Tim O’Brien (1946Bio:






)
Born in Austin, Minnesota. His father was a life insurance salesman and his
mother raises Tim and his brother and sister.
He grew up a voracious reader since his house was filled with books.
Graduated from Macalester College in 1968 summa cum laude with a degree in
political science.
Was drafter in August of 1968 and served in Vietnam as an infantryman with
Fifth Battalion, Forty-Sixth Infantry of the US Army from January 1969 to March
of 1970. His responsibilities included patrolling the Batangan Pennisula and
villages like My Lai after the massacre.
Upon his return he began his PhD at Harvard (1970-76) and worked as a
journalist in the summers. Also during this time he published two books.
O’Brien left Harvard without his PhD but remained in the Boston area and
continued the successful career he had already cultivated.
His Work:
 His first work was If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home
published in 1973 which is a memoir of his time in Vietnam.
 O’Brien comments that Vietnam made him have to write. He states, “War stories
aren’t about war – they are about the human heart at war.”
 Going After Cacciato was really a break-through novel for him when critics
realized that he was not writing the standard war story. It is a combination of war
story and fantasy in which the title character decides to walk to Paris and his
squad has to hunt him down and bring him back. Essentially this novel comments
on the dreams soldiers in this war must have to survive. O’Brien describes this as
“It’s quirky. It goes somewhere else; It goes away from the war. It starts there and
goes to Paris. A peace novel, in a sense.”
 The Things They Carried is O’Brien’s most famous novel and was published in
1990. As with some of his other work, he published some of the short stories first
in magazines. This novel is confusing to critics who want cannot decide if it is a
novel or a collection of short stories. Essentially, it is a group of short pieces that
are richer when surrounded by each other.
 Philip Caputo, a fellow Vietnam writer, describes O’Brien as “solidly within the
tradition of midwestern soldier-poets. Indeed, it is Ernest Hemingway that a
reader hears most often in much of O’Brien’s work – the spare, rhythmic
repetition of key words and phrases; the hard, disciplined control of idea and
emotion in sentences and paragraphs that are models of the stoic understatement;
the darkly ironic gestures; and the classical imperatives of courage and cowardice,
transgression and expiation, of Hemingway’s best stories and novels.”
 O’Brien’s two constant themes are acquiring and understanding and defining
courage as well as how to redeems one’s terrible actions.
Quotations from the author:
 “grace under pressure isn’t sufficient. It’s too easy to affect grace, and it’s too
hard to see through it…Grace under pressure means you can confront things
gracefully or squeeze out of them gracefully. But to make those two things equal
with the easy word ‘grace’ is wrong. Grace under pressure is not courage.”
 “Truth doesn’t reside in the surface of events. Truth resides in those deeper
moments of punctuation, when things explode. So you compress the boredom
down, hinting at it but always going for drama – because the essence of the
experience was dramatic. You tell lies to get to the truth.”
Vietnam Resources:
Glossary of military words used:
http://www.cofc.edu/VietnamRetro/glossary.html
Brief history of Vietnam War:
http://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/
In depth look at My Lai Massacre:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/vietnam/trenches/mylai.html
List of Music influenced by the Vietnam War:
http://www.cofc.edu/%7Enelp/vietnam_music.html
Works Consulted:
Myers, Thomas. “Tim O’Brien.” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 152:
American Novelists Since World War II, Fourth Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book.
Edited by James Giles, Northern Illinois University and Wanda Giles, Northern Illinois
University. The Gale Group, 1995. pp. 140-157.