smell of slaughtered hogs that clings to his skin throughout the chapter

make it obvious that it is impossible to be cleansed of these other elements, or to achieve any

32

kind of meaningful moral renewal. In terms of Vital Materialism, Tim’s situation represents a

significant problem since his direct participation in the creation of harm is unclear, but his

attempt to extricate himself from a network which produces harm is a failure. However, it is not

clear that Vital Materialism considers the possibility that one may not be able to extricate oneself

from a harmful network, particularly if the definition of objects within that network includes

notional and intellectual entities. As Tim finds out, it may be impossible to leave oneself behind.

Furthermore, if, at the one extreme, singular blame is impossible, it may also be impossible for a

situation to exist in which an entity is singularly without blame. Tim blames himself utterly for

the decision to go to war, but “On the Rainy River” does not corroborate this monolithic sense of

culpability, and in the absence of a “good choice” Tim is required to weigh more or less

compelling social obligations against one another when there is no apparent and reasonable

single action which will satisfy manifold – and competing – moral and ethical dilemmas.

ii. “Harlem Globetrotters Bring Their Travelling Show to Bic Kinh Mi”: Objects of Leisure on

the Field of Battle

One of the provocative ideas that arises out of the events of “On the Rainy River” is a

subtle but persistent connection between the military and non-military spheres of life. Aside

from referring to President Lyndon Johnson who, serving a double role as head of government

and commander-in-chief of the military effectively conflates public interest and military policy,

“Rainy River” also focuses on sports as a public preoccupation and a means by which

masculinity or nationality may be performed. The chapter mentions golf, football, and baseball,

and it also describes its climactic crowd scene as “some outlandish sporting event” (55). The

metaphoric and literal parallels between sport and war are perhaps in no need of further

33

elaboration, but there are some interesting similarities between the ideal soldier and ideal

sportsman: “honourable, stoic, brave, loyal, courteous – and unaesthetic, unironic, unintellectual

and devoid of wit” (Fussell 27). Paul Fussell describes the naiveté of English soldiers in World

War I to be most tragically “conspicuous … in the universal commitment to the sporting spirit,”

and the co-existence of young men and the ephemera of competitive games is not only present in

O’Brien’s novels, but a key intersection of nominally non-military objects with the business of

war (26). The easy coexistence of domestic and military objects serves to diminish the

distinction between civilian and army life, and the ability of soldiers to switch between sporting

and fighting frames of mind demonstrates an uncomfortable psychological affinity for conflict.

Apart from suggesting that the civil and military aspects of society are inextricable from one

another, the common paradigm of conflict should call into question whether a given society’s

civil functions or its military actions are more important to its sense of identity.

About a month after he has arrived in-country, Paul Berlin completes an exchange with

the door gunner of a resupply chopper in which he hands the crewman an envelope of letters

home, and receives, in return, a Spalding basketball. This is a rather bizarre quid pro quo: after

all, what does one do with a basketball in the Vietnamese jungle? The answer might seem

obvious: “[choose] up teams according to squads. Eddie Lazutti ripped the bottom out of a

woman’s wicker grain basket, shinnied up a tree, attached it with wire, and slid down. No

backboard, he said, but what the hell – it was still a war, wasn’t it” (GAC 101)? This in

particular is illustrative of the beguiling character of the basketball in that it is able to generate a

kind of alternate reality for the soldiers, since even without the regular accoutrements of a

basketball game (court, backboards, benches, bleachers, scoreboard, and so on,) the ball brings

with it the imperative that it be used, an imperative so strong that it eventually consumes the

34

company. The basketball arrives at an unusual time: to this point, the unpredictability of the war

seems to have resolved itself into a kind of routine, where, “[on] the odd numbered afternoons,

they [take] sniper fire. On the even numbered nights, they [are] mortared. There [is] a rhythm in

it” (100). Not only is the arrival of the basketball both unusual and unexpected, but time itself

seems to stagnate when the routine of enemy contact is broken and the unit goes unopposed from

the first week of July until the middle of August: “Things were very still. … The river below was

solid and unmoving. … There were no signs of the enemy and the day was hot and empty” (101-

102). Both the ball and basket are carried through 14 villages which the men search and damage

before engaging one another in pick-up games. The games originally provide Berlin with a kind

of comfort, a certainty of intention and purpose – “a true thing to aim at” – that otherwise seems

lacking, and also provide both a new routine and an iterative series of final scores which he

memorises and recites (109). The uneasiness that begins to descend on the platoon in the

absence of enemy contact intensifies from a vague restlessness to overt irritation, then to

insubordination and psychosomatic maladies, and finally physical violence as Stink Harris and

Bernie Lynn viciously assault one another. Failing to provide a meaningful diversion from the

problems of the larger conflict, the games instead create negative emotions and energies and

seem to become an extension of the war itself.

Recalling Lazzuti’s rhetorical question, “it was still a war, wasn’t it,” a sense of the

bizarre nature of the basketball begins to develop. As a larger entity, the war does carry on in the

background as the platoon marches, searches villages, destroys abandoned bunkers, and digs

foxholes, but the ball and the games take center stage in the chapter and in the soldiers’ lives.

The games generate a significant but ultimately meaningless anxiety, and eventually playing the

games becomes futile since none of the squads in the platoon can defeat Lazutti’s. The presence

35

of the ball generates a pair of unpleasant effects: first, there is not only the negative effect of

losing but also the sense that the basketball begins to behave with a degree of the teleological

blankness characteristic of O’Brien’s Vietnam. The series of game scores does not suggest an

end point, and, while the playing of the games might be routine, the scores never become

predictable. The wins and losses never develop any kind of structural coherence and,

consequently, never exist in relation to any kind of tangible objective. The attempts to use this

object as a distraction from the larger war, and also from this unsettling period lacking enemy

contact, become dismal failures as what had been a “good time” without enemy engagement

becomes a “bad time” during which the basketball dissimulates both the lack of temporal events

and of a broader metaphysical purpose. The basketball, after all, does not materially “do”

anything other than being bounced, thrown, and carried, but its mute physical presence is central

to this month-long experience of war. And, once Rudy Chassler detonates a mine and the war

returns to “normal,” the basketball and makeshift hoop simply disappear into the background of

ephemeral things encountered and discarded during the long march through Quang Ngai.

An interesting philosophical thread of O’Brien’s work is the lack of opposition to war in

principle, and the implication that a clearer goal and better-defined rules of engagement would

somehow provide a greater degree of moral unity and justification for military involvement in

southeast Asia. The basketball, however, does not provide a useful analogue to this position

since, at least in this relational context, it doesn’t have any moral or ethical implications on its

own. As an assemblage of atoms that make up the rubber, paint, and the compressed air that

constitute its physical presence, or as part of the system that creates a basketball game (along

with court, net, and players all creating and reacting to emerging events), the ball possesses a

kind of implacable power. Cacciato cannot stop bouncing it, the squads cannot stop squaring off

36

against one another, and the ball comes to take over Paul Berlin’s dreams, “spinning endlessly

through the night … falling home with soft swishing sounds”: in short, “there [is] always

basketball” (GAC 102-3). Tobey Herzog suggests that basketball “provides these soldiers with

order, control, clarity, and meaning absent in their Russian-roulette existence and missing from

this particular war” (Vietnam War Stories 150), and Tim reprises this notion in The Things They

Carried as he observes Bowker and Dobbins playing checkers:

The playing field was laid out in a strict grid, no tunnels or mountains or

jungles. You knew where you stood. You knew the score. The pieces

were out on the board, the enemy was visible, you could watch the tactics

unfolding into larger strategies. There was a winner and a loser. There

were rules. (31)

While both Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried expose the apparent lack of

larger purpose and the vagueness of strategic objectives which serve as a convenient means of

both apologising for noncommittal moral judgements of the Vietnam conflict and attempts to

describe the Vietnam experience as fundamentally singular in its “postmodernity,” there is

nothing to suggest that these elements of uncertainty – perhaps especially as they appear to

combat troops – are uniquely characteristic of Vietnam, nor do they fall in the exclusive province

of war and war writing.

The difficulty arising in the suggestion that the basketball provides a surrogate ordering

of the men’s lives within the greater aimlessness of the march is that any order which the ball

does occasion has no more intrinsic moral value than the war does, and may indeed have less.

Sports and games do have very clear purposes, Berlin’s “true thing to aim at” (109). But, the

war on the level of the combat platoon has a set of clear purposes too: inflict damage on VC-held

37

villages, search and destroy tunnels, and produce as many enemy bodies (or body parts) as

possible. Of course, neither O’Brien as author, Berlin and Tim as characters, nor the critic are

satisfied with this simple objective as providing any kind of persuasive argument in favour of

continuing the war, much less starting it in the first place. The straightforward goal of winning a

game based on successfully navigating its arbitrary structure of rules is equally unsatisfactory,

and in fact it degenerates into physical violence between Stink and Bernie (106). The basketball

games only entail a swapping of one moral vacuum for another during the long days of silence in

which the war seems to have forgotten Berlin’s unit. Paul’s feelings on the lull in military

activity as being “[a]rtificial” and filled with “a sense of imposed peace” are highly ironic in

their suggestion that peace, or the nominal absence of the human activity of war, is somehow an

unnatural condition of the Vietnamese landscape (106). Furthermore, the unit’s attempt to re-

impose arbitrary struggle through sport also seems peculiar because it exacerbates the problem of

unsatisfactory motivation that has been plaguing them. Bill Brown identifies this phenomenon

as the concurrent formulation of two uncertain states of affairs around a single thing, “a moment

of ritual without content, … [and] structure with too much substance … that threatens the

coherence of the structures as such” (Sense 40). Brown, in making this observation, refers to the

crisis that exists in Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, where the only reliable means of

differentiating the rightful king from an utterly convincing lookalike is his possession of the

Great Seal. That the heavy golden disk is missing at a crucial moment – prior to the coronation

ceremony – highlights a dual crisis since there is, simultaneously, “no identifiable future king”

and “two future kings where there should be only one” (40). Twain’s Great Seal has the capacity

to resolve both of these problems when, by virtue of its being in the possession of one man or the

other, it both identifies the rightful ruler, and disqualifies the impostor. The outcome of Twain’s

38

narrative is unproblematic since the object comes to be in the possession of the right person at

the right time, and the Seal establishes the legitimate rule of the rightful king. For Paul Berlin

and the men of his unit, however, the presence of the basketball fails to resolve the larger

predicament, an apparently purposeless war.

Brown notes that “history might have taken a different turn” had the Seal appeared in the

hands of the wrong man, and that the result could easily have been chaos instead of order (40).

Moreover, Brown suggests a double performance of the object itself, since the Seal lends

legitimacy to the monarchy while simultaneously “[exposing] the contingency of monarchical

power and the arbitrariness of hierarchy” (40). Though not having the social importance of the

Great Seal, the basketball articulates, and then intervenes in, Berlin’s (and his unit’s) moral

crisis. The ball offers the soldiers an opportunity to play the game (Brown’s “ritual”) which has

an immediate objective but lacks a long-term moral and material trajectory (the “content”). The

comparison to the Harlem Globetrotters is quite apt in that the players are performers rather than

competitors in any meaningful way, and although the scores accumulate, the actions of the

players and the events of the games do not progress towards any appreciable end. Meanwhile,

the ball offers access to a simplistic, goal-oriented system (the “structure”) which, apparently

lacking any kind of telos, overwhelms the men as they become both morally – and strategically –

frustrated soldiers and basketball players without a cause (the “substance”). Though the games

are nominally intended to provide either diversion or a sense of the familiar for the squad, the

emptiness of the matches mirrors and then magnifies the emptiness of the war. Creating

certainty – critically established as the “function” of the basketball in this chapter of Going After

Cacciato – is actually not within the basketball’s power at all: in fact, after providing some

superficial clarity, the basketball only serves to multiply the men’s anxieties about purpose and

39

motivation. Although the performance of the Great Seal does eventually come to good, that of

the basketball does not: Brown contends that the commodification and mass production of

objects undermines their value as things which have a nuanced and ostensibly benevolent

relationship with their presumptive owners (45), but this positive relationship is based, to a

considerable degree, on luck. Berlin’s basketball does not do anything “wrong,” necessarily:

rather, it seems to have the bad luck of being involved in a morally-problematic war. It is

noteworthy that the ball simply disappears from the narrative after Chassler steps on the mine,

and the effective order of war resumes its primacy since the ball’s failure to provide moral

guidance or a sense of moral improvement before its departure might offer a rejoinder to critics

who would suggest that O’Brien’s uncertainty about the conflict is ambivalent or non-committal.

On the contrary, O’Brien’s deep skepticism of domestic and military moral structures allows the

basketball and the games it necessitates to behave as an analogue for Vietnam, implying that

non-military objects are incapable of “domesticating” the martial world. In light of the

basketball’s unsuccessful intervention in the business of war, the domestic sphere obviously does

not possess an inherently more compelling moral grounding or ethical direction than the martial

one, and, since the conditions and outcomes of war are often used to justify or authenticate

certain domestic practices and political opinions, one may conclude that the ostensible distance

between the two spheres is not particularly great. (In fact, using one set of beliefs or

philosophies to justify the other may be akin to self-authentication.) O’Brien’s war does not, and

likely cannot, depend on domestic politics to imbue it with some degree of rational sense.

40

iii. To Pull the Pin: Grenades and the Matter of Metal

The grenade, in its similarity to a baseball, illustrates an even closer relationship between

the military and the civilian worlds as the difference between a tool of sport and a tool of war

becomes less distinct. Tim speaks about baseball as a central element of “mainstream life” and

sees a vision of himself as a “twelve-year-old Little League shortstop pivoting to turn a double

play” (TTTC 48, 55), but this aspect of normalcy is folded into war when the narrator of Going

After Cacciato describes the new fragmentation grenade as “shaped like a baseball, … easy to

handle and easy to throw,” and depicts Oscar Johnson “rubbing it the way pitchers do when they

get a new ball” (234, 108). The metaphoric relationship between the baseball and the grenade

illustrates instead an important, formal kinship between the worlds of war and peace. This is not

to suggest, however, that there is no material difference between a baseball and a grenade, or that

there is not a remarkable difference in the kind of effects each thing may have on other things

with which it comes into contact, but rather that the apparent similarity of the two might indicate

a means of rethinking, if only in a limited fashion, the ways in which objects interact to produce

effects. Narrator Tim of The Things They Carried has long fascinated critics with his double talk

about truth and fiction – or the truth of fiction and the fiction of truth – and has occupied many

scholars who attempt to unravel the novel’s densely-layered metafictional narratives. In the

short chapter “Good Form,” Tim ponders how he would respond to the question of whether he

had ever killed anybody. Through the use of storytelling and its ability to construct or re-

construct events, Tim can make anything happen, and explore possibilities and situations that he

did not personally experience. Indeed, to travel deep into memory and imagination in order to

expand knowledge and experience beyond oneself as a singular subject and, in so doing, reject

the prosaic and materially “real” history of the individual as the only valuable means of

41

accessing truth, is one of the central aims of The Things They Carried. In response to the

question of responsibility for the death of another human, Tim’s practice of transcending the

single subject through the telling and re-telling of events allows him to “say, honestly, ‘Of course

not.’ Or [he] can say, honestly, ‘Yes’” (172). Tim’s explanation of his reasoning here is key to

the understanding of the metafictive functioning of the novel, but, from another perspective, Tim

does not need to employ this narrative cleverness: it is not just the metafiction of the story, but

also the metaphysics of the things in the story, which can trouble the direct, causal relationships

between the nominal human subject and the emergent events of a dynamic, agentially democratic

world.

The language of responsibility is fascinating in its implicit biases regarding the nature of

human involvement in phenomena. It would be quite unusual to think not of a pitcher but of a

baseball team, or a baseball, striking out a batter, but it is commonplace to consider that the

United States dropped a uranium fission bomb on Hiroshima, and that the bomb destroyed the

city while Paul Tibbets Jr. (and, to a lesser extent, Enola Gay,) remain only vaguely connected to

the event. This linguistic uncertainty belies the fact that the mechanisms for human access to the

phenomena of the world are either poorly understood or, under significant political and

ideological influence, habitually manipulated in order to obfuscate or shift locations of blame

and responsibility. Graham Harman notes that the human body is “condemned by [its] own

inherent limits to choose from a restricted range of possibilities for exploring the vastness of the

universe,” but while the means of human interaction are limited, the human may attempt to

employ things as a means of extending its “reach” within the physical world (Guerilla

Metaphysics 49). Karen Barad suggests that embodiment itself is “integrally entangled with the

other,” meaning that the human body relies upon, or may make use of, entities external to itself

42

to ensure, prolong, or enhance its existence (158). The human body, for instance, may encounter

an object and explore that object’s physical characteristics, or it might use that object as a

prosthetic for accessing additional aspects of the physical world. O’Brien’s soldiers might

similarly assess a rifle’s physical characteristics (“it [weighs] 7.5 pounds unloaded, 8.2 pounds

with its full 20-round magazine”), change its physical appearance by cleaning it, alter its physical

location by carrying it, supplement their own agency by pointing it at another body, or extend

their own sensory abilities by “[using] the butts of their weapons as probes” when trying to find

the submerged body of a comrade (TTTC 5, 156).

To a degree, the metaphysical question of “being” entails the consideration of the

prosthetics that make up human access to the world. Richard Feynman, referring to the material

divisions between bodies, observes that “[there] is no such line. It is only in our own

psychological makeup that there is a line” (qtd. in Barad 156). The edges between bodies that

are in contact with one another are only the result of limited human optical capability, and under

intense magnification there are in fact no hard lines between entities which are in contact with

one another. Additionally, the atomic and chemical similarities between human bodies and the

bodies of other organisms, or the elemental similarities humans share with mineral deposits that,

like humans, are native to Earth, undermines the anthropocentric view of “‘The World’ [as]

always other to, and both ontologically and metaphorically inferior to, ‘man’” (Barad 134).

Bruno Latour states, with characteristic sanguinity, that “[he becomes] literally another man”

when he holds a hammer in his workshop, a hammer which “provides for [his] fist a force, a

direction and a disposition that a clumsy arm did not know it had” (250, 249). Thus, the hammer

not only becomes part of the man’s body at a basic, atomic level, but it also lends its power to the

man, rather than being merely an instrument of the man’s intentional agency. It is thus the

43

emerging entity of hammer and human that seeks to make changes to their/its physical

surroundings, and there is in fact no clear line between the human and the thing, nor is there any

clear delineation of agency within that particular confederation of objects.

Cary Wolfe argues that the human is a “fundamentally prosthetic creature,” and that the

prostheticity of human life demands a rethinking of ethics on the basis of human access to, and

presence in, the world as an action which does not stand on its own, but rather comes about as a

result of the humanity’s embeddedness in the world of things (xxv-vi). Thus, if human

“worlding” depends on technological things, as Latour suggests, then it is somewhat bizarre to

“speak of technology as something that is amenable to [human] mastery” (251). However, the

rifleman with an M-16, as a basic paradigm of “soldierness,” does display a certain degree of

material effectiveness in his relationship with the rifle, bullet, and target. The predictable

trajectory of the bullet – influenced though it may be by atmospheric conditions, the laws of

independent motion, and so forth – still allows for a line to be drawn between the rifleman/rifle

assemblage and the location of its ultimate material effects: if not amenable to the rifleman’s

mastery, the rifle is at least responsive to, and reflective of, the rifleman’s nominal intentions

even if the state of its components, the composition of the gunpowder, and external conditions

like wind and precipitation play influential roles in the act of shooting. The grenade, however, is

fundamentally quite different.

Tim, as is his metafictive wont, relates the story of “a slender young man of about

twenty” three times in The Things They Carried, though the Viet Cong soldier is most

memorable as the central character/object in “The Man I Killed” (125). It is not until the

subsequent chapter, “Ambush,” that the means by which this soldier meets his demise are

explained when Tim states, “I threw a grenade that exploded at his feet and killed him,”

44

illustrating a broader sense of the agential capacities of things that places his intentionality at a

remove from the material effects of the exploding grenade (125). Tim’s storytelling in “Good

Form,” a later chapter which returns to the Vietnamese man, is highly equivocal, containing both

the contradictory declarations “I did not kill him” and “I killed him,” statements that are not only

confusing but also somewhat surprising in terms of their focus on Tim’s subjectivity (171, 172).

His prior estimation of the situation reveals at least an implicit blaming of the grenade for the

man’s death, but later he seems to put the blame squarely on himself, as if he is eminently

blameworthy within the ecosystem of things clustered around the trail near the village of My

Khe. He expands the conception of culpability to the extent that “presence” becomes

synonymous with “guilt”: “I remember feeling the burden of responsibility and grief. I blamed

myself. And rightly so, because I was present” (171). This commentary on the nature of blame

is incredibly subversive of the quantities of human agency and intentionality because Tim

suggests that he is guilty in a scenario where, in this telling, he has actually not done anything

other than be present (and, indeed, he suggests elsewhere that his personal guilt for the war

precedes his presence in Vietnam, while even assigning blame to those who never will be

present, or, like forgetful Nebraskan non-voters, have no interest). The intent is not to deploy a

trite didacticism through the insinuation that failing to act can be as unethical as acting

improperly. Rather, the moments of detachment between the grenade leaving Tim’s hand and

when it explodes, killing his Vietnamese counterpart, are as profound as the moments of

detachment where he, in his metafictive re-framing of the story, watches the death of the

Vietnamese soldier with both disinterest and a sense of accountability.

The vagueness of blame encountered in the My Khe incident and the detachment from

the overarching moral justifications for war more broadly are basic problems for both Paul Berlin

45

and Tim since they share a “yes and no” attitude towards their responsibility for the events which

they or their platoons ostensibly cause. Paul Berlin assesses himself as not guilty of malice or a

cruelty of intention, but nonetheless allows himself to be “dragged along” in the business of the

war (263). Tim is in a similar position, but is more direct about his guilt as a result of being

dragged or otherwise prevailed upon in terms of his participation in combat. He has already

established both his guilt and his cowardice as a result of his inability to jump into the Rainy

River and swim to Canada, but even in that situation there is more at stake than just a one-time

choice with moral implications. Kiowa’s fatalistic assessment that the Vietnamese soldier was

“dead the second he stepped on the trail” may serve as a useful corollary for Tim’s experience of

ongoing blame, even if that blame is not dependent upon any particular exercise of agency or

intention on his part (123). It is perhaps rather depressing to think that Tim is guilty or at least

complicit in the Vietnam war the moment he is born in the American midwest, but this idea is

implicit in the far-reaching networks of causation which appear repeatedly in The Things They

Carried. While it might seem like this way of thinking creates a sense of inevitability, the

“[collapse] toward slaughter” which Tim laments, it is more useful to consider these situations as

illustrating how “things [happen] out of other things, … the way events [lead] to events, and the

way they [get] out of human control” which is an object of worry for Paul Berlin (GAC 247).

One might wonder why, if he does not support his role as an American serviceman, Tim

throws the grenade onto the trail before the young Vietnamese soldier. Tim does not seem to

know either:

I had already pulled the pin on a grenade. I had come up to a crouch. It

was entirely automatic. I did not hate the young man; I did not see him as

the enemy; I did not ponder issues of morality or politics or military duty.

46

… I was terrified. There were no thoughts about killing. The grenade was

to make him go away[.] … I had already thrown the grenade before telling

myself to throw it. … I had to lob it high, not aiming … and I remember

ducking down and holding my breath and seeing little wisps of fog rise

from the earth. … It occurred to me then that he was about to die. I

wanted to warn him. (126-7)

Tim’s description of himself as an unthinking participant in this event illustrates the vague nature

of human agency, and it is not correct to presume that he is in some way “defective” in his lack

of intention. He does have a conscious desire to warn the young man, but has, at the same time,

been compelled to act in a manner that is neither in his nor in the young man’s best interests.

What is it that makes Tim do what he does in this episode? By this point, the notion of agency

has essentially become liberated of its frequent partner, intention. Just like there is something

about Berlin’s basketball that suggests the soldiers should break into teams and rig up a

makeshift net, the grenade urges Tim to take a certain action. That Tim refers to his actions as

“automatic” suggests that the grenade is not entirely in control of the situation, but, then again,

neither is he: the “automatic” action probably has at least some genesis in his military training,

his powerful fear, or in some other instinct outside of Tim’s own intentions. It is quite an

uncertain moment, since it is not clear why Tim’s compulsion to act overrides not only his

misgivings about the possible outcomes of the action, but also his deep skepticism of

presumptive justifications for the war, and his participation in it. The question remains of why

Tim deploys the grenade, when other means, such as his rifle, are likely available to him, and it

is notable that the deployment of an indirect weapon mirrors his own ambivalence in this

particular moment. He does not aim, he does not wish to harm the young man, he does not think

47

about political and moral issues, but he is conscious of the power of the grenade to resolve the

situation and “make [the enemy soldier] go away.” Saying that the grenade wants to be thrown

is not quite correct since this merely shifts intention from one body to another and does not

fundamentally alter the conception of agency. However, the highly-seductive and highly-

suggestive powers of these entities do alter the relationship of prostheticity that exists between

humans and things. If one follows Feynman’s and Latour’s thinking, Tim holding a grenade, and

Berlin holding a basketball, do, for a moment, become materially different beings with a new set

of possibilities for relating to the world as it exists in space and time. But these things also act

through their human confederates to make change in the world, a change which is no more or

less ethically vague than that which might arise from rational human thought. The passing

moments which involve Tim, the Vietnamese soldier, and the grenade represent a complex

scenario in which he may be trying to shift some blame away from himself as he relies on his

automatic – and likely conditioned – response as well as an unaimed, indirect weapon to avoid

culpability. However, the effectiveness of the grenade pulls Tim back into the phenomenon, at

the very least as a kind of accomplice, adding another layer of indecisiveness to Tim’s “yes and

no” answer to his daughter’s question about whether he had killed anyone during the war. Tim

explores both options through the story-truth and happening-truth of his narratives, but the

restless and active objects with which he interacts do not allow him to keep his distance from

blame, and in fact serve to intensify his ambivalent position.

Both the lack of “teleological trajectory” to which Karen Barad points in terms of the

emergent “happening” of the world and the notion of inevitability are unsettling for the human

since they entail a lack of control and the destabilization of rational subjectivity as the basis of

effective causation (181). (This kind of thinking has obvious implications for notions of free

48

will, though theoretical engagements with the nature of things tend to skirt that long and complex

debate.) Even though the apparent results of both paradigms are the same since the differential

formation of matter in the universe means that things have to happen, notions of either ultimate

or absent teleological cause produce a human subjective malaise as one wonders what all this

supposed agency is really good for. One should not, however, presume that simply because

things sometimes get out of human control they are out of control altogether. Rather, when

things are beyond human control, they are quite often materially in the control of other things.

The word “grenade” conjures up images of the archaic pineapple-like design with an ovoid body

of cast metal that has the appearance of being made of numerous squares, but the newer arms at

work in Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried are smooth and seamless. While the

older style of grenade had its intended fragmentation pattern forced on it through manufacture,

the newer grenade appears, externally, to be left more to its own devices for its explosive

performance: the grenade has, to a degree, a life of its own.

Jane Bennett explains this conception of life using the analogy of social constructs which,

according to prevalent ideological and philosophical interpretations, have the capacity to resist

human control (and, one might add, influence those humans involved with them to act in certain,

predictable ways) (61). Life in this sense is not necessarily a kind of sentience that allows a

thing to determine a specific outcome, but more the capability or the potential to participate in an

“interstitial field of non-personal, ahuman forces” (Bennett 61). Bennett’s musings on the life of

metal also entail changing the question of identity from a physical to a metaphysical one: in other

words, it is already quite clearly understood what metal is, but not necessarily what metal can do.

This essentially Deleuzian question seeks to explain the potentiality which exists below the

surface of materiality. Tim’s grenade ceases to become an agential extension of his human body

49

once it leaves his hand, and even if he had a more well-defined sense of intention, it would still

be of little consequence to the unfolding of events after the grenade lands on the trail. The

grenade is itself a miniature galaxy of possibilities, a combination of atoms arranged in

crystalline structures of material and void, a fuse and firing mechanism, and explosive

substances. Even its means of exploding is indeterminate. Under normal circumstances, a

confluence of conditions and events and substances has guaranteed that it will explode, but how

that disintegration will transpire is unclear: as the grenade breaks apart,

the line of travel of these cracks is not deterministic but an expression of

emergent causality, whereby grains respond on the spot and in real time to

the idiosyncratic movements of their neighbors, and then to their

neighbors’ response to their response, and so on, in feedback spirals.

(Bennett 59)

To borrow an Epicurean term, the single entity which is the grenade – both in concert with, and a

result of, its manifold constituent parts – “swerves” out of its predictable object relationship with

a human and becomes its own causal agent, creating devastating physical effects which kill the

Vietnamese soldier.

The grenade proves to be a captivating figure not just in its power to make change, but

also in the very character of its changing. At an atomic level, the grenade is always changing in

some way as it exists in the world. That this change occurs below the threshold of the human

perceptual faculties only makes it appear as if the grenade is a solid and durable object.

However, at the instant it becomes efficient in its capacity to cause material change in the world

external to itself, its transformation happens too quickly for human perception to apprehend and

the grenade seems, in that instant, not only to cause but to become the materially-visible effects

50

of its own change. The grenade’s mercurial nature is not limited, however, to relationships with

entities which have either indistinct or questionable intentions. The power of the grenade

overcomes both the intentions and the physical fortitude of the Vietnamese man who tries to

protect himself from its blast, but the object can also be much more subtle in its subversion of

human will. Questions of intentionality aside, Tim and his grenade are working together in the

dynamic creation of a new present moment. In Going After Cacciato, however, the grenade

which eventually kills Lt. Martin has an unusual relationship to the will of the squad. Oscar

Johnson, as nominal ringleader, expects that all the members of the group touch the grenade

which he plans to drop behind Martin as he searches a VC tunnel. Several of the other soldiers

willfully touch the grenade, and Paul Berlin – absent-mindedly dreaming of camping in the

Wisconsin woods – does the same. Cacciato, separated from the group and fixated on attempting

to fish in a rainwater-filled bomb crater, allows the grenade to be forced into his hand despite

being opposed to the “fragging” of the lieutenant.

The community that forms around the grenade in this scene is not a community of

common will or intention, but a community which is responding to the bodily harm which

threatens all the squad members when Martin insists on searching the tunnels. Bennett muses

that when a public forms around a problem, the political action of that community becomes

something other than purely human since other embodied entities likely have some stake in the

outcome of the process, and that responsibility as such has more to do with responses to

emergent situations than it does with blame (101-2). There is an unusual moment when both

Berlin and Cacciato are touching the grenade since the brief amalgamation of the three entities

plays host to a complex operation of willpower. The other members of the squad have all

indicated their solidarity through touching the grenade, but in so doing have also invited the

51

grenade into their social assembly. Berlin is unsure if “[pressing] the grenade against Cacciato’s

limp hand” counts as “touching” or “volition,” but in a way it may not be all that important since,

in a practical sense, things are already in motion and, in an ethical sense, singular human

intention becomes vague when larger groups of actors are involved (247). It is easy to blame the

squad for agreeing to drop the grenade into a tunnel behind Martin, and it is easy to blame the

soldier who personally does the dropping. One might even blame the grenade for exploding.

But the difficulty with blame is that it becomes infinitely regressive and, after a point, somewhat

redundant. Blame is also commonly singular or compartmentalized, meaning that it would, for

instance, be somewhat easy to blame Cacciato – the group’s marginal outsider and last to touch

the grenade – for Martin’s eventual death since he, as the final member of the squad to do so, has

the added burden of being the “deciding vote” in this particular event. One might even seek to

lessen the soldiers’ culpability in the affair thanks to the “indirectness” of the grenade. However,

that the grenade in this case participates in, or is symbolic of, a situation where the assignation of

singular blame is extremely difficult, serves to articulate a system of ethics in which, despite any

internal disagreements, a community always speaks with one voice. All members of a

community are always and already part of that community’s presence in the world, and there is

within that community no privileged, objective position of non-involvement and non-

responsibility.

This kind of ethical positioning in Going After Cacciato is consistent with what Tim

articulates in The Things They Carried where he is unable to make the “right” moral choice since

he is presented with no satisfactory alternative. Considering a presumptive agent as always and

already implicated in a web of blame is in fact a radical departure from what Samuel Scheffler

calls “normative responsibility,” a moral paradigm in which agents are especially responsible

52

“for what they themselves do, as opposed to what they merely fail to prevent” (295). Normative

responsibility might allow Tim to escape blame as a draft dodger or conscientious objector since

a presumptive duty not to harm others directly, or join a group that does direct harm, could free

him from the social obligations which figure so prominently in his (and Paul Berlin’s) decision

to accept the draft notice. Scheffler notes that morality in general is closely tied to the “specific

web of roles and relationships that serve to situate a person in social space,” and the morality-as-

social-construct notion informs Paul’s moral quandary (295). Paul’s ambivalence toward

competing and mutually-exclusive moral obligations is a central theme in Going After Cacciato

(and also serves as the object of intense debate during the climactic Paris peace talks passage

which pits Sarkin’s idealism against Berlin’s pragmatism), but this is not the same problem

which Tim confronts. Though superficially similar in that there is no choice which serves both

obligations, the distinction between Tim’s and Paul’s senses of responsibility is fine, but

important. Paul imagines a relatively small moral world, in which, fundamentally, one either

chooses to serve the moral obligations of the socially close-at-hand, or not. Tim, however, is

simultaneously aware of what Scheffler terms “compelling duties to produce the greatest net

benefit globally,” as well as his domestic, social obligations (297). In addition, Tim realizes that

his social placement, and the institutions on which he relies for moral orientation, are responsible

for causing or facilitating harm on a global scale, and he is thus unable to find a means of

navigating his complex moral dilemma with the limited imperatives these problematic

institutions provide. In other words, institutionally-derived moral directives cannot be relied

upon to provide objective judgments on the institutions that produce them. Tim, similarly, feels

that it is never possible to obtain an objective distance, or become morally distinct, from the

social milieu that produces the very moral system he is trying to use. That the grenade, and the

53

community that forms around it, involves Cacciato in a situation where blame is vague makes

him an interesting – and perhaps unexpected – counterpart to Tim: both relationships to

community (Cacciato and the unit, Tim and the American Midwest), and relationships to things

(the grenade, and, broadly, the war,) broaden the concept of individual responsibility for macro-

political affairs by suggesting that positive action and efficient causation are not the only

morally-significant measures of involvement in an event.

iv. Losing the Silver Star: Seeking and Speaking Courage

“If I could have one wish, anything, I’d wish for my dad to write me a letter and say it’s

okay if I don’t win any medals. That’s all my old man talks about, nothing else. How he can’t

wait to see my goddamn medals” (TTTC 34). Norman Bowker’s anxieties over winning medals

for his military service in Vietnam introduce another kind of object into the fold of the military

engagement, an object which does not have a nominal home either in the domestic social sphere,

or in the world of armed combat. The medal, which is meant to symbolize or recognize military

service and distinguished conduct, originates in the theatre of war but achieves its most

meaningful performance in civilian life where it (presumably) establishes its bearer’s quality of

character. Alex Vernon notes that “being wounded and earning a medal in war have become in

Western culture two definitive signifiers of achieved manhood through martial action,” which

Regula Fuchs points out to be a case in which a “person [is] defined by military institutions”

(Vernon 216-7, Fuchs 127). Identity formation seems to be working in reverse in this situation

since the individual that presumably comes into existence as a result of various social,

ideological, and historical conditions is not confirmed in battle but rather made or re-made: in

other words, the medal is one of the most powerful symbols of war “making men.”

54

Graham Harman observes that the powerful social functioning of the medal is not merely

symbolic, but rather an example of the desire humans have to appropriate the qualities of objects

for themselves.

Contrary to the usual view, what we really want is to be objects – not as a

means to an end … , but in the sense that we want to be …distinct forces

to be reckoned with. … Although it may sound paradoxical, courage is

one of those moods in which we treat ourselves less as free subjects than

as objects. To perform a courageous act is not to behave as a free

transcendent self. … Rather, the unshakable core of the courage inside you

is simply the character … that does not change, that stands for something,

and that would rather be shattered by events than reconcile itself to

shameful compromise. I am courageous not as thinking subject, but as a

valiant leader or [a] tough-as-nails bastard. (Harman 140-1, emphasis in

original)

Neither Paul Berlin nor Tim have a particular interest in the “tough-as-nails bastard” paradigm of

military leadership, and indeed they both attempt to transcend their subject locations and human

failings through the worlds of imagination and storytelling. What is more, Tim concludes that he

cannot be brave, that there is no moral or spiritual reserve in him that can suddenly be tapped in

order to produce admirable behavior, and Berlin points out that the “real issue [is] courage,” a

quantity that is quite different from other similar ideas like bravery or valor (81). Courage,

which Berlin defines as “the power of will to defeat fear,” is in fact not a strictly martial concept

at all, and is one of the few conceptual entities about which The Things They Carried and Going

After Cacciato display some degree of idealism (81).

55

Courage, a quality which emerges as a result of the competing values of will and fear, is

for O’Brien’s characters somewhat more contingent than Harman suggests. Doc Peret’s

discourse on the metaphysics of air conditioning proves to be a rather strange analogue to the

functioning of courage when he describes disassembling an air conditioner as a child and

trying to figure out where the cold came from. … I tore out the damned

guts. But no box. Couldn’t find the cold. My old man, he went buggy

when he saw the mess. ‘You stupid so-and-so,’ he says. ‘There isn’t any

box. It’s a machine, it makes the cold.’ But I still didn’t get it. I kept

thinking there’s got to be a place inside where all the cold was. (GAC 145,

emphasis in original)

It is clearly bizarre to think of a condition like “cold” as a substance that may be stored, and

similarly peculiar to consider “cold” as a self-contained quantity with no relative dimension: how

would prepackaged “cold,” for instance, remain so if the surrounding environment were to

become, in relation to the cold, colder? There is no way for cold to be objectively placed outside

of the world and to remain a constant, and O’Brien’s formulation of courage behaves in a similar

fashion. A young and naïve Tim hopes that a “reservoir of courage” will, in high-stakes

situations, provide him with a kind of strength he lacks in day-to-day affairs, and Berlin,

likewise, believes in a “biological center for the exercise of courage” (TTTC 37, GAC 81). Tim

and Paul’s thoughts on courage form a dialogue with Harman’s formulation, and that Harman’s

courage is constant rather than emergent suggests that his quantity represents something closer to

fearlessness whose unthinking and irrational ignorance of danger is, in fact, highly dangerous.

Paul and Tim’s thinking subjectivity, or the ability to overcome danger through willpower, is in

fact the basis for the ethical dimension of courage and the reason that they both find their

56

particular “[failures] of nerve” so devastating (TTTC 154). In relation to fearlessness, doing the

right thing is purely accidental; but in terms of courage, doing the right thing involves an

exercise of intention and agency.

The difficulty, of course, is that human agency and intentionality do not exist as the

universally effective forces that courage, when thought about this way, requires: neither of these

quantities constitute – nor could they constitute – Harman’s unshakeable core. Norman Bowker

has every intention of saving Kiowa, but blames himself for being incapable of tolerating the

foul smell of the field, flooded with standing water and sewage (TTTC 147). However, Bowker

is also physically incapable of overcoming the downward suction of the mud which is rapidly

filling the impact crater and carrying Kiowa along with it, regardless of other factors: even after

some digging with entrenching tools, it takes five men to extract Kiowa’s body from the muck

(167). It should be clear from this situation that the difference between courage and cowardice is

not definitive and universal, but quite circumstantial. Furthermore, the distinction between those

who win medals and those who do not is similarly circumstantial: “many brave men do not win

medals for their bravery, and others … win medals for doing nothing” (TTTC 135). The

cynicism on display towards the value of the medal is not unexpected (Bowker does hold seven

other medals, including a Purple Heart for a wound “that did not hurt and never had”) and

reveals a rather unexpected parallel between Norman’s debacle in the field and Tim’s

predicament as a draftee on the Rainy River (135). Both Norman and Tim are faced with a

situation in which not acting is considered to be a failure, while the possibility of acting

effectively is always and already foreclosed. While these dual situations may shed some light on

Tim’s cryptic metafictional comment at the end of the chapter entitled “Notes” that losing the

Silver Star is a part of the story which is “[his] own,” the impossibility of saving Kiowa also

57

explicates one of the more confusing elements of Bowker’s story, that he had “lost” the Silver

Star as a result of his inability to save his comrade. Bowker, of course, never has the medal in

the first place: rather than thinking of the medal as an object with a physical reality, it occupies a

conceptual space in which it is “always” lost.

Using the example of Mark Twain’s lamentations over the loss of his house becoming an

expression of the grief he feels for the death of his daughter, Bill Brown suggests that one might

grieve the death of the person by way of a lost or otherwise absent object (50). Moreover,

Brown notes that “material possession comes to substitute for human relation,” and also that

accumulating possessions is a “hopeless effort” at distinguishing oneself from others in a

democratic humanist system where the value of all individuals is (presumably) equal (50, 48).

These notions resonate with Bowker’s story since not only the death of Kiowa, but also the

alienation from his father and his hometown weigh heavily on him, and it is unlikely a

physically-present Silver Star medal would be able to fix these problems. However, Brown’s

comments fall a bit short in explaining how an object – the Silver Star, in this case – resists

defining or augmenting the nominal human subject to which it is attached. Graham Harman’s

intimation that courage is object-like in its unassailable power seems to posit at least the

possibility of representing or signifying it with another object. However, as Tim relates,

“courage [is] not always a matter of yes or no. Sometimes it [comes] in degrees” (141). The

medal, as an object, is always clear in its existence, and is always, Harman argues, “sincere” in

that it is never anything but itself (Guerilla Metaphysics 143). But courage is always a potential,

and is always conditional in terms of the colliding forces of will and fear. While the

metaphysical depths of a Silver Star may remain unknown, it does have substantive and

relational qualities, a mass, and a shape. It cannot, however, exist as a substitute for the

58

changeable, conceptual substance of courage. It is impossible to define what courage is (it is

neither intention, as seen in Bowker’s story, nor is it dependent upon result, as those who have

medals for doing nothing attest), let alone to reproduce or articulate it faithfully with something

else, a “something” that, no doubt, has its own internal ambiguities and uncertainties.

That one cannot simply use a thing to represent or signify something else with a

meaningful degree of verisimilitude has some rather profound implications. If the Silver Star is

always in a state of loss, it is because the medal as an object cannot effectively encapsulate or

perform “courage” since courage itself cannot be reduced to a certain quantity: it is always

emerging through competing forces in the human, the world, and the elements of which they are

both constructed. In terms of its prosthetic value, the medal also falls short since it can never

conjure courage, or capture courage in its moment of becoming: the access that the medal allows

its bearer to “courage” as an entity in the world is extremely limited since the conditions which

are needed to produce courage do not recur, and courage thus cannot be brought back to life

through a memento. The prosthetic shortcomings of Bowker’s and Berlin’s “lost medal” should

also serve as a warning about the shortcomings of other prosthetic objects, be they the objects of

conspicuous consumption used to communicate individuality, or intellectual substances like

political ideology (and, at a more basic level, language itself), that emerge from and influence the

relationships between objects. Representation is a poor substitute for the thing itself, and this is a

constant, irresolvable frustration for the human subject that, enamored of authenticity, always

finds the real thing falling just beyond reach. Bill Brown provocatively states that “only the

missing thing is utterly distinct,” and this suggests what is so compelling about the absent object,

whatever it may be, and however it may exist: no thing which is “here” is a true thing to aim at,

and it is only through inaccessibility rather than a durable, obstinate presence, that the values and

59

meanings of objects seem to become clear (50). In a moment of idealism, Paul Berlin feels that

his great fear carries with it an equally great promise of future courage, and feels “a Silver Star

twinkling inside him,” a perpetual potential that accords with his fixation on possibilities (81).

However, the Star itself remains staunch in its resistance to human access as the only person who

wins it, Bernie Lynn, only does so in death (85). As problematic as a focus on possibilities and

metafictive truths might be, there is something equally dubious about certainties, particularly the

ultimate certainty of death.

Although it may be somewhat simplistic to suggest that both of the novels in question are

concerned mainly with uncertainty, the anxiety attending a draftee’s general lack of control over

his own life is a significant emotional dimension of both Going After Cacciato and The Things

They Carried. But this lack of control is not restricted merely to being forced to do something

one does not want to do: rather, both Tim and Paul feel a high degree of alienation from their

homes and their families both for political and ethical reasons. Berlin, occupying a relatively

small moral world of limited accountability, cannot find the courage to turn away from the

networks which do him harm. Tim, although somewhat more mature in his ability to see that he

has accountabilities to people and principles beyond those which might be found in his

immediate family, hometown, and various cultural myths, is still unable to navigate his “moral

split” and consequently deems his own uncertainty to be deserving of moral blame. However,

the assemblages of objects with which Tim and Paul interact not only militate against their

nominal ability to control the situations in which they are involved, but also demonstrate that the

human ability to control situations as such is much more limited than these characters might

think. Whether it is the objects of home which cease to provide a sense of ease and belonging,

the domestic objects that refuse to draw a hard line between civil and military spheres of human

60

life, the military objects which extend and even appropriate the physical agency of the humans

who wield them, or, finally, the absent objects which illustrate human life to be a perpetual state

of loss, the things at work in O’Brien’s novels not only confound the humans with whom they

coexist, but also undermine the supposed uniqueness of the single human as a responsible entity

in the world.

61

Chapter Three: Wasted: The Human Body as Object

Can the human body be removed from its place atop the hierarchy of agential entities in

the material world? That the body is not solely a manipulator of material objects, but in fact

responds to the presence of material objects in a host of ways, even going so far as to achieve

new ranges of possibility for being in the world through an extensive capacity for prosthetic

interactions with all kinds of foreign objects, raises the question of what the human body actually

is. More provocatively, one might wonder if, or to what extent, the human body is actually a

man-made object. The suggestion of the artificiality of the human body does not mean to imply

that there is something industrial and unnatural in the creation of the human body as such, but

rather that the human body as a notional construct is something other than the human body as it

exists in the material world. The creation of this ontological difference between the body and

other objects (even objects consisting of the same materials) leads to the emergence of the

exceptional human, a jointly physical and rational entity which is always superior to, more

important, and more valuable than any other entity with which it has contact. The human body

nonetheless functions largely as the instrument of rational consciousness: after all, the body is

the vehicle for human consciousness to move about in the world, and the means by which the

human mind makes its agential mark on the universe.

The problem with thinking of the human body as the instrument of human reason lies in

the deeply-ingrained paradigm of instrumentalizing the human body as such, or making any

human body the subject of the rational will of any other human, either systematically in terms of

the subjugation of racial, ethnic, or sexual others, or individually in terms of exploitative

personal relations. Jane Bennett suggests that it is politically and ethically useful to think of “all

bodies [as] kin” since they are “inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations,” but this

62

thinking may gloss over another dimension of kinship which lies within human bodies

themselves (13): all bodies are the products of an internal network of relations as well. These

competing networks recall Graham Harman’s thinking on the Heideggerean fourfold of the

thing, in which one axis describes the degree to which the essence of the thing is located

somewhere between its unified wholeness and its plurality of parts. Does the human body, then,

exist more meaningfully as a unified entity, interacting with other entities in the world, or does it

have more value as a confederation of tissues, structures, fluids, chemicals, electrical impulses,

and microbial organisms which combine and react with one another to construct an apparently

unified entity? This question is perhaps one of humanity’s more troubling philosophical

quandaries since it may be impossible to determine whether reality, authenticity, and value are

inherent in the qualities of unity or diversity, a problem which encompasses the relative

valuations of human bodies and social structures, the worth of objects, and even the value of

fictional versus historical records and their respective pursuits of meaningful narratives.

Thinking around the human body, however, gravitates towards the valorization of the unified

whole, rather than the plurality of its constituent parts, and such thinking allows for the creation

of a simplified estimate of the relative value of bodies, a value which, essentially, may be only

skin-deep, leading to an ideological privileging of certain phenotypes or physiologies.

Moreover, this intellectual approach informs the distaste felt toward disfigurement,

dismemberment, and disability. While it is not philosophically jejune to hope for the continued

attachment of all of one’s body parts to one another in normally-prescribed ways, the fact that

the privative prefix dis is attached to the three conditions above suggests that anything other than

the whole is always and already significantly less than the whole in both material and intellectual

terms.

63

The body is perhaps the ultimate fetishized object of human desire not just in terms of

physical appetites, but also in terms of philosophical importance. The human body, of course, is

“the real thing,” with each body an original piece of (genetic) craftsmanship. Bill Brown

describes the “ideal fetishized thing” as an object which is “saved from the tyranny of use, from

the instrumental, utilitarian reason that has come to seem modernity’s greatest threat to mankind”

(Sense 8). Even if all human bodies are nominally alike one another, the indissoluble

combination of each individual consciousness with a unique human body presumably renders the

“mass production” of bodies – even through genetic replication – impossible. However, the

conditioning of individuals into military troops and the forcible suppression of individuality in

favour of subordination to the will of another, be it a superior officer or, more broadly, the will

of “the mission,” results not necessarily in mass production, but rather in a kind of consolidation

or homogenization. The bodies and minds of individuals not bred for war are remade in order to

be more amenable to the disciplinary requirements of military service. This process is no more

or less “natural” than the training and conditioning of the human body and mind to function

within any other social and cultural construct, but it nonetheless seems intellectually troubling

since it apparently involves conditioning the individual to accept collectivization and also be

susceptible to instrumentalisation at the hands of single human agents or small groups

empowered to make decisions in support of political or military goals that may not be in the best

interests of the individual. A difficulty arises, then, when the human individual, which has a

nominally autonomous ability to move about the world and effect change, exists on the one hand

as a self-contained and self-governing entity, while existing, on the other, as a part which serves

a utilitarian function within a larger whole. More troubling is the notion that the whole may have

64

ends which are not commensurate with the well-being of the individual, but still uses the

individual – or, more specifically, the individual’s body – as a means to achieve those ends.

Regula Fuchs points out that discussions of war often focus on political and ideological

issues, and that this diverts attention from the efficient, material dimension of conflict which

involves the destruction of human bodies for a nominal cause until the belligerents on one side

“[give] in and no longer [find] the sacrifice of human beings worth the ideologies fought for”

(110). These thoughts are analogous to Susan Jeffords’s theorizing of technology within the

Vietnam war context, thinking which entails the separating of the tools of war from their

ostensible effects and creating, instead, a “theater … [of] objects for display” (9). Indeed,

Jeffords describes at length how the soldier’s body (specifically, John Rambo’s) becomes a

fetishized object for display as the ultimate technology of war since it can always “present a new

performance, a different look,” unlike other military items whose materially efficient capacities

are more circumscribed (12). Jeffords’s compelling structure of significance, which entails a

fluid relationship between the technical thing and the soldier’s body (if not a conflation of the

two into one and the same thing), should provoke the re-thinking of the ways in which martial

objects are treated. There is, furthermore, a fundamental disconnect between the mythic socio-

political values of individualism and heroism and the essential mass-production of soldierly

bodies through boot camp and basic training. Sara Ruddick notes that the soldier is not a

naturally-occurring, sui generis entity. If it were, one “would not need drafts, training in

misogyny, and macho heroes, nor would [one] have to entice the morally sensitive with myths of

patriotic duty and just cause” in order to assemble a fighting force (152). The de-

individualization which occurs in the creation of soldiers actively moves them out of the

65

exceptional realm of humanity and places them with the other nominally-expendable things

which populate the landscape of war.

The implications for the mass-production of obedient human bodies are two-fold. First,

this is yet another reason to reconsider the blameworthiness of groups or states which, though

they do not participate in a conflict through donating soldiers in support of one of the competing

ideologies, are complicit in terms of providing one side with arms or goods. Second, the soldiers

whose bodies become part-and-parcel of military technology and are needed either to carry or to

operate it are, to some degree, also expendable (16). (Jeffords, in fact, argues that soldiers are

“designed for the technology,” rather than the other way around (16).) Thus, Regula Fuchs’s

“sacrifice of human beings” becomes the sacrifice of expendable objects, but this thinking of

course does not accord well with the political requirements of war’s meta-narrative of patriotism,

honor, and duty. The notional “hero” is in fact needed to dissimulate the disposability of the

soldier, and the narrative heroism of the monolithic Hollywood creations which Sylvester

Stallone, Chuck Norris, and John Wayne embody end up fulfilling a dual function as they are

simultaneously one small, technical part of the greater whole, and spectacular individuals whose

singular abilities and unique service to their nation are both durable and irreplaceable. The

human body is caught in a philosophical double-bind, objectified and instrumentalized either

way as a utilitarian part among other parts, or, seemingly, as one of Graham Harman’s “forces to

be reckoned with” in the service of some larger (and typically vague) agenda (140). There is an

interesting doubleness of thought at work in terms of the spectacle of military technology as

divorced from its effects, since the body of the soldier appears to be celebrated in a similar way,

as a thing and not as a body. Given the extent to which things are discarded, destroyed, or

wasted in this context, the thought that thing and body may become one and the same should

66

lead to an undoing of human exceptionalism that, rather than removing questions surrounding the

ethics of using bodies in war, actually intensifies them. In other words, is the relatively “poor”

treatment which things receive at the hands of humans permissible, and is it emblematic of a

certain disdain which human individuals have for the bodies of others and, indeed, their own?

If, as Fuchs argues, soldiers “lend their bodies to the state in order to substantiate beliefs

and ideals,” then the state must take responsibility for the harm done to those bodies and also for

the beliefs and ideals whose defense occasions that harm (111). This responsibility should be

even more pronounced in situations such as those found in The Things They Carried and Going

After Cacciato where the protagonists are drafted, and the nature of their consent to “lend” their

bodies to a state cause is vague. It is neither overly compelling nor particularly honest

intellectually to believe that one-time consent (particularly if such consent is provided under

duress) places responsibility solely on the recruits both for what they do, and what is done to

them over the course of their military service. In the introduction to New Materialisms:

Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost contemplate the continuing

conceptual and ontological divide between humanity’s material and ethical responsibilities to the

globe’s natural environment and the entities which reside within it (16). However, thinking

about the treatment to which human bodies are subject not just in armed conflict but in other

kinds of systematic, state-sanctioned violence (such as punitive justice) changes when the

comfortable paradigm of the effective, rational, unitary human agent is broken down as a result

of material and philosophical accountability becoming more diffuse. What, then, is actually “on

trial” when a collective entity levels questions of innocence or guilt against an individual who is

not only part of it, but also clearly subject to the pressures of that same collective’s will? Using

the example of able versus disabled bodies, Karen Barad suggests that the other is “not radically

67

outside the self” since both categories of being are mutually dependent on one another for

definition, and it is only the “luxury of taking for granted the nature of [one’s able] body” that

degrades the disabled (158). What if Barad’s thought referred to political and ideological bodies,

rather than physical ones? The flow of ethical judgements could then be reversed to reflect, in

the collective, the culpabilities it locates in the individual.

i. Who is the Man I Killed?

There are certain critical approaches to the section of The Things They Carried entitled

“The Man I Killed” which suggest that Tim’s retroactive construction of a life story for the

shattered corpse lying on the trail near My Khe is an act of colonialism in which the

(presumably) white subject inscribes his own story on a Viet Cong soldier; an act of misogyny as

the narrator remarks on the dead man’s feminized features; or a distracting echo chamber of male

victimisation. However, to obtain a better sense of what this short chapter does, it may be useful

to consider an episode from another novel to which Tim’s story bears striking similarity. “Coup

de Grâce,” the fifth chapter of Robin Moore’s The Green Berets, is concerned with Henri “the

cowboy” Huyot, a French guerilla commander responsible for the execution-style death of an

American, and Green Beret Major Fritz Scharne’s quest for revenge. As a novel which may be

trying to be more sensational than cerebral, Moore’s efforts to cast the early days of the Vietnam

war as a remake of the old west deservedly bear their share of criticism. Renny Christopher

notes that the chapter’s focus on the battle between Scharne and Huyot not only relegates the

Vietnamese combatants to a secondary role, but also serves a political function in that it sidesteps

issues of cultural ignorance and makes the engagement “a battle of white men versus white men”

(205). Scharne eventually kills the retreating cowboy with a grenade (albeit one fired from a

68

grenade launcher), and the depiction of the dying cowboy should be familiar to those acquainted

with “The Man I Killed”:

The fourth round landed squarely in front of the cowboy and stopped him

as though he had run into an invisible wall. He was hurled backward to

the ground. … Huyot was still alive when I reached him, though almost

unrecognizable. His handsome face had been torn badly by shrapnel, his

nose lying on his cheek. Blood burbled from ugly rents in his bare chest.

Wounds in his arms, groin, and legs bled profusely. His eyes were open,

fixed on Scharne who stood looking down at him.

Huyot’s lips moved but no words would come.

Other Rangers gathered to look at the formidable cowboy, barely

identifiable as a Caucasian now except perhaps for his great size. Scharne

stared down at him impassively until finally with a grating moan Huyot

gave in to his wounds and died.

Fritz turned from the dead Frenchman to me. “He knew who I

was. He knew who it was got him.” …

I was still staring at the appalling damage the [grenade launcher’s]

shell had done to the lately big, strong body of Henri Huyot. Scharne

looked back at the victim of the M-79. “ … I’d have let him get away

alive if it hadn’t been for what he did to Andy Bellman.” (172-3)

There are some notable differences between the cowboy and the young soldier who appears in

The Things They Carried. The cowboy, of course, is alive when the narrator and Major Scharne

find him, and there are several moments of macho bravado while the special forces officer

69

ensures that the cowboy knows who it was that was responsible for his death. The cowboy’s

disfigurement, though graphic, is somewhat less brutal than that of the Vietnamese soldier, but

the narrator’s comment regarding the Huyot’s obscured whiteness fit well with the cowboy’s

doubly villainous role as not only an enemy commander but also a turncoat, throwing in with the

communistic “natives” instead of his fellow western/European capitalists. Perhaps the most

disturbing image of the dying cowboy is his disfigured nose almost completely torn from his

face, and lying sadly on his cheek.

Although it is not clear if O’Brien intentionally re-writes Moore’s scene in order to

convey a contrary message, the “undamaged” nose of the man Tim describes does seem to

indicate something more than a merely coincidental similarity between the two episodes (118).

Robert Vadas notes that Vietnamese soldiers applied the derogatory term “crooked nose” to

Caucasian individuals (xiii), so the cowboy’s facial disfiguration entails a blurring of his

racialized identity, while the extreme trauma which Tim’s soldier suffers as a result of the

grenade explosion – “[his] jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye

was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole” – does not entail the same kind of blurring or

erasure (TTTC 118). The young man also falls into the category of what Tim later calls “a body

without a name,” a categorization that seems to entail a certain degree of colonial silencing of

character through either the denial or ignorance of the name as one of the primary means by

which individuals relate to their social environments (213). However, this approach assumes

that the use of the name remains uncoloured by political, ethnic, and social biases, or even

outright obliviousness to the structures and conventions of naming. (Renny Christopher, for

instance, excoriates Tim O’Brien for “allowing” Paul Berlin to imagine Vietnamese characters

with names which are both factually inaccurate and unpronounceable in Vietnamese (230-2)).

70

Moreover, thinking of names so rigidly also overlooks the fact that naming might also generate

assumptions about ethnicity and family history, or engender opinions about relative moral or

cultural quality. Moore, for instance, uses Henri Huyot’s French background to construct him as

an inherently untrustworthy character, and also uses the “cowboy” epithet to cast the complex

Vietnam conflict as nothing more than a test of American frontier mettle.

The young man’s nameless body wavers between an unknowable abstraction and a

concrete reality. Like all of Tim’s deceased characters, the young man lives a “new life” in

death as part of the story. But he also lives a double life since his body “[seems] animate even in

death” as blood continues to flow from the fatal neck wound, sunlight “[sparkles] against the

buckle of his ammunition belt,” and the angle at which his head has come to rest gives him the

appearance of “staring at some distant object beyond the bell-shaped flowers along the trail”

(122, 123). While this scene nominally relates that the human body as a material entity still has

the capability of “doing” things even if human life processes no longer animate it, the soldier

becomes part of the novel’s broader project, which Tim relates in the final section of The Things

They Carried.

Inside the body, or beyond the body, there is something absolute and

unchanging. The human life is all one thing, like a blade tracing loops on

ice: a little kid, a twenty-three-year-old infantry sergeant, a middle-aged

writer knowing guilt and sorrow.

And as a writer now, I want to save Linda’s life. Not her body –

her life. (223)

Tim later describes his storytelling as “a way of bringing body and soul back together,” a way of

finding a synergy between the phenomenal experience of the story – which, as Graham Harman

71

relates, has a reality to it even if it is imagined (155-6) – and the phenomenal experience of the

dead human body. Tim struggles with this problem repeatedly in The Things They Carried as he

tries to understand and explain the truth of the war through fiction, pseudo-fiction, and memory,

and Paul Berlin contends with the same problem, though articulated in the context of the

imaginary “million wars” conversation between Doc Peret and Fahyi Rhallon. “[When] a war is

ended, it is as if there have been a million wars, or as many wars as there were soldiers,” Rhallon

contends (GAC 196). Peret rejoins that “[the] war itself has an identity separate from

perception,” a way of thinking which applies not only to war stories, but also to the general

nature of truth and the metaphysical nature of all objects, including the human body (196).

Unlike the cowboy, the young soldier dies with one eye closed, and the other obliterated,

meaning that he cannot see who it was that killed him. Although the killing was indirect (and

reliant upon the vitality of a hand grenade), it is not necessarily an abstraction. Azar, a soldier

who loves “[the] Vietnam experience,” is comfortable making the VC soldier an abstraction,

suggesting that Tim “laid him out like Shredded … Wheat” (202,119). Attempting to fill the

void beyond or beneath the apparent physical boundaries of the man’s existence as

circumscribed within the shattered body, however, Tim finds the invention of the soldier’s back

story ultimately disturbing. The “constellation of possibilities” that, in death, the man’s life

becomes, constitutes the ultimate unknowability of another individual and, indeed, any object

with which one relates on a purely phenomenal level (122). It may be argued that Tim’s

invented story of the Vietnamese man as an unwilling soldier is so close to his own that it

obscures or eradicates the soldier’s “real” story, but the invented narrative has some more

meaningful functions. Although Tim’s story could be (and likely is) entirely unrelated to the

soldier’s actual history, it demonstrates the possibility of fundamental similarities between

72

American and Vietnamese soldiers. Furthermore, Tim’s story suggests that immediate material

realities of the soldier’s life do not entail all of the significant dimensions of his entire existence.

One might criticise Tim for attempting to imagine his way out of guilt for the death of his

Vietnamese counterpart under a flimsy pretext of “resurrecting” him through storytelling, but,

more importantly, Tim’s creation of the story and the awareness of possibilities contradicts

Kiowa’s deterministic opinion that the man’s death was a foregone conclusion since the narrative

becomes an exploration of how the current state of affairs has come to be, rather than a

disavowal of whatever degree of personal responsibility he might have for it.

By considering possibilities, Tim not only elevates the enemy soldier above the level of

abstraction, but also approaches blame and responsibility from something other than a humanist

perspective. Choices made at a community, national, or international level can create outcomes

and establish culpability (fairly or unfairly) on an individual level. In other words, conditions

combine to produce an outcome that is not the sole responsibility of the individual, and, in fact,

may be out of the individual’s control entirely. It is naïve to suggest that one may know all the

details of the soldier’s true history, or, indeed, the realities that, existing below the veneer of

phenomenally relatable elements of the human body, are at the core of every individual. It is

similarly naïve to suggest that familiarity with, or myth-making around, a body, even one’s own,

allows for an exhaustive understanding of that body, or the individual of which it is a part.

Harman states that “any object … has a reality that can be endlessly explored and viewed from

numberless perspectives,” and while some perspectives are no doubt more valuable than others,

strictures of physicality and shortcomings of philosophy or politics limit the range of

perspectives available at a given time or in a given location (76). But, to attempt to transcend the

limitations of perspective in order to approach the unknowable has some significant ethical

73

implications, not the least of which is the appreciation of the fact that the marks which

individuals make on other entities cannot be conflated with the reality or the “meaning” of those

entities in and of themselves. Thus, the abstract otherness of an enemy casualty as shredded

wheat, limited in the ability only to be “done to”, can be more fully reimagined in terms of its

similarity to the self and its ability to “do,” an ability which, Barad suggests, forecloses the

other’s being “[radically] outside … the self” (178). The man Tim kills lives on in this story and

“in the stories of his village and people,” both of which recognise his existence as more than an

instrument and nameless body (124).

ii. Body Parts: The Allure of Disfigurement and Captivating Fragments

Narrator Tim of The Things They Carried is highly interested in preserving the unity

between life and body, even if the two are reintegrated only in narrative. However, Tim’s

uncertainty about the nature of the body makes the amalgamation of the material with the

notional very difficult. Like any object, the body as both a material and mental concept is easier

to consider as a unitary entity, even though it is always, and simultaneously, a plurality of parts.

Regula Fuchs points out Tim O’Brien’s characteristic style of description, a style which she

terms the “multisensory approach,” is an effective means of drawing readers into his scenes

through “visual, auditory, tactile and kinaesthetic” stimulation (183-4). The approach, though

effective, once again underscores the complex relationship that exists between the telling of a

story and its representation of “truth” where the various sensory dimensions of an event

surround, but never fully articulate, the event itself. While the retelling of certain events such as

the deaths of Curt Lemon or Kiowa allows for the creation of different perspectives that may

create a deeper understanding of the “truth” of the events, the contemplation of possibilities from

74

several perspectives and in terms of numerous sensory responses seems to emphasize the

plurality of the perceiving bodies as entities which are interacting with their environment in a

number of discrete ways. The truth of an event, to the extent that it can be apprehended, is

always the result of piecing together the effects of various stimuli into a kind of collage rather

than creating a unified portrait. The perpetual failure to achieve definitive unity raises the

ultimate question of whether things ever coalesce into a meaningful whole, and, if so, what the

effects of such a whole might be.

Wholeness, which is obviously difficult to construct within a community of perceptual

entities, often exists as a philosophical and ideological virtue unto itself. This preference may be

the result of the preconceived notion of wholeness on the level of the individual, a wholeness

which comes into question when an object-oriented approach is used to consider the nature of the

human body. The notion of a unitary whole in terms of the body has two dimensions. The first is

a pseudo-theistic unity of body and “life,” and the second is the material unity of the body as an

entity which depends, for its physical and metaphysical significance, on a seamless integration of

its constituent elements into a whole which is more than a sum of its proverbial parts. To

consider the body in this manner, however, involves a simplification of what the body actually is,

ignoring, for instance, its relationship to the things it engages as prosthetics and also the colonies

of microorganisms with which it enjoys symbiotic relationships. Further, the simplistic

construction of the body as a fully self-contained entity knowable only as a whole also reduces it

to the level of an instrument that is easily manipulated and governable. The predisposition to

think of wholeness as desirable, and dividedness or partialness as unpleasant, seems comfortable

enough. But in the context of these novels, the considerations of the human body as a simplified

whole serves as a means of ignoring or at least deferring the unsettling emotional effects of

75

death. Alex Vernon describes the process of soldiers giving one another nicknames as a way of

both using “depersonalization as an emotional defense mechanism” and as a means of

developing a surrogate community filled with “provisional identities useful for intersquad

dynamics” (215, 216). Some names are rather vague (Stink, Doc), others involve animals (Rat,

Buff), and some involve objects or substances (Ready Mix). The narrator of Going After

Cacciato relates that “[names bring] men together, true, but they [can] also put vast distances

between them,” and the Ready Mix name comes not as a result of disdain for the soldier so much

as disdain for the soldier’s rank, earned in “three months of stateside schooling” (146). Only

serving with the squad for twelve days, Ready Mix’s quick death makes a mockery of his

advanced training, but is unironic to the enlisted men who never expect him to amount to

anything more than another tombstone in the “Cement City” (146).

There does not appear to be much difficulty in thinking about Ready Mix, the soldier, as

a walking, talking grave stone since both the soldier and the monument appear as

undifferentiated and unitary entities. However, the death of Ted Lavender, though employing

similar imagery, is much more disturbing for Kiowa. While there is some absurdity in the fact

that Ready Mix’s death, remembered as largely worthless even though it came during an actual

battle rather than as a result of incidental enemy contact or booby trap, the irony of Lavender’s

death is much more pronounced. Like most of O’Brien’s characters, Lavender’s death is less

than heroic as he is shot in the head after leaving the unit to urinate, “[zapped] while zipping”

(TTTC 16). Remarkable for Kiowa is the fact that Lavender goes down without any “twitching

or flopping … – not like the movies where the dead guy rolls around and does fancy spins and

goes ass over tea kettle” (6). On the contrary, Lavender’s death is sudden and unequivocal:

“Boom. Down. Nothing else,” and both Kiowa and Tim reach similar conclusions about the

76

instantaneous but irreversible change which Lavender’s body has undergone. Kiowa describes

Lavender’s body as going down like a rock, a sandbag, or like cement, and Tim, likewise,

describes Lavender as going “down under an exceptional burden, more than 20 pounds of

ammunition, plus the flak jacket and helmet and rations and water and toilet paper and

tranquilizers and all the rest” (6). Perhaps because Lavender makes use of drugs to combat his

fear of the war and lighten the mental burden of various psychological and military pressures, in

death he becomes yet another object amidst the constellation of things which he carries, and this

is deeply troubling for the other soldiers. Tim notes that the euphemisms which the soldiers use

for being killed (such as greased, lit up, offed, or zapped) mean that “dying isn’t [quite] dying,”

but this thinking does not accord with the shock that attends Lavender’s death (19). In spite of

Kiowa’s attempts to convince himself otherwise, there is nothing metaphoric about Lavender’s

“boom, down” death at all.

Aside from Tim’s constant paradox of fiction being truthful, and the truth being fictional,

his narratives often hinge on a particular kind of positive and negative uncertainty. Rather than

suggesting that he simply does not know the truth about some aspect of the war, Tim creates a

world which explores both possibilities. There is the contradictory nature of the things which

soldiers carry as “a means of killing or staying alive,” and also the unassuming but resonant

assertion that “[imagination is] a killer,” a statement which contradicts Tim’s nominal purpose of

saving “lives” through narrative and storytelling (7, 10). Tim is similarly ambivalent about

Lavender, relating that Rat Kiley “[says] the obvious, the guy’s dead,” but later recalling that

Kiley’s description of Ted’s condition has a note of incredulity: “the guy’s dead. The guy’s

dead, he [keeps] saying, which [seems] profound – the guy’s dead. I mean really” (7, 10). That

Lavender’s death is both normal and shocking, both obvious and profound, speaks to Tim’s

77

trademark uncertainty, but also calls attention to a particular ambivalence towards the value of

the body, and the degree to which bodies waver between being individuals themselves, or just a

shell, some kind of relational vehicle, for the individual. Although Lavender becomes “dead

weight” in the narrative’s first section, Tim’s revisiting of Lavender’s body in the final section of

the work shows the group of soldiers combatting their comrade’s “deadness” by having a

conversation with it/him (218). Mitchell Sanders provides questions, and several nameless

soldiers respond in Lavender’s characteristic, tranquilized manner. It is the experience of death

that draws the soldiers closer to one another, but that also allows Lavender the flexibility to

occupy multiple positions as a corpse, an interlocutor, and a memory.

As Tim and his fellow soldiers are always attempting to minimize or undo the

fundamental disharmony which is the separation of “life” from the human body, The Things

They Carried seems to communicate a consistent view that the unitary nature of an object (either

the living human body, a social community, or an ideological construct) is the most meaningful

way to understand its significance in the world. This notion accords with one of the work’s

nominal ethical aims, which is to communicate that the responsibility for what transpires during

war is not placed solely on soldiers, commanders, strategists, or politicians, and also to maintain

that indirect involvement is not reasonable grounds for escaping blame. Furthermore, the notion

of unitary being is commensurate with Jane Bennett’s view that, in a world where events come

about as the result of the interrelated actions of numerous agents co-located within a web of

causation, “to harm one section of the web may very well be to harm oneself” (13). Serving to

reinforce this conception of the singular or unitary entity as, if not superior, at least preferable to

the entity which exists as plurality of parts are the recurrent figures of dismemberment and

disfigurement that appear throughout both The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato.

78

Such images of physical trauma to human bodies generally accompany descriptions of death,

with most deceased characters having significant facial mutilation either graphically described or

alluded to. Tim’s Viet Cong soldier is seen memorably with his “jaw … in his throat,” and Ted

Lavender is described in similar terms: “[he] lay with his mouth open. The teeth were broken.

There was a swollen black bruise under his left eye. The cheekbone was gone” (12). Buff, in

Going After Cacciato, is also shot in the head during combat and found, almost inexplicably,

with his face detached from his body and lying in his overturned helmet (284-5). Frenchie

Tucker suffers a catastrophic facial injury as he is shot through the nose while entering a tunnel,

and even Billy Boy Watkins, though ostensibly dying of shock after triggering a land mine, dies

with an unnaturally-contorted expression frozen on his face (65, 217).

The damage to the body which these men suffer is provocative not only for its

gruesomeness but also for the fact that the disfigurements, though a hideous result of the means

by which the men were killed, are generally not fatal in and of themselves. They can easily and

productively be read as emblems of the need for psychological reconstruction after the

experience of traumatic events (indeed, as Mark Heberle has shown, this is one of the most

compelling readings of O’Brien’s war novels), but the trauma reading may not be of exclusive

value. Graham Harman’s concept of allure, in which “the intimate bond between a thing’s unity

and its plurality of notes somehow partially disintegrates,” seems to describe the persistence of

these images of disfigurement. It is not necessarily a morbid interest in cadavers so much as a

fascination that arises within the individual when forced to confront the essentially constructed

nature of the human body. Rather than a single whole, the disfigured body becomes an entity

composed of many individual parts and systems of parts which are easily ignored and subsumed

within the ontological categories of “human” or “person” and only ever thought about, with

79

some discomfort, in times of illness, injury, or disability (143). The epistemological privileging

of the conceptual “whole body” over the partial one appears to be pervasive, but the parts of

bodies that populate both O’Brien novels have a compelling presence. In some cases, the

separation of a body part from the whole body meets, unsurprisingly, with a certain amount of

shock on a material level for the literary characters, but, more symbolically, a kind of confusion

about, or lack of understanding of, the changed body.

Billy Boy stood there with his mouth open and grinning, sort of

embarrassed and dumb-looking, … looking down at where his foot had

been, and then … he finally sat down, still grinning, not saying a word, his

boot lying there with his foot still in it. … Billy was holding the boot now.

Unlacing it, trying to force it back on, except it was already on, and he

kept trying to tie the boot and foot on, working with the laces, but it

wouldn’t go. (GAC 216)

Billy’s bizarre reaction to having his leg severed mid-tibia turns into a fatal panic, even

though the wound itself is not mortal. Although the wound does seem to have the capability of

causing an event with more serious consequences than the actual physical trauma would indicate,

what is more intriguing in this scene is the merging of the foot and the boot into a single entity,

other than the body, but still, Billy Boy believes, part of it. It may be unusual to think of a boot,

by being worn, as becoming part of the body, but an object-oriented theoretical rubric – such as

Karen Barad’s – which contemplates the false division between body and object actively

entertains the concept. In this scenario, Billy’s boot subsumes the distinctiveness of the severed

body part as he tries to put on the footwear which is already being “worn.” A similar fate befalls

Lee Strunk, who has his right leg severed at the knee after triggering a booby trap. However, the

80

circumstances of Strunk’s death are somewhat vague as he survives long enough to be loaded

into the medevac chopper before dying “somewhere over Chu Lai,” and the death comes as a

relief to Dave Jensen, another soldier in the squad (TTTC 63). Jensen and Strunk have a pact

which dictates that, should one of them receive a disabling wound, “the other guy would

automatically find a way to end it” (62). Strunk is naturally worried that Jensen will kill him as a

result of the injury, and, apparently unable to grasp the separation of his leg from the rest of his

body, attempts to run away even though there is “nothing left to run on” (62). Strunk remains

confident that the severed leg can be reattached, but the actual condition and disposition of the

remainder of his leg remains unclear. That there is still an “it” to be “[sewn] back on” suggests

that the severed leg is still somewhere in the vicinity, and in some degree of wholeness (63). It is

clear that Billy Boy’s foot and boot are relatively whole and recognizable, but when the dustoff

arrives to remove Billy Boy’s body from the area of operations, an interesting ambivalence arises

regarding the singular identity of separate parts. The squad members “[wrap] Billy in a plastic

poncho … and they put him aboard, and then Doc [wraps] the boot in a towel and [places] it next

to Billy. … The chopper [takes] Billy away” (GAC 217). Billy’s nature as a singular entity is

quite fluid in the scenario, where he is placed on board the chopper missing his foot, but the

presence of the foot, though wrapped separately from the body, becomes folded in with the

presence of Billy’s body to create a kind of reunification of the whole in death.

When Buff is shot, his disfigured body is also loaded aboard a chopper and flown out,

along with his personal items. Buff’s death leaves the unit without a machine gunner, and the

M-60 is still lying in the ditch near where Buff’s body was found, along with his helmet, which

is filled with the ghastly remains of his face. The soldiers make a conscious decision not to place

the face and helmet in the chopper with the rest of Buff’s body (Eddie mentions to Doc that he

81

has “forgot something”), and the remains are afterwards given rather coarse treatment (280).

The machine gun cannot be left behind, and Cacciato retrieves it from the ditch.

Then, again, he [slides] slowly into the ditch.

Very carefully, keeping it steady and close to his stomach,

Cacciato [picks] up the helmet and [carries] it down the ditch to a patch of

high grass. …

[Paul Berlin watches] as Cacciato [steps] over a log, [stops], and

then, like a woman emptying her washbasin, [heaves] Buff’s face into the

tall, crisp grass.

Then, Cacciato climbs the bank. He [rinses] the helmet under his

canteen, [wipes] it with his shirt, and [ties] it to his rucksack. (285)

It is difficult to imagine why Billy’s dismembered foot is placed with him in the chopper, while

Buff’s face is not only left behind, but discarded, and other items like the helmet are saved.

There are obvious practical reasons for the machine gun to be kept, but Cacciato should have

absolutely no use for Buff’s helmet whatsoever since there is no indication that Cacciato has lost

his own. Berlin imagines “an expression of dumb surprise” on the remains of Buff’s face as it is

thrown into the grass, and the strange interchangeability of the face and the helmet provides a

comment on the “life after death” upon which Berlin is musing (285). One might consider the

animated face as a particularly good representative of life, and the reanimation of the face as it is

discarded from the helmet mirrors the separation of the face from the head at the moment of

Buff’s death. Cacciato’s decision to keep the helmet, as a kind of surrogate head, may then

appear concurrently with the reanimated face as a means of keeping Buff’s memory, or even

82

Buff himself, alive in a highly abstract manner long after the chopper has taken his incomplete

body away.

When Lee Strunk is loaded onto the helicopter, though, no mention is made of whether or

not his leg travels with him. In a manner similar to that in which heavy or unwieldy objects are

discarded in these novels, the leg, which one may presume exists in some recognisable form,

merely disappears into the chaos of the war as depicted in The Things They Carried. Perhaps the

fact that Strunk is still alive, if only barely, when he is loaded aboard the medevac helicopter

distances him from the severed leg, and the leg retains an otherness to the living body which

makes it easy to forget and discard. That the disposition of Strunk’s leg remains unarticulated,

even after Strunk dies on the way back to an army hospital, further indicates a general

uncertainty about the relationship that exists between a body and its parts, and also about what

exactly it is that constitutes a whole body. Billy Boy seems to regain a bodily wholeness in

death, Buff’s comrades are ambivalent about his mutilated body, and Strunk’s counterparts seem

to turn a blind eye to his disfigurement and overlook the presence (or perhaps the absence) of the

severed leg. The inconsistent treatment of body parts becomes even more confusing when the

treatment of Vietnamese bodies is taken into account. Susan Jeffords notes that non-American

bodies “[have] meaning only as death, its signification [is] fragmented – pieces of bodies

‘[count]’,” a sentiment with which Mark Taylor agrees: the military’s infamous “body count”

metric for combat success served not only as a “tangible measure of achievement” when

territorial objectives remained vague, but also as a foundation of the “mere gook syndrome”

which combined the value of the dead (presumptively) enemy body with racism to render

Vietnamese lives of “negligible importance” (Jeffords 8, Taylor 115, 116).

83

That the fictional American soldiers collect Vietnamese body parts while having a vague

relationship to the significance of their own bodies, or the bodies of their comrades, indicates

that the mutilation of “enemy” bodies in order to furnish themselves with souvenirs (like Norman

Bowker’s Vietnamese thumb or Mary Anne Bell’s necklace of tongues) comes not from a place

of racism, necessarily, as much as a place of unknowability in a metaphysical sense. More than

just a wilful ignorance of facts or systems of value, the transgression of cultural norms involved

in desecrating bodies, either living or dead, belies a deep uncertainty about the separation of self

and other, inside and outside (Fuchs 90). Towards the end of The Things They Carried, Rat

Kiley becomes afflicted with recurring nightmares involving his work as a medic. “Always

policing up the parts, … [always] plugging up holes,” Kiley begins to see the living men in the

unit as assemblies of organs and appendages, and begins to find a source of morbid but

disinterested entertainment in pondering “how they’d look dead” and “wondering how much [a]

guy’s head weighed, … and what it would feel like to pick up the head and carry it over to a

chopper and dump it in” (211). Eventually overcome with anxiety, Rat purposefully shoots

himself in the foot so that he may be relieved from duty and sent to a military hospital in Japan to

recover (211). Mark Heberle notes that Rat’s actions, which come to a head after he “begins to

see himself and his comrades as potential corpses,” emerges from the anxieties over “seeing

them as a collection of organic body parts rather than as human beings” (213). Although

comprehensive and insightful, it is somewhat strange that Heberle’s reading of O’Brien’s oeuvre

does not recognise the human as being both unitary being and a collection of parts. The

desperate actions Rat takes to get out of military service involve just this kind of recognition:

even though it is unsettling to think of the human body as a community of parts (particularly in

such instances as some parts have been forcefully removed or disengaged from other parts), Rat

84

makes the decision to preserve the whole through damaging a more-or-less expendable part.

Even though he is essentially damaging “himself,” doing so does not affect his being: in fact, the

physical damage might save it. Moreover, Rat’s self-mutilation is an intriguing symbolic event.

Steven Kaplan points, somewhat anachronistically, to the foot as being “a symbol of the soul”

(57), a description which is expanded in Cirlot’s Dictionary of Symbols to indicate that “an

infirmity or mutilation of the foot is the counterpart of an incurable defect of the spirit” (73).

Perhaps this description makes Kiley’s actions appear somewhat trite, but the functioning of

literary items as both thing and symbol mirrors the dual nature of things as both assembly and

unit. Also, the functioning of this particular symbol illustrates a neat unity between the body and

its immaterial, ineffable essence, between “being” and the material manifestations which allow

“being” to meet the world.

The uncertain relationship which the characters of these novels have with bodies as

wholes or as parts appears rooted in the always-fluid nature of any object as both a unity and a

plurality. Tim’s preoccupation with the reunification of life and body, or the coalescing of

contradictory memories into a single, meaningful truth, leads to a privileging of the singular over

the plural, and this serves as an interesting complement to Mark Heberle’s reading of these

novels as a means of reconstructing shattered mental health through the therapeutic act of

remembering and storytelling. The ambiguity, however, is never resolved. Perhaps the most

memorable example of Tim’s irresolvable ethical and narrative ambiguities is the character of

Curt Lemon. Memories of Curt in life are preserved in a pair of vignettes, but the “freeze-frame”

moment in which he dies is particularly resonant for Tim.

I watched Lemon turn sideways. He laughed and said something to Rat

Kiley. Then he took a peculiar half-step, moving from shade into bright

85

sunlight, and the booby-trapped 105 round blew him into a tree. The parts

were just hanging there, so Dave Jensen and I were ordered to shinny up

and peel him off. I remember the white bone of an arm. I remember

pieces of skin and something wet and yellow that must have been the

intestines. The gore was horrible and stays with me. …

I can still see the sunlight on Lemon’s face. I can see him turning, looking

back at Rat Kiley, then he laughed and took that curious half step from

shade into sunlight, his face suddenly brown and shining, and when his

foot touched down, in that instant, he must’ve thought it was the sunlight

that was killing him. (79-80)

Lemon’s gruesome but near-instantaneous death is notable for its graphic detail and also for its

ambivalence. Lemon is both in shadow and in sunlight, moving ahead with a half-step but

looking back, and disintegrated by an absent enemy present through the booby-trap. The

moment he steps into the sunlight the explosion forces his body into the air, while also tearing it

to pieces. Lemon, in Tim’s memory, is in a perpetual state of disintegration and wholeness,

death and life, and the fluctuation between these two states has the unusual side effect as the

badly-mutilated remains in the nearby tree are both “parts” and “him,” even though they are not

clearly recognisable as body parts, let alone parts of a specific body. While a state of bodily

wholeness continues to be a preferable state of existence (since, for many of O’Brien’s

characters, a state of bodily disfigurement or dismemberment is linked so closely with death), the

state of being “human” or at least having some form of meaningful identity is not dependent on

it, nor is it dependent, even, on being “alive” in any conventional sense.

86

iii. Humping the Boonies: “The Way it Mostly Was” and Questions of Free Will

If the foot is to be considered the symbol of the soul, then the fundamental action which

signifies being in the world of Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried is the march,

and a corollary to the march is the act of carrying. It is hardly insightful or ground-breaking to

imply that walking may have some practical significance to a novel about simply redirecting the

act of marching and walking away from the war, or that carrying as a material act has some

significance in a novel whose title suggests it. However, both walking and carrying are actions

which require bodily enactment, and also use bodily enactment as a metaphoric means of

exploring issues surrounding personal culpability and responsibility for involvement in military

affairs. Furthermore, the confluence of carrying and walking indicates a kind of burden or

assigned task requiring a quest or a journey, and this further implies the existence of a reason or

motivation for undertaking said burden, along with the implication of the acts having both some

risk, and some reward, attached to them. For O’Brien, the immediate problem with the kind of

“questing” that the long series of search-and-destroy missions seems to entail is the lack of

purpose. The soldiers are carrying military items, weapons, food, water, clothing, and personal

effects, as well as the massless weight of “[grief], terror, love, longing, … painful memories …

[and] cowardice barely restrained,” but the reasons for doing so remain elusive (TTTC 20).

They marched for the sake of the march. They plodded along slowly,

dumbly, leaning forward against the heat, unthinking, all blood and bone,

simple grunts, soldiering with their legs, … just humping, one step and the

next and then another, but no volition, no will, because it was automatic, it

was anatomy, and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage,

the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness

87

of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility.

Their principles were in their feet. Their calculations were biological.

They had no sense of strategy or mission. (TTTC 14)

This passage from the eponymous chapter in The Things They Carried is a clear distillation of

the central concerns of a similar chapter found in Going After Cacciato, entitled “The Way it

Mostly Was.” Despite the accolades which “The Things They Carried” has received as a stand-

alone short story, it would be a mistake to jettison O’Brien’s earlier meditations on the subjects

of volition, will, and the sense of mission as they are explored more fully, and in closer relation

to the human body, in this earlier work.

Renny Christopher has derided Going After Cacciato as “deeply apolitical” and as a

“questioning of the war which turns out to be nothing more than a test of courage for an

individual” (234, 230). To be fair to Christopher, her study is not exclusively, nor even

principally, concerned with Tim O’Brien, and it considers him as one among many authors who

work in the genre. (She does not refer at all to The Things They Carried, which is a surprising

blind spot.) Nonetheless her advocacy for “accurate representation” of “Viet Nam” as a country

and a people separate from “Vietnam” as an American war is quite admirable, even though some

of her criticisms are somewhat pedantic (243). She takes umbrage, fairly, with O’Brien’s

broadly cavalier attitude towards Vietnamese cultural details, but it is hard to see how some of

her contentions hold up under closer scrutiny, particularly in light of a more detailed reading of

Going After Cacciato. To indicate that the novel is predominantly a test of courage robs it of its

many subtleties, and makes the novel’s conclusion rather trite and unsatisfying: Paul Berlin is

obviously a “bad” soldier. The novel is, certainly, concerned with courage, but it is not a

comparison of soldierly qualities in the same way that The Green Berets, for instance, describes

88

the various qualities of Special Forces officers and their vast competencies in relation to the

Army of the Republic of Vietnam or the Viet Cong guerillas. More than remaining vague on the

issue, Cacciato is openly skeptical of male heroism and the achievement of mission objectives as

a sign of individual quality.

That the novel is deficient for not explaining the political motivations of the Viet Cong or

the Diem regime is debatable since hard political discussions are not necessarily a condition for

narrative quality. But Cacciato, even if does not survey the political positions of the war’s

various belligerents, is still quite political in its contemplations of moral responsibility and

community dynamics. Sidney Martin, Berlin’s “modest, thoughtful” lieutenant, takes a rather

predictable view of the war in which he is fighting, seeing it as a means to a lofty end, that

“lessons might be learned” for the improvement of humanity as a whole (166). Apart from

appearing rather imperial in this context, Martin believes strongly in the value of mission over

the vague values of “purpose” and “cause,” and hopes that the men under his command will

“comport themselves like soldiers … [for] the sake of mission, … and for the welfare of the

platoon … [and] also for [their] own well-being” (165). Martin’s hope, in other words, is that

the men will recognise the inherent value of their military service and do exactly as they are told,

in the same way that Martin observes protocol and follows the orders which he is given.

Martin’s consequentialist thinking, of course, is significantly undermined in O’Brien’s literary

world, a world which lacks the kind of ends needed to justify ambiguous means. Martin’s

thinking about the presumably self-evident value of mission allows him to sidestep his own

misgivings about the “lack of common purpose” since the mission allows each soldier to

“exercise his full capacities of courage and endurance and willpower” (165, 166). It is difficult

to take Martin’s claims seriously, and it is similarly difficult to imagine that Cacciato is

89

advocating for these views specifically, since Martin’s punctilious adherence to the value of

mission and standing instructions leads to his own eventual murder.

In both Cacciato and The Things They Carried, O’Brien is deeply concerned about the

nature of guilt, and although Berlin seems more disoriented and uncertain while Tim feels a

much keener responsibility for his role in the war, both novels emphasize moral responsibility

even though personal choice is apparently impossible. In essence, both novels involve a

significant skepticism of human intentionality, and suggest that the ability of humans to meet the

world on their own terms is significantly limited. O’Brien’s world is not a deterministic one, in

which things are “bound” to happen, but is more of an indeterminate one, a “disorder[ed] …

world without rules” in which things seem to happen for no reason (Chen 79). While both of

these states tend to foreclose the meaningful operation of human freedom, O’Brien’s system of

responsibility does not depend on the ability to act differently, or even the possibility of

alternative actions, to assign moral judgements. It is enough merely to know that an action is

wrong, regardless of whether it may be avoided or not, in order to become culpable for that

action’s effects. (Berlin, occasionally, thinks at length about the depth of his uncertainty and

eloquently pleads ignorance, even though his own imagination, through the character of Sarkin

Aung Wan, tells him that he must have the will and the courage to reject his “false obligations”

to the military and to social expectations (318).) It seems rather strange for Sidney Martin to

suggest that Berlin’s apparent “oxen persistence, … fortitude, discipline, loyalty, self-control,

courage, [and] toughness” is an expression of “freedom of will” (168): Martin, obviously, does

not know very much about the philosophical world he is inhabiting. While it is clearly not

impossible for two individuals with different world views to inhabit the same material world, the

90

narrator of Going After Cacciato makes it clear that Martin’s ideals of “[courage] and bravery

retain little of their traditional meaning in Vietnam” (Ooms 30).

Like Tim, Paul Berlin is highly conscious of his own body as a biological system as he

marches along the road climbing the mountain, particularly in terms of the combination of

muscles and bones which make up the legs and feet. Berlin’s body, though, is not the obedient

servant of the mind, but actually seems to have a mission of its own, which is to keep climbing.

Martin suggests, in a somewhat confusing manner, that the will of the soldier should be

subordinate to the objectives of the mission for the soldier’s own well-being, and Berlin feels

that whatever will he has – that is, the will that he has not already abdicated to the draft and the

military command structure within which he is now located – may be directed to the control of

his body, but his body apparently has other ideas.

[Though] he wanted now to stop, he was amazed at the way his legs kept

moving beneath him. … [Always] climbing, as if drawn along by some

physical force – inertia or herd affinity or magnetic attraction. He

marched up the road with no exercise of will, no desire and no

determination, no pride, just legs and lungs, climbing without thought and

without will and without purpose. (167)

The intervention of the body in the relationship between will and moral responsibility is

something of a philosophical wild card, since it calls into question the very nature of human

subjectivity. As the body, in a conceptual sense, fluctuates between a unified whole and an

assemblage of parts, the human subject is experiencing a significant moment of disharmony

when the body appears to ignore the nominal directions it receives from Berlin’s mind: in other

words, the body seems to have a life of its own. This is perhaps the most striking example of

91

what Alex Vernon describes as the “conscripted grunt … knowing no control,” a fundamental

figure in O’Brien’s war novels (177). That Berlin in unable to control his own body might seem

to let him off the hook for his participation in the war since he is somehow dragged along with

the military intervention in Vietnam and thus a victim of state politics. However, to suggest that

Berlin’s bodily actions are completely beyond his control is to suggest, by extension, that

Vietnam also exists as a “moment of temporary insanity” where nothing, or no one, is in charge,

and thus nothing, or no one, is responsible for what takes place there (Vernon 190). Perhaps one

is too harsh in deriding Sidney Martin’s rather unphilosophical position which privileges the

direction of mission over other indistinct entities, and not harsh enough in terms of assigning

blame to Berlin for his shockingly indeterminate position. Moral responsibility appears to be all

that Berlin has, since he is unable to control his presence in the military, the missions whose

objectives he is nominally pursuing, the way he performs in combat, and also the simplest and

most basic bodily functions of a soldier, marching and carrying. As if his lack of independent

agency were not already bad enough, Berlin goes to the added trouble of imagining alternative

options – the transcontinental chase of the fleeing Cacciato, for example – upon which he cannot

act, and that render his inaction all the more blameworthy. Berlin’s lack of control, far from

being freighted with moral responsibility in spite of itself, actually intensifies it.

Tina Chen notes that “the focus on the materiality of the body emerges as an organic

expression of the war”, and the obstinacy of Berlin’s body, spurred on by some invisible force,

becomes a reflection of the war itself (87). Even Martin, the professional and educated soldier

who takes the most sanguine view of Vietnam, finds its purposes and its importance to be vague.

Although he chooses to avoid the question of cause and focus instead on mission (an entity

which is also tied to the body through the infamous “body count” metric), he does not appear to

92

be able to provide an adequate source of motivation for action even though he is leading his

troops to an actual, set battle in the mountains rather than on yet another apparently aimless

ambush mission, travelling from village to village. Martin has misgivings about commanding a

small portion of the war, and Berlin (among others) has misgivings about fighting in it, yet the

war, its intellectual justifications, and the bodies, keep carrying on in spite of better judgement

and human desire. These concerns about the vague location of control are not limited to the

theatre of war. Rather, the scenario of Berlin’s unruly body indicates the possibility of human

agency having a significant basis in the body itself, rather than in the rational mind, as a force of

change in the world. At the same time, however, the scenario is also an articulation of the way in

which the body, even in perfect health, limits the human to a “restricted range of possibilities for

exploring the universe” and makes material human action a result of negotiation rather than

singular intention (Harman 49).

iv. Everyone and No One: Locating Blame for the Damaged Body

Although O’Brien assigns moral responsibility for the events of the Vietnam war to the

American nation (guilty as a result of its actions, inactions, and influences) as much as to discrete

individuals within that nation, it would seem that pleading Alex Vernon’s “temporary national

insanity” is obviously not a valid excuse for the harm done to all parties involved in the conflict

(190). There is no doubt that Vietnamese civilians, historically, bore the brunt of this harm as a

result of shelling, aerial bombardment, chemical defoliation, and some particularly high-profile

and visible atrocities such as the My Lai/Son My Massacre of March 16, 1968. That it took a

significant amount of time for news of this massacre to reach media outlets in the United States

speaks to both the level of secrecy with which the military operates, and also the confusion that

93

exists as a result of American re-naming of villages, hamlets, and geological features in Vietnam

(Taylor 109). The exact number of civilians whom B and C Company of Task Force Barker

killed in cold blood, concurrently, in the hamlets of My Lai 4 (known locally as Thuan Yen) and

My Khe 4 (known locally as My Hoi) within the larger township of Son My has never been

determined, but Mark Taylor indicates that the number could exceed 400 (110). Military and

public reaction to the massacre was mixed: Task Force Barker, for instance, had received a

commendation for its conduct in the Son My area earlier that March, and there was a great deal

of disagreement about the details of the events and uncertainty over the sentencing of Lieutenant

William Calley, a platoon commander in C company, to a life at hard labour for his role in 22

deaths: Calley’s sentence was quickly overturned and reduced to three years of house arrest

(Taylor 116, 110, 106). No other individuals involved in the massacre were convicted (only a

handful were tried), and apart from the prevailing lack of consensus about establishing a line

between duty and atrocity, there was a lack of clarity surrounding the admissibility of evidence

in civilian trials investigating past military service (Taylor 111).

The fallout from the My Lai massacre, the vague motivation for Task Force Barker’s

brutality in March of 1968, and the hesitance of the American government and criminal justice

system to respond to the incident indicate that Tim O’Brien’s concerns about the uncertainty of

“truth” and far-reaching responsibility for the events of Vietnam are not just some literary trifle

but historically (and currently) relevant. Calley’s obvious guilt makes him an apt “fall-guy” for

the murders, but, regardless of his direct culpability in civilian deaths, it must be noted that

singling him out as a low-level, local commander is both unjust and significant. Susan Jeffords

state that the separation of the disillusioned grunt from the state is a common – if not universal –

trait of Vietnam literature, and while this separation of soldier from state frequently serves as a

94

means of recuperating the moral quality of the soldier in contrast to the state (either too hawkish

or too dovish for his liking), this separation occurred for the opposite reason in Calley’s public

trial. Calley’s positioning as a solitary outlier separates him from both the state (as an

abstraction of law, convention, and bureaucracy) and from the nation (as an expression of public

opinion). It is much easier to blame a single person for a moment of indiscretion (or insanity)

than to confront questions of systemic problems within the American military and within the

American society which sanctions it, or to contemplate whether Calley’s individual deficiencies

are not isolated but rather an expression of some underlying character quality inherent in

“Americanness.”

There is an interesting parallel between Lt. Calley and Lt. Jimmy Cross, the platoon

commander in The Things They Carried. Cross has a tendency to blame himself for the deaths of

his platoon members (such as Ted Lavender, shot while the Lieutenant thinks of his love interest,

Martha; or Kiowa, who dies in the muddy field which people from a nearby village use as a toilet

and in which Cross insists on making camp), and also feels the omnipresence of an “absent

judge” which seems to be scrutinizing his every action (163). Cross is not alone in his

submission to the singular blame of the absentee adjudicator: Norman Bowker blames his lack of

strength and inability to pull his friend from the mud for Kiowa’s death, and the nameless young

soldier (perhaps Tim himself) blames his need to show Kiowa a picture of his girlfriend (and,

specifically, the act of flicking a flashlight on) for the fatal mortar attack (163). Bowker,

however, does not just fail a test of strength outright, but is overcome with the stench and taste of

centuries of human excrement which the exploding mortars turn up in the flooded field (143),

and the young soldier states that it might not be his pride in his girlfriend that caused the attack

but that “the flashlight made it happen” (163). Struggling with his silence after returning home,

95

Bowker suggests that “the town [is] not to blame, really,” for the guilt he feels and his inability

to speak about his traumatic memories (143). Cross, similarly, states that when a soldier dies,

there “[has] to be blame,” and that, “in the field, … the causes [are] immediate,” suggesting his

own guilt (169, 170).

Regula Fuchs takes Cross’s admission at face value, claiming that “[in] the end, it comes

down to the individual soldiers and the [choices they make at an] exact point in time” (84). This

seems to be a rather strange interpretation of the novel’s stance on responsibility, since Tim, as

the teller of these stories, goes to such great lengths to construct alternatives to singular blame.

At an immediate level, neither the soldiers in the platoon, nor Bowker, nor Tim’s nameless

doppelganger, nor Jimmy Cross, are particularly committed to the responsibility which they

place on themselves. Bowker profoundly suggests that Kiowa’s death is “[nobody’s fault. …

Everybody’s” (168). Beyond being uncertain about his sole culpability for Kiowa’s death, Cross

notes that

[you] could blame the war. You could blame the idiots who made the war.

You could blame Kiowa for going to it. You could blame the rain. You

could blame the river. You could blame the field, the mud, the climate.

You could blame the enemy. You could blame the mortar rounds. You

could blame people who were too lazy to read a newspaper, who were

bored by the daily body counts, who switched channels at the mention of

politics. You could blame whole nations. You could blame God. You

could blame the munition makers or Karl Marx or a trick of fate or an old

man in Omaha who forgot to vote. (170)

96

Cross does conclude that he has his own slice of responsibility for Kiowa’s death, but this does

not preclude the possibility of there being a significant amount of blame to go around: in other

words, blame, in any instance, has both a singular and a plural dimension. After all, it is difficult

to imagine any reasonable argument which would suggest that any event does not have both

immediate and underlying causes. However, the privileging of immediate causes as either

praiseworthy or blameworthy, and the concomitant privileging of the human agent who enacts

these causes, creates a situation like Lt. Calley’s, where noteworthy acts – in his case, acts

noteworthy for their brutality – make it easy to treat the human actor as aberrant or somehow not

representative of the social networks within which he is located. The repeated use of the second-

person “you” in this passage, and the mention of an exceptionally broad linkage of human and

non-human entities as well as natural and random circumstances are an example of O’Brien’s

“demands that his readers consider the possibility of their actual presence and participation” in

the war, rather than allowing Cross to bear the burden of Kiowa’s death himself (Vernon 190).

Cross retreats into his imagination and “[walks] off into the afternoon,” apparently exhausted

from deliberating at length on the nature of his responsibility. Tim’s hope, and, presumably,

O’Brien’s, is that those who have also become personally involved in Kiowa’s death will not

retreat with him.

It would be difficult to propose that the victims of the My Lai massacre were simply

victims of “bad luck,” and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Still, there is something

unusual about the fact that Task Force Barker ended up committing these acts when other units

operating in Quang Ngai province – including O’Brien’s – did not. There is something similarly

random about the deaths of O’Brien’s characters, in that they almost always occur unexpectedly

and for no apparent reason, “all a matter of luck and happenstance” (TTTC 168). The soldiers’

97

embrace of luck and the lack of control it engenders allows them, at least temporarily, to walk

away from the deaths of their comrades, but their memories persist. It may be easier for those

implicated in an event through a broad web of responsibility and the unpredictable factor of luck

to shift blame off themselves when their direct, physical involvement in the emergence of that

phenomenon is vague or nonexistent. The loss of Kiowa, however, is a communal experience.

And that even the usually sardonic Azar is rendered speechless when the soldiers finally find

Kiowa’s body indicates that his death is a moment of genuine tragedy (166). But what, exactly,

is it that the soldiers are missing, and what exactly are they searching for underneath the watery

mud of the field the morning after the mortar attack? Kiowa’s missing body becomes another

entity which, in its dead state, assumes an ambiguous identity: is the body a “thing,” or is the

body “Kiowa”? Shortly after a mortar explosion, a flow of mud and water begins to drag Kiowa

beneath its surface, and Bowker is confronted not with the full body of his comrade in distress,

but rather an assortment of body parts still visible above the slime.

[He] saw Kiowa’s wide-open eyes settling down into the scum … but

when he got there, Kiowa was almost completely under. There was a

knee. There was an arm and a gold wrist-watch and part of a boot. …

There were bubbles where Kiowa’s head should’ve been. (142-3)

Bowker’s encounter with the sinking and only partially-visible Kiowa, and Azar’s

uncharacteristic reaction to Kiowa’s demise – particularly, the locating of Kiowa’s body by

spotting a boot heel breaking the surface of the water – are interesting moments particularly

because they involve a dynamic relationship between Kiowa as an individual, and Kiowa not as a

body or object, but as body parts. Although this is similar to the ways in which Tim represents

Curt Lemon, Billy Boy Watkins, and others, Kiowa’s “partialness” serves to undo not only his

98

well-defined racial otherness (he carries, for instance, moccasins and a hunting hatchet among

his personal effects), but also his basic separation from the other soldiers as an individual and

self-contained entity. The erasure of his individuality in the mud of the field is a

counterintuitive, sympathetic moment, in which the appearance of Kiowa’s body as parts is able

to overcome his separateness from his comrades. The flooded field obscures Kiowa’s racial

difference, and his appearance as only a hand, or a boot, or a knee makes him, and his fate,

identifiable for the platoon’s other members. Rather than seeing Kiowa going down, they realise

that the body trapped in a water-logged and collapsed shell hole could well be their own. Upon

finding the boot heel, Azar asks, almost stupidly, if “[that’s] him,” and, while Bowker responds

rather impatiently that it must be, the fact remains that it could have been any one of them (166).

Also, that Kiowa’s body has suffered some extensive trauma, with “a piece of his shoulder …

missing [and] the arms and chest and face cut up with shrapnel” further challenges his

distinctiveness from the remainder of the men in the unit, and serves to prevent the other soldiers

from assuming a position of objectivity (167). That Kiowa’s body could be “our” body forces

the re-evaluation of the human and non-human sources of responsibility for his death.

Looking towards a community of actors in order to determine responsibility for any

particular event entails a certain awareness of the competing powers of unity and plurality in any

emerging state of affairs, from the highly-localized to the global. The act of considering the

nature and importance of a community, as well as one’s own relations to it (and within it), should

serve to challenge the ideologically-propagated ontological superiority of the whole over its

parts: a community is an entity which is in a constant state of flux between its singular identity

and its many constituents (which may simultaneously be part of other communities), as well as a

community’s inclusion within an even larger confederation of entities. Thinking of plurality

99

itself as inherently distasteful, while it may inform discourses of restoration and renewal which

have their own presumptive moral values such as Heberle’s trauma studies approach to Tim

O’Brien’s work, also suggests that both efficient causation and ethical responsibility are located

principally – if not entirely – within the realm of the singular entity, most commonly the rational

human individual. That one may be able to undermine both human intentionality and the

exceptional agentic power of the individual by suggesting that the individual itself is a pluralistic

entity with a greater or lesser degree of internal disharmony (as a result of the tensions between

the singular and the plural in the body itself) indicates that notions of durable and rigorous

personal responsibility must be located outside of rational human thought. This is, however, not

a call to end human responsibility for actions and states of affairs completely, but rather a

suggestion that, if blame and responsibility become entities which, like the bodies implicated in

their production, are both singular and plural, then states of ethical blameworthiness – if singular

– may become less compelling if broader networks of responsibility are acknowledged. The

acknowledgement of these networks not only forecloses the possibility of there being positions

of objective personal disinterest, but also positions wholly with, or without, moral responsibility.

100

Chapter Four: The Land is Your Enemy

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue,

nor suggest models of proper human behaviour, nor restrain men from

doing things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not

believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that

some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then

you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. (TTTC 65)

Tim’s blunt and blatantly skeptical statement near the beginning of “How to Tell a True War

Story” should seem strikingly out of place in a work which has such an obvious moral dimension

as The Things They Carried, and indeed within the larger context of Tim O’Brien’s war writing.

But the fact that the passage refers to “a very old and terrible lie” indicates that one should be

suspicious of the kind of relationship that a war story has to morality as a whole, and that a kind

of overt didacticism is incompatible with the realities of war since armed conflict is always

bending or obfuscating the distinctions between right and wrong, and challenging preconceived

notions of what constitutes permissible justification for activities carried out against military

enemies and their civilian supporters. More importantly, it is worthwhile to make the fine

distinction between a story being overtly (and perhaps simplistically) moral in nature, and a story

having subtle moral implications. Tim’s repeated telling of the same events, as well as his

preoccupation with kinds of narrative truth in which “[absolute] occurrence is irrelevant” should

give one the sense of there being some reason or need for the constant reiteration and rethinking

of events, particularly in terms of the novel’s thematic concerns with guilt, responsibility, and, in

broad terms, truth, all of which have a significant moral dimension (79-80).

101

Tim acknowledges that his statement about true war stories not being moral is a bit of a

red herring when he reveals that “if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth.

You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unravelling the deeper meaning”

(74). His statement suggests that any meaningful moral message or moral implication is

impossible to explicate with any certainty since any attempt at interpretation inevitably distorts

the message itself. Thus, any story which has the appearance of articulating some kind of

didactic message cannot help but have that message become vague as the meaning and the moral

of the story are enfolded with many layers of ambiguity and also subject to personal perception.

Mitchell Sanders’s account in the chapter of the reconnaissance patrol that heads into the

mountains and encounters not only “strange … music that comes right out of the rocks” but also

“chamber music,” “a terrific … soprano,” “opera and a glee club and the Haiphong Boys Choir

and a barbershop quartet and all kinds of funky chanting,” although somewhat embellished, is a

story which seems to have striking moral relevance, while also having the appearance of being

flagrantly untrue and symbolically unclear (TTTC 69-71). The soldiers in Sanders’s story,

seemingly driven over the edge by the otherworldly cacophony emanating from the land around

them, respond with firepower.

They get arty and gunships. They call in air strikes. … All night long they

just smoke those mountains. They make jungle juice. They blow away

trees and glee clubs and whatever else there is to blow away. Scorch time.

They walk napalm up and down the ridges. They bring in the Cobras and

F-4s, they use Willie Peter and HE and incendiaries. It’s all fire. They

make those mountains burn. (71)

102

The problem for the soldiers is that, even after unleashing the massive destructive capability of

military technology, “they still hear it,” and their only recourse is to return to base (72, emphasis

in original). When a colonel asks the squad what occasioned the night-long strike, they stare

dumbly in response, certain that he would neither listen to nor believe their story. Sanders

suggests that listening is the key moral lesson to be taken away from the encounter, and the fact

that “[nobody] listens” only exacerbates an already confusing and negative situation (73). “You

got to listen to your enemy. … That quiet – just listen. There’s your moral” (73-4, emphasis in

original). Sanders’s exhortation to listen to the enemy has a pair of interesting implications: it

suggests that the enemy may not necessarily be a human one (pointing to the bizarre and

inexplicable capabilities of the landscape, not toward a dehumanisation of “actual” and elusive

VC or NVA adversaries), while also making it rather unclear what one should be listening for.

In Sanders’s story, the soldiers encounter a nearly indecipherable clash of sounds, but he

later suggests that the silence of landscape can be just as telling. Paul Berlin encounters a similar

situation when his initial survival lesson at the Combat Center in Chu Lai consists of a corporal

turning his back on the assembled men and staring wordlessly out at the sea for an hour (37).

This lesson, presumably, teaches the new soldiers about waiting for something to happen and

prepares them for the long periods of boredom or inactivity which will be a part of their service

in-country. Although the relatively benign combination of sea, sand, and wind does not seem to

compel any action whatsoever in that time, the soldiers still spend the hour essentially listening

to it, and waiting, presumably, for one of Graham Harman’s “imperatives” to make itself known

to them. Harman suggests that, rather than solely approaching things in the world either with

pre-existing moral standards or as a kind of blank slate prepared to make a snap decision,

humans are under the influence of things which approach them with “some imperative … in

103

every situation,” a state of affairs that “[eliminates] the notion that [humans] meet a world of raw

sense data with arbitrary behavioural choices” (63). To Harman’s thinking, regardless of

whether things themselves may be indifferent to human interests, they have the power to

influence the actions of the entities which apprehend them even if apprehending entities choose

or are compelled to ignore that power. The narrator of Going After Cacciato suggests that

listening for the imperatives that come from the landscape is not necessarily productive,

however: after all, it requires not only the willingness to listen, but also to act accordingly in the

moment, and pay attention to these imperatives in the future.

Listening is not merely an action so much as it is one of the foundations of ethical

responsibility in the worlds of Tim and Paul: but, that the message is sometimes illegible, and

sometimes completely silent, sheds little light on how one might apprehend the imperatives

which other entities produce, and how these imperatives might inform moral sensibilities.

Although cagey on the subject, Tim does explicitly admit that stories have a meaningful moral

dimension (even if it is difficult to understand or explain clearly), and he also states implicitly

through his insistence on telling stories (and repeating them) that language and communication

must serve something other than basic utilitarian purposes. Listening, for O’Brien, does not refer

solely to the act of hearing sound, but refers more generally, and importantly, to the act of

noticing, or taking heed. That almost all the letters the American soldiers send home from

Vietnam go unanswered is not simply a moment of bathos or a sadistic punchline, but rather

illustrative of intentional ignorance on the part of individuals not directly involved in “a war they

[do not] understand and [do not] want to understand” (TTTC 43, emphasis added). Although

more receptive to the idea of listening, Paul Berlin’s own lengthy lists of questions always

overcome his ability to be an effective listener, and his fantasy of being able to walk away from

104

networks of obligation ultimately comes to nought since he can never see – or hear – anything

beyond his own immediate concerns and uncertainties. Tim, as a storyteller, not only presumes a

listening audience, but also goes so far as to provide some instructions about how to listen

properly to the stories which he relates. However, the narratives and their moral imperatives are

often ambiguous, to say nothing of Tim’s assertion that moral messages can be indistinct or even

misleading in their own right. Mitchell Sanders’s story of the silent recon patrol which climbs

into the mountains and becomes “[all] ears” is a microcosm of the larger thematic framework of

listening for vague or indecipherable moral messages, but also introduces the landscape as an

entity which, in its suggestiveness, may captivate human senses, infiltrate and influence the

human body, and even militate against the strong physical and notional separations between self

and other (69, emphasis in original).

Renny Christopher, one of O’Brien’s most forceful critics, suggests that his work depicts

“Viet Nam the country [as] synonymous with ‘Vietnam’ the war,” and this is a statement that is

generally implicit, and sometimes explicit, in both Cacciato and The Things They Carried (232).

Although Christopher’s broader project consists of valuable and insightful commentary on the

larger trends of ethnocentrism, racism, and cultural solipsism across a number of works

concerned with the Vietnam war, her comments on Tim O’Brien’s writing miss the mark

slightly. Christopher suggests that viewing the land as an enemy force “devalues the war efforts

of … Vietnamese soldiers” and “denies the Vietnamese their roles” as defenders of their

homeland against foreign invaders (233). In a denotative sense, both of these statements can be

true: however, neither of the novels in question here expressly or indirectly celebrates the role of

soldiers or the pursuit of military objectives whatsoever, and it would be somewhat bizarre to

shift the focus of the novels away from sincere questions about guilt and responsibility and

105

towards a comparison of the relative strategic and moral values of the war’s contenders.

Similarly, that the American soldiers appear to lack a clear moral purpose in pursuing their

objectives in Vietnam does not automatically mean that the morals of their opponents are either

necessarily superior or unquestionable. The United States also employed the “defending the

homeland” rhetoric as justification for its involvement in the conflict, citing the infamous

“Domino Theory” as reasonable grounds for provoking a proxy war against global communism

in a remote location of minimal economic value and with a limited capacity to retaliate. O’Brien

is both personally and artistically critical of these motivations and the military actions which

were born out of a vague and unclear threat to American public safety.

Some of the difficulty that Christopher’s arguments encounter has to do with her belief in

the apparently self-evident virtue of “accurate representation” in American literature about the

Vietnam war. That the people of Vietnam are often reduced to caricatures in this genre is both

unfair and regrettable, and there is no doubt that in O’Brien’s work they are often ignored or

treated only as an unknowable mystery, belying a certain level of cultural ignorance on

O’Brien’s part as a soldier in Vietnam, and underscoring a similar ignorance in the characters of

Tim and Paul. But assuming that O’Brien is striving for accurate representation and failing in

some relatively obvious ways is not the only critically-compelling reading of Going After

Cacciato or The Things They Carried: rather than attempting to represent the Vietnamese

landscape as a substitute for the actions of the Vietnamese people (however they may be

motivated), the landscape and its obstinacy may in fact address different problems altogether.

That the land ostensibly “refuses” to cooperate with American interests and, instead, becomes a

self-possessed entity mirrors O’Brien’s construction of the implacable nature of war in general,

and the ways in which entities which are either nominally subject to, or have their beginnings in,

106

human intention, actually develop organically and have “lives” of their own. Furthermore, the

acts of individual humans are not always clearly motivated or beyond moral reproach, and the

chain of causation which leads to emerging events is rarely – if ever – pure, predictable, and

linear. Finally, O’Brien’s treatment of the Vietnamese landscape might also provide some

insight into the question of whether Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried are

either inherently or explicitly racist in their preoccupation with an aggressive landscape rather

than a human enemy.

i. Folded in With the War

The presumptive moral indifference of the natural world, be it exemplary of the actual

absence of objective, ethical principle or merely the inability of the human perceptual set to

grasp it, means that its practical, physical effects on the humans with whom it interacts are not

always benign or even neutral. That the Vietnamese landscape is sometimes constructed as an

antagonistic force is revelatory of a particularly pervasive kind of thinking which privileges

human existence above all else, suggesting that any element which is harmful to human

existence is not only practically but morally evil, while those which have no effect or are

beneficial to human lives are nominally “good.” While the drive to preserve one’s own life –

like the desire to keep one’s own body intact – is understandable, the epistemological effects that

this kind of thinking generates can be problematic. While Tim, after a firefight, looks at the

aliveness of the surrounding land and is both grateful and inspired, the Vietnamese geography

does not always engender such a sense of self-affirmation (77). That the land is the war, that the

land generates events which are morally good and morally bad, and that the land is also

(sometimes) the enemy, illustrates another in the series of blurred lines that exist throughout

107

O’Brien’s work. Truth, reality, and even time and space are quantities which, throughout The

Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato, seemingly refuse to be their prosaic and

quiescent selves. Tina Chen notes that O’Brien’s “blurring of boundaries calls to attention the

very nature of relation,” since, in the horizontalized relationship between fact and fiction,

imagination and reality, and also between subject and object/environment, the democracy of

competing forces leaves no “figure … untouched by the others” (95). Chen suggests that this

state of affairs means that “truth is always provisional, waiting to adapt itself to the …next

reality,” and Chen’s paradigm of provisional, emergent value could also apply to thoughts about

the moral nature of the natural world (96).

Throughout O’Brien’s work, the deaths of various characters gain some of their shocking

and memorable quality from the fact that the circumstances of their demise are very often

random and merely incidental. Although this has the effect of undercutting trite notions of

military heroism and nobility in meeting one’s end, it does make it difficult to explain the moral

standpoint for which these novels advocate. While there is a patently obvious undercurrent of

ethical responsibility not only for participating in Vietnam as a soldier, but also being complicit

in the war as a result of political action or even by nationality, there is little information available

by which one may determine whether or not the deaths of individual soldiers are necessarily

justified. The “normally sadistic” Azar, for instance, goes unharmed; as does the absent-minded

and over-emotional Jimmy Cross. But Norman Bowker eventually commits suicide after the

war, and Kiowa dies an ignominious death in a field which serves as a toilet for a nearby village.

Kiowa’s death is particularly unsettling, perhaps because the practical causes for it – to say

nothing of the symbolic ones – are highly unclear, and also because there does not seem to be

any greater purpose which his death serves. As part of a microcosmic comment on the entire

108

Vietnam war, Kiowa’s death is ultimately the result of an accident, a mistake, or bad luck. Cross

could have given the order to bivouac on higher ground, avoiding not only the obviously

distasteful field but also the further problem of flooding from the Song Tra Bong. Later, the

unnamed young soldier chooses an unfortunate time to switch on his flashlight. And the

unpleasant smell of the field, churned up during the bombardment, prevents Bowker from

rendering more assistance – ineffective though it may have been – to his drowning comrade.

Kiowa’s meaningless death is exemplary of not only the waste, but the unfortunate

happenstance, that is the war.

The role of the landscape in Kiowa’s demise, however, cannot be easily ignored. There

is a clear and well-documented correlation between the literal human waste which is present in

the field, and the more symbolic human waste which is the killing of individuals for reasons

which are either unclear, insupportable, or even absent. However, the manner in which Kiowa

becomes “part of the waste” is intriguing since his death is, ostensibly, of “natural” causes.

When Kiowa’s body is found, it has suffered some significant trauma as a result of shrapnel from

detonating mortars, but these wounds are not fatal. Instead, Kiowa drowns in the field as what

would be an impact crater on dry land fills itself with mud and water, dragging him under the

surface and trapping him there with such force that it later takes the efforts of a small group of

soldiers with entrenching tools to extricate his body. Kiowa’s drowning requires the ingestion of

some elements of the land (which occasions another of Azar’s rude jokes), and the entry of

substances or organisms of Vietnamese origin into human bodies is generally harmful to

American soldiers. They are very careful, for instance, to eat only canned rations which the

army supplies, and only to drink water from their canteens which is purified with tablets. Even

so, a number of parasites and diseases afflict the soldiers, and, for some, the results are more

109

serious than mere sickness. Vaught, Paul Berlin’s squadmate, demonstrates the sharpness of his

bayonet by slicing water-logged skin off his arm: “in two days the bacteria soaked in and the arm

turned yellow, so they bundled him up and called in a dustoff[.] … It was a shock to learn he’d

lost the arm” (GAC 2). Morty Phillips makes the ill-advised decision to go for a swim on a

particularly hot day in the area of My Khe where the enemy has a strong presence. Even though

he escapes detection and injury from the human enemy, “[a] few days later … he feels real dizzy.

Pukes a lot, temperature zooms way up. … Jorgenson says he must’ve swallowed bad water on

that swim. Swallowed a VC virus or something” (TTTC 186).

It is somewhat unlikely that the disease which kills Morty has either a partisan affiliation

or a history of genetic engineering at the hands of the Vietnamese guerilla faction. However, the

political allegiance of the presumed virus is further evidence of a widespread belief in the

hostility of the non-human entities which are part of the Vietnamese environment and, more

symbolically, another example of the way in which the land, if not imposing its will, at least

exerts some agential force on the humans who attempt to navigate its challenges and gamble

their lives against the “million ways to die” which present themselves in Vietnam (TTTC 187).

Kiowa’s death, however, is much more immediate than a bacterial infection. In a practical sense,

the mortar fire unleashed on the squad camped in the flooded field must be the work of humans,

though their origins or affiliations are unknown since contact with them is never made. But,

Bowker recalls that the mortar rounds did not have apparent human origins, and instead “seemed

to come right out of the clouds” (141). His recollections of the shells falling quite literally like

rain offers an interesting echo to Cross’s assertion that “[the] rain was the war and you had to

fight it,” and in the moments where the mortars are falling on the soldiers, the boundary between

the war and the world becomes fluid (156). The overflowing of the Song Tra Bong is the result

110

of the relentless monsoon rains, and as the shells fall to earth with the precipitation and “the field

just [explodes]” in a shower of “[rain] and slop and shrapnel,” natural and artificial elements

become nearly inseparable from one another (142). As both the water and the mortars play a

shared role in Kiowa’s death, the power of the soldiers becomes nearly nonexistent. They are

unable to respond in kind to their attackers, they do not succeed in adding to their enemy “body

count” in order to provide at least some measure of combat effectiveness, and they are similarly

unable to save their comrade from the joint forces of war and nature.

Chen observes that “Kiowa not only dies in Vietnam; he is incorporated into the texture

of the land” (93). Her statement unintentionally speaks to an interesting parallel between Kiowa

and the young Vietnamese soldier who is the subject of “The Man I Killed,” a man who, in

death, becomes incorporated into “the stories of his village and people” (124). Beyond this

passing similarity, as well as the host of shrapnel wounds which disfigure both his and Kiowa’s

bodies, is the vagueness of responsibility that surrounds their respective deaths. Tim’s certainty

in terms of his responsibility for the young man’s death, even if his evasiveness about the literal

nature of that responsibility confuses the matter somewhat, may shed additional light on the

critical debate about whether or not the young, nameless American soldier who turns the

flashlight on and causes the mortar attack is, as Heberle suggests, Tim himself (Heberle 209).

More importantly, though, the broader system of responsibility at work both on the My Khe trail

and in the field by the Song Tra Bong represents a deeper and perhaps unanswerable question

about the morality, or the moral imperatives, which may inhere in objects. Jane Bennett, as

mentioned above, finds the notion of singular blame unethical, and Tim seems to agree. Whether

he threw the grenade that killed his VC counterpart or not, and whether his need to show Kiowa

a picture of his girlfriend by flashlight in the field caused the shelling or not, he admits to having

111

some complicity in those events simply by being present. Tim’s seeming contradiction of his

role in the death of the young Vietnamese soldier in “Good Form” makes it unclear where the

grenade that exploded at the young man’s feet originated, and the source of the mortars is

similarly unknown except that they come – literally – out of thin air. The grenade and the

mortars cannot help but explode, the rain cannot help but fall, and Tim cannot help but go to the

war. However, Tim constructs himself as a moral casualty, unable to will or act his way out of

responsibility for the war, but his prevailing attitude towards the other actors is less clear.

If the land is the enemy, it is only because the human desire to project its own views and

interpretations of particular moral problems on the environment drowns out whatever ability the

land might have to respond, or even initiate an agential transaction. Tim seeks “signs of

forgiveness or personal grace or whatever else the land might offer” when he returns to the site

of Kiowa’s death nearly 20 years later, and his actions, as usual, are somewhat inscrutable (173).

It is difficult to say why Tim needs to re-enter the water near the field’s edge and wedge Kiowa’s

moccasins into the muddy bottom. Tim lets the moccasins slide away in the same way that

Kiowa himself slipped beneath the surface of the foul and muddy water years before, and it is a

strange moment of atonement or apology for his past actions. Kiowa’s body, of course, was

found and removed from the field, so it is not as though Tim’s placement of the footwear “re-

unites” his friend with a treasured personal item. It is also difficult to read Tim’s actions as a

means of appeasing the Vietnamese land since he sees the environment as being variously

malignant and benign, but never as an entity, or assembly of entities, that is ultimately concerned

with the consumption or absorption of human bodies or items. Rather, Tim’s submerging of the

moccasins is most likely a personal memorial gesture and a moment of “personal catharsis,” as

Heberle suggests, but the gesture is also immediately and “decisively undercut” (209, 210). For

112

O’Brien, water does not seem to hold its usual symbolic value of purification, cleansing, or

renewal. Frequently, and ironically, water is corrupted and diseased, unpleasant in smell,

appearance, and effect. While this may indicate not just moral indifference but a general

underlying immorality or amorality in the natural world, it also serves as a further indication of

O’Brien’s belief in the difficulty of escaping ethical responsibility, and the impossibility of

restoring one’s own moral standing.

Heberle notes that the complete and utter truth of the Kiowa episode “can never be fully

represented through writing” (211), and in the same way as Tim’s stories provide only a slice of

the truth, his re-experiencing of the field provides only limited phenomenal insight into the true

being of the land itself. Tim places the moccasins beneath the surface with the buried “canteens

and bandoliers and mess kits” lost during the mortar attack, but the moment of remembering or

of re-enacting the traumatic memory is rather anticlimactic: “it was hard to find any real

emotion. It just wasn’t there” (TTTC 176). “‘Well,’ [Tim] finally [manages]. There it is” (178).

Kiowa, presumably, never did deserve to be bodily combined with the filth and waste which

serves as the physical substrate of the war, and Tim’s placement of the moccasins beneath the

water pooled in the field with other lost and nearly-forgotten military items serves as something

of an ambivalent gesture, an attempt at reconciliation and a reprise of Kiowa’s unfortunate

“wasting.” After the fact, Tim is also nonplussed, having nothing to say other than the

disappointing and cliché phrase, “there it is.” Tim’s less-than-dramatic action, similar to Paul

Berlin’s reacting to the poverty of Quang Ngai with “mild surprise, fleeting compassion, but not

amazement” (GAC 254); Mitchell Sanders’s blunt observation amidst the bodies of more than

two dozen enemy soldiers that “Death sucks” (TTTC 230); and the notion that a true war story

leaves the hearer with nothing to say except “Oh” (TTTC 74), speaks to the “unknowability” of

113

Vietnam in a broad sense, and, more particularly, to the kind of moral uncertainty which

underlies it. Far from suggesting, however, that certain acts and philosophies cannot be morally

valued, this uncertainty calls for a more thorough investigation of the ways in which moral

questions are approached, and moral values are constructed.

The emptiness which pervades Tim’s attempts to resolve his complicated feelings about

the war and the country becomes a source of anxiety for him since it calls into question the very

nature of what Harman terms his “access to reality,” and this anxiety appears to be a result of

Tim’s reluctance to accept the sincerity of things in the world while searching for some kind of

authenticity, be it objective moral value or real narrative truth (18). It is, somehow, an

uncomfortable truth that the reality of things may indeed be as multiple as their relations with

other entities in the world, and Tim’s anxiousness in terms of the changeable nature of reality –

the field, at one time “[embodying] all the waste that was Vietnam, all the vulgarity and horror”

is now “just what it is, … [flat] and dreary and unremarkable” – seems to be based on a

surprising lack of comfort with the possibility of things having multiple layers of meaning,

significance, and moral import. In short, the imperatives to act which things project into the

world may be indecipherable or easily understandable, but are sometimes contradictory as the

means of relation with other entities are reconfigured over time and space and – for Tim –

memory. The field can be a place of horror and place of peace as the act of memory joins the

past to the present, meaning that while the events of Vietnam are ostensibly locked in history, the

act of remembering allows them to assume an air of immediacy and currency. But memory also

gives such events a dual moral quality as an act, in its moment, emerges as a product of

contemporary circumstances while, in memory, it is subject to revision in light of many alternate

possibilities. This dual quality contributes to the dynamic nature of human morals since, whether

114

the imperatives which objects project into the world change or not, the interplay between these

imperatives and their material effectiveness on one another – and the emerging state of the world

– do. The effectiveness of various imperatives informs or creates a state of normative human

morals, but this state is always in flux as the movement of time, and the vastness of physical

space, ensures that, although a broad sense of interconnectivity may exist, a regional hierarchy of

more or less effective local networks will arise at the same time as the composition of such

networks undergoes constant change.

Tim’s use of memory as a stockpile of experiences which may be reviewed and,

essentially, re-lived through storytelling speaks to Bill Brown’s questioning of what kinds of

emotional motivations underlie the act of collecting. Brown asks whether individuals curate

collections “in order to keep the past proximate, to incorporate the past into … daily [life], or in

order to make the past distant,” perhaps assuming a degree of ambivalence on the part of most

collectors (12). Tim, however, very clearly refuses to isolate his current self from history since

he uses both imagination and memory in his collection of stories to blur the lines between past

and present, between what happened and what might have happened, and even between fact and

fiction. As a result, Tim can neither resolve the ambiguities of his Vietnam experiences nor

simply accept his – and their – uncertainties and say, truthfully, that “[all] that’s finished,” as he

attempts to mitigate his young daughter’s lack of understanding at the end of “Field Trip.”

Whatever new understandings Tim might cultivate through his exploration of possibilities, or his

attempts to use temporal distance as a therapeutic means of confronting guilt or trauma, find their

undoing in his simultaneous efforts to incorporate the past into the present, efforts which have

the effect of recycling or reaffirming his previously-held conclusions about guilt and culpability.

115

Ultimately, Tim’s appeal to the land cannot relieve his sense of moral deficiency, even though it

may suggest that he is not entirely responsible for Kiowa’s demise. Although Tim considers his

own guilt in his friend’s death – be it direct, indirect, or merely a result of being present that

night along the Song Tra Bong – to be pervasive, the field also seems to bear some

responsibility, even if that responsibility is not the same kind that Tim has, or feels that he has.

Thus, the field becomes a strange place to seek forgiveness and, though not necessarily hostile to

Tim’s intentions, it is at least incompatible with the moral expectations which he attempts to

impose upon it.

ii. Carrying the Land and the Sky

It is obvious that carrying is, in O’Brien’s work, the fundamental activity of the soldier,

since even when the soldier is not actively marching, he is burdened with all manner of physical,

psychological, and notional lading. Not limited to personal, military, or even miscellaneous

collected items or to intellectual quantities like fear and pride, Tim notes that the soldiers

carried infections. … They carried diseases, among them malaria and

dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae

and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself – Vietnam, the

place, the soil – a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and

fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they

carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all

of it, they carried gravity. (14)

One cannot help but be reminded of Martin Heidegger’s four-fold nature of the thing, a principle

of metaphysical uncertainty in which the essence of the thing as an entity is always to be found

116

somewhere between the four poles of mortality and divinity, land and sky. By carrying both the

land and the sky (as well as the physical and the notional), the soldiers undergo a transformation

from intruders in the Vietnamese landscape into a part of the landscape itself: that is, the soldiers

become a means through which the non-human world may emerge and find expression. The

land becomes part of the soldier’s body to the degree that it not only covers his clothes but also

his face, partially obscuring or altering his identity, while the humid atmosphere and the

incessant rains of the monsoon season similarly infiltrate all of the soldier’s equipment leading to

the proliferation of parasitic organisms on his body. But more than just the physical

manifestations of the world are to be found intermingling with the soldiers as they move through

it: Tim is careful to note that they also carry the “place,” something which suggests a symbolic

and significant connection that transcends physical effects.

Heidegger argues in his treatise on the nature of the thing that a jug’s true character is

revealed in the act of “the outpouring” of the material which is contained within it, or the

suggestion and the possibility of outpouring even if it is empty (172). In other words, it gains its

essential being not from its synthesis of disparate conceptual elements, but from the way in

which the jug employs its qualities to make change or announce its presence in the world. This

is also one of the fundamental, generic concerns of Vietnam literature inasmuch as it is a

collection of works which contemplate the many competing approaches to explaining, valuing,

and judging the American involvement in southeast Asia. O’Brien’s work is obviously not

without import in terms of such broad conceptual discussions, even though the novels in question

here are largely concerned, on a basic and material level, with staying alive and surviving the

year-long tour of duty which the American military required of its draftees and volunteers. One

of the overarching tensions in the works involves the almost surreal way in which the American

117

war effort involves the packaging, importation, and distribution of American patterns of

consumption – including “sunglasses and woolen sweaters … sparklers for the Fourth of July,

colored eggs for Easter … the fruits of science, the smokestacks, the canneries” – while the

efforts of the Vietnamese soldiers appear to be more natural and less forced, a process of

interaction rather than a process of imposition (TTTC 15). Tim, with a mixture of awe and fear,

relates that “the countryside itself seemed spooky, … and Charlie Cong was the main ghost”

(192).

He could blend with the land, changing form, becoming trees and grass.

He could levitate. He could fly. He could pass through barbed wire and

melt away like ice and creep up on you without sound or footsteps. He

was scary. In the daylight, maybe, you didn’t believe in this stuff. … But

at night you turned into a believer. (193)

Night is a significant time for Tim, and it seems to be all the more unsettling since the

clarity of relationships that give structure to a world with a particular epistemological order break

down, and it becomes easy to lose one’s place in relation to the world, to others, and to oneself

when “fighting forces that did not obey the laws of twentieth-century science” (192). While

playing his prank on Jorgenson in “The Ghost Soldiers,” Tim experiences this kind of

transcendent feeling for only a few fleeting moments when he “[seems] to rise up out of his own

body and float through the dark, … [becoming] the land itself – everything, everywhere – … I

was Nam – the horror, the war” (198-9). In light of the feelings Tim has about Kiowa’s death

and the disturbing way in which his friend and comrade became “folded in with the war,” the

empowering moment in which Tim surpasses the physical limitations of his body to feel a

greater sense of unity with the numerous and diverse individual phenomena which make up “the

118

land” and “the war” should also strike him as an ambivalent one. “The Ghost Soldiers” begins

with Tim being shot, and the medic Jorgenson’s ineptitude falls just short of causing the

narrator’s untimely demise, leading to “borderline gangrene” in the wounded area (181). Tim, as

a result of his body’s relative weakness and susceptibility to both the physical effects of bullets

as well as microbial infection, becomes reliant on medical care to save him from death, and it

would seem that he cannot adequately attempt to exact revenge on Jorgenson while still trapped

within his own body, a body which is, after all, beholden to Jorgenson for its continued

existence. It is only when Tim, rather than being a victim of certain constellations of events and

circumstances, joins forces with the world – and the war – that he can begin to feel a sense of

power. Despite having to spend a month on his stomach in order to recover from a serious

wound in the buttocks, Tim enjoys a certain degree of good fortune since his moment of

“oneness” with the world is not the same as Kiowa’s, or the same as any of the individuals

whose deaths come during the search of enemy tunnels. In spite of their differing results, both

Tim’s experience and Kiowa’s are concerned with the limitations of the human body as an

agential entity in the world, with Kiowa’s illustrated through death, and Tim’s through a

momentary and quasi-divine rising above the material realities of his existence. It is worth

noting also that Tim describes his experience as one in which “right and wrong [are] somewhere

else,” suggesting that transcending materiality entails a degree of liberation from whatever

imperatives material conditions may offer, even if his ethical sensibilities remain in effect and

continue to suggest a course of action (198).

Perhaps no character achieves such a clear transcendence of bodily limitation as Mary

Anne Bell, the “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong.” Arriving in-country as a relatively normal

American girl “fresh out of Cleveland Heights Senior High,” she gradually becomes enamoured

119

of the business of the war and the rugged landscape which surrounds the medical aid station in

the mountains near Chu Lai (89). Developing an interest in the native population as well as the

mysterious operations of a detachment of Green Berets stationed at the base, she eventually

disappears into the wilderness with them on a lengthy mission and, though she physically

reappears three weeks later, “in a sense, … never [returns]” (100). Her presence upon returning

to the base becomes “vaporous and unreal” (101), and before long she takes to the jungle alone

and without a weapon, disappearing entirely and becoming, in the words of Rat Kiley, “part of

the land” (110). That she seems simply to evaporate into the mountain topography and become

another of the haunting spirits which frequent the jungle darkness is another ambivalent moment

in the narrative, since the way in which she “[seems] to flow like water through the dark” exists

in counterpoint to the intense and heightened awareness she has of her own body as a unitary

entity: “I feel close to myself. … I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my

skin and my fingernails, everything, it’s like I’m full of electricity[.] … I know exactly who I

am” (106). Perhaps divining the nature of a thing, or gaining a true and sincere sense of a thing,

is not a matter of firmly locating its essence at some point between the various poles of being,

but of finding a point at which a perfect balance between the four is achieved. For Mary Anne,

the state of concurrent closeness to herself and to the larger world becomes perpetual. In

contrast, Tim’s sense of oneness with the war in “The Ghost Soldiers” is only momentary,

perhaps because it does not include coincident closeness to his body as a powerful entity unto

itself: he is, in fact, anxious that he is “losing [himself], everything spilling out” (202). In either

case, there is a clear moment at which prosaic physicality assumes a secondary importance to the

more ethereal qualities of Heidegger’s “sky” and “divinity,” and what, for Harman, might equate

to the concurrent qualities of a thing’s internal unity, and its endless potential for relation.

120

O’Brien, of course, is not suggesting that the Vietnamese soldiers who oppose the

American military are paranormal supermen, or that Mary Anne literally dissolves into the

landscape surrounding the medical aid station. On the contrary, the idea of slipping the bonds of

one’s physical body is more of a symbolic one, suggesting that the access to truth and

understanding requires one to look beyond historical personal experience and narrow intellectual

patterns to achieve a broader perspective on the world. In the (albeit imaginary) conversation

which occurs between the soldiers in Paul Berlin’s unit and Li Van Hgoc, the Viet Cong major

suggests that respecting and understanding the landscape requires an awareness of its multiple

nature as “community, and soil, and home” in addition to “earth and sky and even sacredness”

(GAC 86). In light of these significances, Li’s land transcends a certain capitalist paradigm of

usable or consumable space, or the military notions of territory with greater or lesser strategic

importance. Instead, to approach the Vietnamese geography with at least an appreciation for its

many and varied vectors of relation is to accord with Li’s statement that “things may be viewed

from many angles [in order to reveal] entirely new understandings,” a way of thinking which

exemplifies not only O’Brien’s larger literary project, but also the theoretical and philosophical

projects of scholars like Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, and Graham Harman who seek to rethink the

way in which human relation and human existence manifest themselves in the world, and how

the moral and ethical spaces which attend those manifestations might be contemplated. The

seeming out-of-body experiences which Tim and Mary Anne describe, along with Berlin’s

imaginative transcendence of the mundane realities of being a foot soldier, exist as a signal to

look beyond the normal boundaries not just of the human body, but of the human mind in order

to seek novel answers to old questions, be they of politics, personal relations, trauma, or of guilt

and responsibility.

121

The response of Berlin’s unit, tellingly, is to begin destroying Li’s subterranean listening

post when he informs them that they cannot ever find a way out of the network of tunnels in

which he is located, and also that “the land cannot be beaten” (97). The land, as “the war,” has

made “prisoners [of] all of [them],” and the escalating violence has made it a jail “with no exit”

(96). Corson’s destruction of Li’s periscope, through which the soldiers were able to see

themselves waiting outside the tunnel where Frenchie Tucker and Bernie Lynn were shot, is not

only a source of anxiety for the Vietnamese officer, but an example of sheer unwillingness to

consider the validity of other perspectives, particularly those which locate the focal point of

signification and meaning-making outside the individual. In what appears to be a convincing

show of human agency, Corson and his unit refuse to take a third-person view of themselves

(and, in fact, actively reject the means of adopting such a view), an act which becomes a

disastrous rejection of the agential capacity that is present in the geographical and environmental

elements which surround and entrap them: the destruction of the periscope, and the additional

perspective which it offers, serves to mystify the war even further and “only makes more pieces.

Each thing broken makes the puzzle more difficult” (94). As the limited political and ideological

views which are comprised of only a single approach to truth, nature, or other universal or

essential concepts become more entrenched, Li suggests, the potential for resolving differences

of all kinds becomes increasingly remote. Sarkin Aung Wan, however, notes that successful

resolution of conflict may also rest in “[becoming] a refugee,” that to escape the kind of prison

which the underground tunnels represent, one must “join it” (97). It is necessary, in other words,

to reject the comfort of one’s intellectual or epistemological “home” in order to see past the

deep-seated assumptions about the nature of the world inherent in any specific ideology. The

Vietnamese landscape, erstwhile in its self-defense through mines and booby traps, through

122

parasites and diseases, and through extreme weather and formidable topography, may appear

adversarial in spite of its presumptive moral indifference. However, its threatening nature,

located specifically in both its otherness and in its multiplicity of being, is not insuperable, and to

come to terms with its seeming implacability involves not only listening, but also a willingness

to look beyond the normal patterns of value and relationality which tell only partial truths.

In addition to the land’s ability to defend itself, the ability of the Vietnamese land to

“talk” becomes, for Tim, a captivating preoccupation over the course of The Things They

Carried. In conversation with Sanders, Tim learns that “[everything] talks. The trees talk

politics, the monkeys talk religion, … Nam – it truly talks” (71). Later, Tim finds “the crickets

[talking] in code, and the night [taking] on an electronic tingle” which produces a “strange hum

in your ears … [like it] had its own voice” (195, 210), and Sanders reprises his comments on the

monkeys, this time not talking religion but “[chattering] death-chatter” (210). The speaking

land, and the human awareness that it is speaking some imperative, indicate a kind of

relationality that is not unnatural so much as it is unusual. Despite the vagueness of the “strange

hum” and the “death-chatter,” the apparently wild landscape does seem to be engaging with the

human perceptions in a sophisticated and meaningful way. While it is unlikely that Tim or

Mitchell hear the various elements of the natural world engaging in philosophical discussion per

se, the ability of the things in the environment to “signal messages” to their human interlopers is

clear, even if the meanings are not. Sanders, obviously, is wrong to suggest that Vietnam is not a

place of civilisation, but his insistence on listening to the voices of the jungle redeems his

superficial ignorance. That the soldiers are able to interpret, to some degree, the messages of the

jungle indicates they, themselves, are not as ontologically or even practically separate from the

country as they think they are, or, perhaps, would like to be. But, their inability to be completely

123

in tune with the imperatives of the “strange hum” or the resounding silences of the landscape

indicate that their rational and perceptive faculties are indeed limited and circumscribed by the

physical realities and limitations of the human body. Like O’Brien’s larger project of explicating

an elusive truth, the kind of ethical systems which the forces of nature suggest may continually

exceed the human ability to apprehend and interpret them.

However, the inability of the American soldiers to make a full connection with the

imperatives of the land creates a sense of equivocation in terms of the novels’ apparent attitudes

toward the Vietnamese people who inhabit the country. Recalling Renny Chrsitopher’s remark

that “Viet Nam” the place and “Vietnam” the war coalesce into a single entity for O’Brien, it

may be reasonable to assume a similar linkage exists between Vietnam the place and the

Vietnamese people. Christopher’s assertion that O’Brien’s focus on the land as the most

persistent belligerent in the war denies the Vietnamese people their proper recognition as rational

agents suggests the possibility that O’Brien’s intellectual shortcomings come not solely out of

ignorance but also out of inherent racism and the inability to conceive of some meaningful

difference between the land and its inhabitants, a position she describes as “definitely critical of

… American racism, but … [not having] an adequate replacement for it” (223). Both novels

have their obviously racist moments, such as Stink Harris’ view of the Vietnamese language as

“monkey chatter [and] bird talk” and his calling Li Van Hgoc a “Chinese cookie” (GAC 261, 95).

Stink’s obvious denial of the ethnic differences between the Vietnamese and the Chinese speaks

to a systematic misrepresentation of non-white cultures, and his characterisation of the Asian

language as a series of apparently sub-human, animal sounds is similarly problematic. Sanders

rejects the idea that Vietnam is a place of civilisation, and The Things They Carried does in fact

countenance the idea that the host of jungle sounds – including monkey chatter – has at least a

124

degree of intelligibility, unlike the Vietnamese language itself which, in Going After Cacciato,

proves to be an abiding mystery. Moreover, Cacciato states that villages – if not the people in

them, exactly – are “part of the land,” and that the large hedges which obscure them become not

just a natural obstacle but “a kind of clothing” for the Vietnamese settlements (251, 252). That

Berlin attaches a human quality to the villages as he thinks of them wrapped in clothing, and also

assigns them a certain sinister character as he describes the hedges as being “like walls in old

mansions [with] secret panels and trapdoors and portraits with moving eyes,” suggests a very

clear link between the apparent but inscrutable enmity of the land and the (perhaps intentionally)

misunderstood character of the Vietnamese people (252).

However, the narrator of Cacciato points out that, whatever symbolic similarity there

might be between the land and its inhabitants, “[Berlin does] not know the people who [live] on

the land, but the land itself he [knows] well” (250). Not only does this statement militate against

the creation of a singularly significant relationship between humans and land, but the narrator

also notes shortly thereafter that, “by not knowing the language, [the soldiers do] not know the

people,” which further works against critical attempts to establish a clear (and ideologically

suspect) equation of the land with its inhabitants (261). It is worth noting that, though Li Van

Hgoc lives underground, has the ability to see beyond his immediate situation, and does seem to

symbolise a close bond between the Vietnamese and their physical homeland, he is, after all, a

prisoner whose life is “[ruined] by a war [he] never cared about,” and does not seem to argue

with Berlin’s unit as a wise and prescient individual so much as one resigned to a strictly

circumscribed fate (96). Regardless of his pessimistic view of imprisonment, Li is at least aware

of a certain synergy which exists between the Vietnamese and the landscape, offering in

rejoinder to Berlin’s question of how their soldiers “melt into the land” the question of whether

125

“the leopard [hides] … [or] is hidden by nature” (85, 86). Li’s cryptic response, while hinting at

the broader conceptions of agency that have broader locations for material effectiveness than just

the human subject, also speaks to Cacciato’s greater ambivalence regarding the relationship

between land and people. This ambivalence finds itself closer to resolution in The Things They

Carried, where the reluctant soldier who meets his end in “The Man I Killed” is not ultimately

condemned to a below-ground prison sentence or burial but rather “[wakes] up in the stories of

his village and his people” (124). The movement of the soldier away from an uncertain fate in a

perpetual prison to the world of folklore serves as an interesting articulation of O’Brien’s

departure from the deep ambivalence of his earlier novel in favour of contemplating the

redemptive and explanatory effects of storytelling – as well as the effects of stories themselves –

while also exploring the capabilities of language to inform personal and national development.

Though subtle, Tim’s reliance as an American writer on storytelling, and the concurrent

awareness of a similar ability and willingness to create narratives on the part of the Vietnamese

people, suggests an equivalency between the two cultural groups. Moreover, O’Brien as an

author and as an individual is not unaware of the close relational ties between land and person,

and land and culture generally. It may not be accurate to suggest that O’Brien unknowingly

displays an ideological condescension towards non-western culture by constructing it as closely

tied to the landscape in a derivation of the noble savage paradigm since, as he communicates in

his earlier memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, his sense of obligation to dubious American

domestic and foreign politics comes as a result of his own contract with his homeland.

I owed the prairie something. For twenty-one years I’d lived under its

laws, accepted its education, eaten its food, wasted and guzzled its water,

126

slept well at night, driven across its highways, dirtied and breathed its air,

wallowed in its luxuries. (18)

Both Paul Berlin and Tim extend O’Brien’s personal feelings on the issue of obligation,

with Berlin calling it “a legitimate debt” and Tim ultimately deciding not to “swim away from

[his] hometown and [his] country” when the opportunity presents itself (GAC 319, TTTC 55).

That these novels, and O’Brien himself, struggle with assigning moral blame in situations where

honoring previously-established obligations that are, in some way, tied to geographical locations

and the networks or relationships that emanate from them makes it difficult to argue that O’Brien

feels such obligations to be, in and of themselves, primitive or otherwise culturally degenerate.

It would, after all, be easy to dismiss such obligations if they are not sufficiently compelling, and

the Vietnamese soldiers Paul and Tim encounter appear to be contending with the same issues of

tacit national complicity becoming a de facto compulsion to engage in a war which has unclear

or unconvincing motivations. Rather than refraining from suggesting that there is some symbolic

link between humans and the landscape, O’Brien gestures towards the problematic nature of this

relationship, regardless of nationality or ethnicity. O’Brien and his characters are all faced with

a moral impasse regarding their involvement in their specific communities. Although nominally

concerned with the issue of patriotism rather than identity politics as such, Alisdair MacIntyre

indicates that the kind of moral confusion which these characters display is neither unexpected

nor unprecedented. An objective moral judgment requires one “to judge impersonally,” even

though one’s normative sense of morality is in danger of annihilation if one fails to “understand

… individual life as embedded in this history of [one’s] country” (122, 134). Tim and Paul are

beset by moral danger on both sides since they must either “[place their] ties to [their] nation

beyond rational criticism” or leave their “social and moral ties too open to dissolution by rational

127

criticism” (MacIntyre 136). That the series of more or less compelling relationships within the

moral landscapes of these novels makes morally-responsible action incredibly difficult

challenges the agential power of the singular human subject, and also calls the notion of singular

responsibility into question: moral imperatives emerge from numerous sources – be they human

or inhuman, animate or inanimate – which, in their multitude, place significant and often

contradictory demands on human faculties. Broadly, this may indeed suggest that the rational

humanist subject is not singular in its agential capacity, and, more importantly, that the humanist

subject is, as a result of its embeddedness in broad networks of causation, distinctly unable to

effect the changes it wishes to in a number of situations.

iii. Being Borne: The View from the Freedom Bird

In the ever-changing environment of Vietnam, the helicopter becomes the ultimate

object, a symbol of the utter unpredictability of the GI experience, and a kind of deus ex

machina, a figure that may serve any number of near-alchemical functions in a narrative while

also performing. A chopper takes soldiers into a landing zone, and brings back casualties. It

may be loaded with bodies, and produce rations and ammunition in return. It participates very

clearly in the dehumanising process of combat, negotiating these object-for-object, dead-for-live

transactions on a regular and continual basis. A body wrapped in a poncho, loaded on the deck,

might produce one of several items in return: rations, water, ammunition, a fresh soldier, mail,

Coca-Cola, or, perhaps, nothing at all. Michael Herr’s description of the chopper in Dispatches

may be one of the most memorable passages in the entire Vietnam genre.

As long as we could have choppers like taxis it took real exhaustion or

depression near shock or a dozen pipes of opium to keep us even

128

apparently quiet … In the months after I got back the hundreds of

helicopters I’d flown in began to draw together until they’d formed a

collective meta-chopper, and in my mind it was the sexiest thing going;

saver-destroyer, provider-waster, right hand – left hand, nimble, fluent,

canny and human; hot steel, grease, jungle-saturated canvas webbing,

sweat cooling and warming up again, cassette rock and roll in one ear and

door-gun fire in the other, fuel, heat, vitality and death, death itself, hardly

an intruder. (8-9)

The vitality of Herr’s account accords well with the very nature of the chopper itself, a

machine of multitudinous parts, numerous functions, flight and speed, bearing arms and

elevating the human above the difficult realities of humping in the boondocks. Fredric

Jameson’s treatment of the passage is similarly telling in its description of the helicopter as an

exemplar of the “new postmodernist space,” an object which does not just “represent motion …

but which can only be represented in motion” (212, emphasis in original). The idea of the

helicopter, then, entails not just a machine with a potential for action, but which is always in

action, always presenting a relational face to the world, and which is ever-changing in its

signification and its importance, from one moment to the next being indescribable as anything

other than a certain uncertainty. For Tim, and for American soldiers more generally, flight is, of

course, the ultimate escape from the difficulties and the dangers of Vietnam, even if there is a

grim and fatalistic certainty that leaving the battlefield aboard a helicopter is by no means a

guarantee of leaving the battlefield alive. More broadly, thinking of the chopper as the ultimate

thing within the genre illustrates the profound complexities and the immutable, ineffable

essences that inhere within all things in the world, but which often either recede from human

129

view or are, in terms of the limited scope of human perceptions, unobservable. In the same way

that a helicopter may appear and disappear seemingly of its own will, and in so doing make

instant changes to the battlefield, appear to transform one object into another, and provide a

literal means of transcending human physical limitations as it rises above the chaos and

confusion of war, the chopper also exemplifies a way of thinking about the world in which the

reality of object, in terms of its appearance, value, and usefulness to the human subject only

begins to describe the numerous way in which things make meaning in the world, and how they

in fact may influence the human systems of value which only presume to instrumentalize them.

Since Tim considers the freedom of flight as the only true escape available from the

bodily danger, physical toil, and questionable moral standing inherent in his military obligations,

one can perhaps forgive his flights of imagination that transform the jet aircraft which will

transport him back home to the United States as actual birds. However, it is easy to see the

appeal, with regard to the difficulties of the landscape and the strain it places on the human body,

of being “carried … [and] purely borne” above and away from the war (TTTC 22). One might

similarly use the notions of distributed agency, Thing Power, and object-oriented philosophy to

reconsider how the human subject is placed within the world, perhaps not bearing the full

responsibility for the making of meaning and generating efficient causation, nor absorbing the

full blame for the states of being which come to pass. Redeveloping paradigms for considering

the importance of the natural world, and thinking about the human body as part of that world,

rather than superior to it, could lead to novel approaches to considering a future in which the

significance of bodies is neither hierarchical nor subject to its current limitations. Though it is

quite difficult to imagine human existence without a strong sense of individual agency (along

with its implications for single responsibility and the operation of retributive justice systems), re-

130

thinking the paradigms of human responsibility and obligation as part of the larger operation of

global “becoming” actually increases the ways in which humans can be considered to participate

in making the world what it is, rather than lessening them, and such thinking may indeed combat

apathetic behaviour through suggesting that the things which happen, though not always

specifically human-caused, are seldom entirely out of human hands.

131

References

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter

and Meaning. Duke UP, 2007.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010.

Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago UP, 2003.

Chen, Tina. “‘Unravelling the Deeper Meaning’: Exile and the Embodied Poetics of

Displacement in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.” Contemporary Literature 39.1

(1998): 77–98. JSTOR. Accessed 31 October, 2015.

Christopher, Renny. The Viet Nam War/The American War: Images and Representations in

Euro-American and Vietnamese Exile Narratives. Massachusetts UP, 1996.

Ciocia, Stefania. Vietnam and Beyond: Tim O’Brien and the Power of Storytelling. Liverpool

UP, 2012. ProQuest. Accessed 30 October, 2015.

Cirlot, J. E., and J. Sage. Dictionary of Symbols. Routledge, 1983. ProQuest. 17 April, 2017.

Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, Editors. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics.

Duke UP, 2010.

Copley, Frank O. Introduction. On the Nature of Things. By Lucretius, Norton, 1977, pp. vii-xxi.

Fuchs, Regula. Remembering Viet Nam: Gustav Hasford, Ron Kovic, Tim O’Brien, and the

Fabrication of American Cultural Memory. Diss. U of Zurich, 2010. Peter Lang, 2010.

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. 1975. Oxford UP, 2013.

Harman, Graham. Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Open

Court, 2005.

Heberle, Mark A. Tim O’Brien: A Trauma Artist. Iowa UP, 2001.

132

Heidegger, Martin. “The Thing.” Poetry, Language, Thought, Translated and edited by Albert

Hofstadter, Harper Colophon, 1975, pp. 165-186.

Herr, Michael. Dispatches. 1968. Vintage, 1991.

Herzog, Tobey. Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost. 1992. Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.

ProQuest. Accessed 24 January, 2018.

---. Writing Vietnam, Writing Life: Caputo, Heinemann, O’Brien, Butler. Iowa UP, 2008.

Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” Everyday Theory, edited by Becky

McLaughlin and Bob Coleman, Pearson, 2005, pp. 201-15.

Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Indiana UP,

1989.

Kaplan, Steven. Understanding Tim O’Brien. South Carolina UP, 1995.

Latour, Bruno. “Morality and Technology.” Trans. Couze Venn. Theory, Culture & Society, vol.

19 Issue 5-6 (December 2002), pp. 247-60. SAGE Journals. Accessed 9 February 2017.

MacIntyre, Alisdair. “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” Global Ethics: Seminal Essays, edited by Thomas

Pogge and Keith Horton, Paragon, vol. 2, 2008, pp. 119-138.

Moore, Robin. The Green Berets. Crown Publishers, 1965.

Nielson, Jim. Warring Fictions. Mississippi UP, 1998.

O’Brien, Tim. If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. 1975. Broadway,

1999.

--. Going After Cacciato. 1978. Broadway, 1999.

---. The Things They Carried. 1990. Mariner, 2009.

133

Ooms, Julie. "'Battles are always fought among human beings, not purposes': Tim O'Brien's

Fiction as a Response to the Crisis of Modernity." Renascence: Essays on Values in

Literature 66.1 (2014): 25-45. Academic OneFile. Accessed 31 October, 2015.

Ruddick, Sara. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Beacon, 1989.

Scheffler, Samuel. “Individual Responsibility in a Global Age.” Global Ethics: Seminal Essays,

edited by Thomas Pogge and Keith Horton, vol. 2, Paragon, 2008, pp. 291-312.

Taylor, Mark. The Vietnam War in History, Literature and Film. Edinburgh UP, 2003.

Vadas, Robert E. Cultures in Conflict: The Viet Nam War. Greenwood, 2002.

Vernon, Alex. Soldiers Once and Still: Ernest Hemingway, James Salter, and Tim O’Brien. Iowa

UP, 2004. ProQuest. Accessed 30 October, 2015.