“This Is True”: Between the Memory and History of Tim O’Brien’s Trauma

Author Tim O'Brien

The writing and methodology of Tim O’Brien resist labels, and as such, assault the binary conceptions of fiction versus nonfiction and memory versus history.  From his personal insistence that he is not a “Vietnam War author” despite titling an autobiographies The Vietnam in Me (Heberle), to the ambiguity of his “fictional” form, labeled by Martin Brady of Booklist as “a kind of ‘faction’” (O’Brien), the uncertainty regarding his content and approach to writing create a unique ever-changing space in between the aforementioned binaries.  This space emerges when O’Brien overlaps memory and fiction.  For, as O’Brien puts it, “When I talk about imagination and memory, I’m talking about the two key ingredients that go into writing fiction”(Smith).  O’Brien goes further to say, “Memory by itself is the province of nonfiction-you write what you remember”(Smith).

Realms of Memory by Pierre Nora

However, O’Brien’s notion of “memory” is challenged by Pierre Nora’s piece, “Between Memory and History” which states, “The task of remembering makes everyone his own historian”(Nora).  Rather than pinning the label of historian on O’Brien, this point of tension merely demonstrates that O’Brien and Nora recognize the same process but give it different names.  Additionally, Nora posits a different notion of memory, one that “has taken refuge in gestures and habits, in skills passed down by unspoken traditions, in the body’s inherent self-knowledge, in unstudied reflexes and ingrained memories.”  In essence, that which has not revealed itself consciously and yet remains a part of one’s functioning.  This element of consciousness is important for it pertains to O’Brien’s second ingredient:  imagination.  Imagination, that which is constructed from the whispers of the subconscious, seems to reflect Nora’s notion of memory.  More so, imagination, in a realm not petrified by the past or a set self-image, puts it out of reach from the mental step that facilitates history in which “self-consciousness emerges under the sign of that which has already happened”(Nora).  In this fashion, Nora helps diagnose and reframe O’Brien’s “imagination” and “memory” as “memory” and “history.”

Cover of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried featuring a soldier literally with memory on the forefront of his mind.

With the true mission of history being to “suppress and destroy” memory (Nora), how is the outcome of O’Brien’s work  “part memory, part imagination”(Smith)?  Differences of semantic labels aside, the conceptual relationship between Nora’s memory and history is one that O’Brien may seem to wholesomely subvert by bridging the binary, when in reality, the relationship keeps its essence through O’Brien’s goals, methodology, and the application of it to a new arena of memory and history.  While Nora describes history and memory as two distinct concepts, their manifestations in life do not seem so disconnected to O’Brien who thinks, “Our lives are largely, maybe totally, determined by what we remember and by what we imagine”(Smith).  The brain is explicitly the bridge between the two for O’Brien and is the case for Nora as well upon closer analysis.  For both O’Brien and Nora, the brain is ultimately the site that spawns history because of the capacity for self-consciousness it unleashes.  In addition, Nora points to the methodology of history, historiography, as “the most tangible sign of the split between history and memory”(Nora), yet the brain that facilitates the mental processes of historiography and history is the same one that is home to the conditioned responses and learned behaviors that form memory.  For O’Brien, imagination is real in that “it’s not happening in the physical world, but it’s certainly happening in the sense of data of the brain”(Smith).  Here in the brain exists O’Brien’s imagination (Nora’s memory), helping him as “a means of dealing with the real world” just like his memories (Nora’s history).

O'Brien depersonalizes soldiers by breaking them down to the things they carried.  In such a state, what kind of consciousness exists?

Beyond the shared psychological and physical root to Nora’s history and memory, the means and ends of O’Brien’s methodology avoid the divisive dynamic of historiography.  O’Brien hurdles Nora’s obstacles of “self-consciousness” and “the task of remembering” that characterize historiography because he does not consciously say, “‘Here’s where I’m going next’ in terms of form and so on.  The language takes me there”(Smith).  Rather than being consciously rooted in the future or the past, O’Brien’s free-flowing thoughts place his writing process in Nora’s memory of the current moment.  O’Brien expands on the impact this memory-facilitated mindset has on his writing methodology by noting, “I always wondered…‘Why am I writing these stories?’ But I never pursued it intellectually.  I just said, ‘Well, I am.’  Once a story is underway I no longer feel in complete control”(Smith).  This lack of control launches O’Brien towards his ultimate goal:  “to produce story detail which will somehow get at a felt experience”(Smith).  In this process, elements of a “true-life story” (Nora’s history) become embellished, “letting one’s imagination heighten detail” in a manner that gets closer to a “felt experience” rather than a lie.  This process of filtering “true-life story” details that have surfaced from his subconscious through the lens of his imagination into “felt experience” serves as a method by authors can attempt to revert traces of Nora’s history back to the roots of their original memories.

Cover of The Things They Carried

While Rat Kiley, a character described as someone for whom “facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around,” merely hints at the way he attempts to capture the truth of Nora’s form of memory by reimagining factual truth,  “How To Tell A True War Story” (“HTTATWS”) offers readers a lens explicitly focused on such attempts and the manner in which they are made.  However, this seems immediately contradicted by the name of the narrator, Tim O’Brien, and the manner in which he consciously recognizes himself and “you” in discussing the subject matter.  But this “Tim O’Brien” is a fictional character, thus rendering any interaction with him fictional as well.  The use of fictionalization to embellish the traces of history present in his work, like in the case of “Tim O’Brien,” blurs the memory-history binary one embellished trace at a time and leaves a story behind in the process.  The augmentation of details that ring of Nora’s history by means of O’Brien’s imagination convolutes even the simplest of statements like “This is true.”  “HTTATWS” vacillates between a declarative tone, like that of the opening line, and a passive tone, like that used in telling the story that follows it.  The story, about a soldier’s grief after a friend dies, is told in a passive present tense and with a passive tone towards the audience as he seems to preempt their reactions, as if the story has been told so many times that “O’Brien” is engaging with the process rather than the audience.  At one point, “So what happens?” narrates a moment of suspense “O’Brien” preempts in the audience while at another point writes “you” is addressed, but it is not the audience for it is only in the context of the impersonal expression “you could trust him with your life”(O’Brien).  In this fashion, O’Brien’s story remains loyal to the author’s proposed means of redrawing Nora’s history-memory binary because it applies his imaginative skills to augment its historical traces and is not crafted from nor directed towards an identifiable consciousness that could attach it to history.

Photograph of a young Tim O'Brien in Vietnam.  After all these years, did the war ever really end for this young man?

“HTTATWS”’s attempt to harvest memory from history takes a steps towards the latter by playing on the fictional nature of the text and its lack of a defined consciousness to address the “unspoken traditions” and “ingrained memories” of Nora’s memory.  The belief of O’Brien the author that “the soldier can’t really teach anything.  The only thing he can do is tell war stories” illuminates “HHTATWS” as a reflection of a larger tradition of in which soldiers cannot engage in the self-reflective historical task of teaching and can only engage in the practice of telling stories.  “O’Brien’s” method of practicing this tradition avoids the trappings of historiography because true war stories “do not indulge in…analysis”(O’Brien).  A “true war story” sidesteps the search for historical resolution because “it never seems to end.  Not then, not ever.”  Even if this analysis were to occur, it would merely have traces of history in it because of O’Brien’s use of fictionalization to stretch history across Nora’s binary into the territory of memory.  “O’Brien” the character even posits, “In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.”  “HTTATWS” leaves readers with some form of “unspoken tradition” because if “nothing is ever absolutely true,” then some truth, is left unspoken in the lack of total truth, “Sometimes it’s just beyond telling”(O’Brien).  In this space, elements of “unspoken tradition” can be found.

In revisiting the moment a soldier was killed by a landmine O'Brien stresses his point:  This is true.

Perhaps the most convincing evidence that “HTTATWS” exemplifies O’Brien’s  remapping of Nora’s memory-history binary is his first line:  “This is true.”  The significance of this phrase goes beyond its role as a foundational spark for The Things They Carried to the role of repetition in a “true war story.”  Over the course of “HTTATWS,” “O’Brien” revisits the same story of a soldier killed by a landmine four times, each time with different elements of truth and fabricated truth mixed in.  The reason being is that “you can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it”(O’Brien).  The reason being is “O’Brien’s” loyalty to the subjective nature of truth as exemplified by his introduction to one story, which states, “This one does it for me.  I’ve told it before-many times, many versions-but here’s what actually happened”(O’Brien).  Repetition thus becomes a means to both tell a true war story and diagnose whether a story is a true war story.  In the end, it seems like the terrain covered across Nora’s memory-history binary in “HTTATWS” could be understood by revisiting the opening line again and again, “This is true.”  Exploring it each time with a different inflection, intonation, or other means of giving meaning to the phrase from doubt, to certainty, to exasperation, and beyond.  Saying it until it is ingrained.  Saying it until it feels like part of a tradition.  Saying it until saying it no longer requires conscious effort to do so.  Saying it until it is memory born from a trace of history.  For in the end, no matter how it is said, “This is true.”

Scholarship from the United States Naval Academy, an institution bound to Vietnam through its graduates like Senator John McCain and their traumatic experiences, looks at O'Brien through the lens of that trauma.

Although O’Brien states that The Things They Carried originated from “remembering all this crap I had on me and inside me, the physical and spiritual burdens”(Heberle), the traumatic burdens of war have an even deeper relationship in the process of storytelling, both for O’Brien and others.  An investigation by Professor Mark McWilliams, Chair of the United States Naval Academy’s English Department, into the role of trauma in O’Brien’s work reveals a reciprocal relationship between trauma and storytelling.  McWilliams’ psychological work is littered with the terms of O’Brien and Nora but under different labels:  psychology’s memory is on par with O’Brien’s “factual truth” and Nora’s history.  However, this is only when a memory is conscious.  Otherwise, it is akin to the realms of O’Brien’s imagination and Nora’s memory.  McWilliams first places trauma on the level of O’Brien’s imagination for “trauma inflicts upon the brain a story which…it cannot understand, cannot process, cannot move beyond” and thus rests below the conscious mind (McWilliams).  In looking at “war neuroses,” Freud conceived that the damage of trauma is in its disruption to one’s sense of time.  For Freud, a traumatic event comes into an individual’s life too rapidly for one to recognize and understand.  As such, one can only recognize it in hindsight, which disrupts the sense of time of those traumatized.  To them, the experience of the event has not happened yet, only the notion that something happened.  Flashbacks, nightmares, and other products of one’s imagination emerge to fill the void and understand the experience lost in time.  McWilliams writes that in trauma, “this most literary of psychological experiences, without time, there can be no coherent narrative, no story” (McWilliams).  

Trauma and Recovery by Dr. Judith Herman validates the fictional "Tim O'Brien" as not just an example of PTSD, but as her prime example of trauma's effect on Vietnam War veterans.

This connection between trauma and stories is not just reflected in O’Brien’s work as suggested by Professor McWilliams, it is a connection validated by the medical community and in O’Brien’s life.  O’Brien finds himself the subject of a case study of traumatic symptoms in Trauma and Recovery by Dr. Judith Herman.  Herman quotes passages from The Things They Carried as examples of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and draws on O’Brien as her primary writer on the Vietnam War (Heberle).  Of interest is not just O’Brien’s presence in this medical book, but the fact that it is the fictional “Tim O’Brien” who Dr. Herman is inevitably validating as being an embodiment of the processes and products of trauma.

The soldier above exemplifies the toll of trauma on the body and mind, leaving a memory on the individual level that casts the psyche and physical being as its environment.

While O’Brien’s “Tim O’Brien” may represent one half of his statement that “the imagination is half of war, half of any kind of experience”(maroon), the other half of war’s traumatic experience is present in O’Brien’s own life too in a manner that challenges a basic assertion Nora makes about memory.  O’Brien’s body and mind serve as a medium for memory and history for, as he explains, “Nam lived on inside me and I just called it by another name-I called it life…such things live on even though you think you’re over them.  They come bubbling out”(Heberle).  Through his internalization of memories from Vietnam he gave them a new environment:  his mind and body.  In doing so O’Brien complicates Nora’s claim that “there are no milieu de memoire, real environments of memory”(Nora).  This contradiction occurs because Nora conceives of memory on a national cultural scale while O’Brien’s body manifests it on the level of the individual.  The rigidity with which Nora confines his work to the national level is noted by Professor Michael Rothberg, whose work applies Nora’s concepts “beyond the framework of the imagined community of the nation-state”(Rothberg).  So while Nora sees a lack of real environments of memory on the national level, the application of his concepts can validly be extended to the individual level, as exemplified by O’Brien’s embodiment of memories from Vietnam.

The American Psychiatric Association first used the label "post-traumatic stress disorder" in the third edition of its Diagnostic Statistical Manual in the wake of its high occurrence in Vietnam War Veterans.  Although the trauma O'Brien experienced is validated in the therapeutic community, it is not a community to which he has attached himself.

In the milieu de memoire of O’Brien’s psyche and body, the traumatic memories of Vietnam and their manifestation in his work are complicated even further by the inevitable presence of the historical impulse of self-consciousness and the historiographical impulse of self-analysis inherent to the addressing of trauma by therapeutic means.  However, O’Brien is averse to directly addressing his traumatic past in a therapeutic fashion and is critical of authors of Vietnam Literature whose work seeks therapeutic ends (Heberle).  This pattern of aversion is present in his inability to commit to a single version of a story and instead continuously revisits it through repetition, like the flashbacks and nightmares characteristic of trauma.  His inability to commit to specific descriptions of details in his autobiographical piece “The Vietnam In Me” further demonstrates his strategy of avoidance towards traumatic symptoms.  This piece testifies to the role of distorted time in the traumatic experience for “on war time, the world is one long horror movie” to O’Brien and to its aftereffects as O’Brien seeks “to make the bad pictures” go away from the motion picture of Vietnam left on a loop in his mind “for too many years” leaving O’Brien “in paralysis-guilt, depression, terror, shame”(Heberle).  While these details demonstrate how the processes and symptoms associated with trauma are evident in O’Brien’s life, they lack the specificity of a direct confrontation with them.  Even when he does decide “it’s either move or die” all he can vaguely say is that he is “starting to start”(Heberle).  Although O’Brien’s stance on therapy may change, if he continues to employ the same means to resolve his trauma and experiences the same symptoms in the course of doing so, then the historical traces that have fed the fictional “Tim O’Brien” will remain the same.  In turn, “Tim O’Brien” and the fictional world he inhabits will still serve as an extension of the milieu de memoire of O’Brien’s own body and psyche.

Polaroid of Tim O'Brien in Vietnam.  How much of this young man is "Tim" and how much is Tim?

The extension of O’Brien’s milieu de memoire from his physical being and mind is illuminated by the means of coping with trauma he shares with “Tim O’Brien” and that harkens back to the roots of trauma theory.  The validation of “Tim O’Brien” as an environment of traumatic memory on the individual level by Dr. Judith Herman puts him on par with the milieu de memoire of O’Brien himself.  In these environments a common means of exploring the traumatic terrain of their memories exists:  stories.  While O’Brien publicly addresses his trauma with his stories, “O’Brien’s” use of stories is demonstrated he imagines himself as a ten-year old boy, “skimming across the surface of my own history…when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story”(O’Brien).  This use of story to bridge a distorted sense of time demonstrates the traumatic nature of “Tim’s” existence and stakes a place for O’Brien and “O’Brien” in relation to the realm of traumatic memory.

Tracer rounds and O'Brien's work have something in common:  they carve paths through the dark for others to follow towards a common target.

For both O’Brien and “O’Brien,” true war stories and how to tell them become a means of trying to ground themselves after the “high leap into the dark” of Vietnam’s trauma.  In relation to O’Brien’s autobiographical work, one would be correct to say that in that context, his stories and the process of writing them would exist in the realm of history and historiography.  However, the means by which O’Brien embellishes historical traces using the imaginative skills born from his subconscious renders the fictional realm of “O’Brien” one that extends the milieu de memoire of O’Brien’s mind and body to the page.  One of O’Brien’s pages, with all the true war stories and means of telling them it contains, takes on the form of its own environment.  An environment in which “O’Brien” and O’Brien can tread together “into the dark” down broadly lit mental paths of fiction rather than the disjointed and individualized footsteps of history.  While O’Brien’s fiction by no means offers a path for individuals to uniformly traverse the milieu de memoire of his traumatic memory, for his historical traces give it a distinct beginning and end, these historical traces acts like real tracer rounds.  Tracer rounds, interspersed between rounds of live ammunition, follow the same path a normal bullet would.  They differ in that they emit a red flare that allows a soldier and those he is fighting with to see the path it travels and its ultimate destination.  In this manner, while other soldiers undergoing the same trauma of combat cannot be in the same location as another soldier, they can reach the same target by mimicking the path of the tracer round.  In a similar fashion, soldiers can target their environments of traumatic memory by telling true war stories and the methods of telling them.  The historical traces that differ between them, like the individual tracer rounds fired in battle, ultimately hit their target of restoring light to the darkness of traumatic memory like the tracer rounds that form a conversation with each other through their mimicking of each other.

Two soldiers embrace each other and seem to literally hold their collective memory together.

The capacity of O’Brien’s true war stories to spark a conversation with others targeting the same traumatic dark introduces a wrinkle into Pierre Nora’s work.  Although Nora’s concepts and O’Brien’s works have fundamentally differed because Nora’s apply to the level of the nation while O’Brien’s stems from the individual.  However, the nature of Nora’s “collective memory” seems to overlap and clarify the ability of O’Brien’s work to source of communally addressing trauma.  Nora states “there are as many memories as there are groups”(Nora) which seems to indicate that soldiers could be a group.  Additionally, as those who are capable of telling the hybrid mix of memory-history known as true war stories, soldiers come with a well of memory in place.  Nora appears to complicate O’Brien when he says, “Memory is blind to all but the group it binds”(Nora).  Although O’Brien’s work is available to the public, readers are greeted with the disclaimer “This is a work of fiction” next to the publication information of The Things They Carried.  In a literary world with the binary of nonfiction and fiction, O’Brien tells readers which lens to view his work through, thus leaving them blind to the truth his work gets at and is evident to those who observe it through their own true war stories.  “Tim O’Brien” in the story “The Ghost Soldiers” recalls when the company of soldiers he once belonged to visits the base where he is stationed.  Although to “O’Brien,” these guys had been my brothers” when he was with them, it is clear to him now “once you leave the boonies, the whole comrade business gets turned around”(O’Brien).  Even for soldiers it appears there are different groups of memory such as those still serving and those retired from combat.  Yet the traumatic memories at their core and the need for true war stories to address them leads to O’Brien’s role as a tracer round fired off into the dark where its path serves as a model for others to follow.

The presence of the Vietnam War in the daily lives of US citizens was made possible by news crews like this one from ABC News.

Given the inherent tension to a term like “collective memory,” in regards to whom it would and would not encompass, where does this inherent boundary line extend to for something like the collective memory represented in O’Brien’s work?  While it offers collective memory distinctive to different groups, like those in combat versus veterans, O’Brien himself clarifies the stake that those who did not serve in the Vietnam War have in this collective memory.  O’Brien explains how “Vietnam was an experience that many people in America had felt that they had gone through because of television; they felt that they were veterans of the war…subsequently, they are unwilling to understand that they weren’t participants”(Smith).  Nora refers to television’s capacity to create such a distorted self-perception in his statement that “the media, has substituted for a memory entwined in the intimacy of a collective heritage the ephemeral film of current events” which has created a “tremendous dilation of our very mode of historical perception”(Nora).  Rephrased in Nora’s terms, news coverage of the Vietnam War deceived the self-conscious lens of history by providing observes with an “ephemeral film.”  In doing so, their historical perception became one that placed them in the perceived role of participants contrary to reality.  However, the relationship between the collective memory of those who served in Vietnam and those who did not is given a place through a term used once by Nora and expanded by a scholar of his work:  “prosthetic memory.”  Michael Rothberg of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign credits mass culture for “making group-specific cultural memories available to a diverse and varied populace”(Rothberg).  The results of these alterations to collective memories are “prosthetic memories.”  Because Rothberg does not go into the details of this process it is a topic very much open to scholarly investigation.  The potential use for this kind of memory is validated for O’Brien in letters he receives from the family members of soldiers.  The essential message of them all is, “‘Thank you for writing this book because now I feel something in terms of identification, and in terms of participation that I didn’t before.  My husband can’t talk about it, but now I sort of understand why he doesn’t, why he can’t”(Smith).  While O’Brien’s work forms a memory-history hybrid that pacifies the war within that binary, its ability to function as a “prosthetic memory” gives it a cathartic capacity for those only able to experience the ripple effect of the collective memory of war imprinted on their loved ones.

Forrest Gump may have been fictional, but he is very much a lieux de memoire of the Vietnam War in the eyes of history.

While Nora employs the term “prosthetic memory” one time in his text, his investigation of history and memory occurs in the context of another term:  lieux de memoire.  Nora defines lieux de memoires as “moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned…like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded”(cite).  It is essentially something that has undergone the process of being repurposed from being something once part of memory to being a part of history that people now look to as a shell of the receded “sea of living memory.”  One lieux de memoire of Vietnam is Forrest Gump.  Initially just a motion picture experience, it has been repurposed as an embodiment of the Vietnam War.  From the racial tensions of the war personified by Bubba to the disruption of America’s innocence embodied by the contrast between Forrest’s aloofness and Lt. Dan’s trauma, Forrest Gump has become a cultural reference point for the Vietnam War.  The transformation of Forrest Gump into a lieux de memoire is exemplified by the way actor Gary Sinise strategically uses the character he played, Lt. Dan, when volunteering with veterans.  The gap in experiential memory that could impede interactions between veterans and a civilian actor is addressed by Sinise who instead occupies the cultural shell of his character when volunteering in an attempt to allow those he works with to more readily identify with him (Sinise).