Tim O’Brien (1946- ), Author of The Things They Carried
Reader’s Theatre
1. “All my work has been somewhat political in that it’s been
2. directed at big issues.” Tim O’Brien once said.
3. “My concerns have to do with the abstractions: What’s courage
4. and how do you get it? What’s justice and how do you achieve it? How does one do right
in an evil situation?” O’Brien turned those questions
5. into powerful artistic tools in his gripping war novels such as Going After Cacciato
(1978) and The Things They Carried (1990).
All: O’Brien was born in Austin, Minnesota, and graduated from Macalester College in St.
Paul. In 1968,
3. he was drafted and served with the U.S. Army in Vietnam, where he attained the rank
5. of sergeant. Returning from the war, he went to Harvard for graduate work in English. A
summer internship
1. at The Washington Post led to a job as national affairs reporter for that newspaper.
4. O’Brien had been writing stories since childhood, and even in the midst of his academic
work,
2. he knew he wanted to write full time. It was his military experience in Vietnam that
provided much of the material for his fiction and personal narratives.
All: If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973) is a collection of
anecdotes and observations of his duty in Vietnam.
5. The book drew widespread praise, particularly from veterans, as an authentic re-creation
of
4. the foot soldier’s experience in an unpopular war.
2. O’Brien’s first novel, Northern Lights, appeared in 1974 and dealt with a veteran
returned to civilian life.
1. Many of his shorter stories are told from the point of view of a young soldier named Paul
Berlin.
3. Going After Cacciato, his second novel, followed four year later. This novel returned
All: to the jungle war and depicted a soldier’s fantasy of quitting the battle and walking
off across the mountains to find Paris.
2. Cacciato was acclaimed as one of the few novels to have captured the essence
5. of the Vietnam experience, and it won
3. the prestigious National Book Award in 1979.
1. O’Brien has said of his novel, “It’s not really Vietnam that I was concerned about when I
wrote Cacciato;
4. rather it was to have readers care about what’s right and wrong and about the difficulty
All: of doing right, the difficulty of saying no to war.”
4. In 1990, O’Brien published The Things They Carried, a remarkable fictional memoir
about the Vietnam War and its
1. human effects. The book is made up of interconnected stories narrated by a character
named Tim O’Brien, who, the author says, is not ‘
3. himself. The title story deals with the physical objects a soldier carries into battle, such
as weapons and letters from home, as well as the intangible things,
5. like fears and memories. At publication, O’Brien told an interviewer,
2. “My life is storytelling, I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive,
and the dead ….
All: In Vietnam, men were constantly telling one another stories about the war.”
1. O’Brien’s Vietnam experience also lies at the core of his psychological thriller,
2. In the Lake of the Woods (1994). The book focuses on a politician who tries to conceal
his past involvement
3. in the massacre of Vietnamese civilians by American soldiers at My Lai in 1968.
4. The following passage is from O’Brien’s autobiographical account of his experiences in
Vietnam:
5. “One of the most persistent and appalling thoughts which lumbers through your mind as
you walk through Vietnam at night
All: is the fear of getting lost, of becoming detached from the others, of spending the night
alone in that frightening and haunted countryside.
5. It was dark. We walked in single file, perhaps three yards apart. Mad Mark (the platoon
leader) took us along a crazy,
4. wavering course. We veered off the road, through clumps of trees, through tangles of
bamboo and grass, zigzagging through
3. graveyards of dead Vietnamese who lay under conical mounds of dirt and clay. The man
to the front and the man to the rear were the only
2. holds on security and sanity. We followed the man in front
1. like a blind man after his dog, like Dante following Virgil through the Inferno,
All: and we prayed that the man had not lost his way, that he hadn’t lost contact with the man
to his front.
4. We tensed the muscles around our eyeballs and peered straight ahead. We hurt ourselves
staring at the man’s back. We strained.
3. We dared not look away for fear the man might fade and dissipate and turn into absent
shadow. Sometimes, when the jungle closed in,
5. we reached out to him, touched his shirt. The man to the front is
1. civilization. He is the United States of America and every friend you have ever known;
2. he is Erik and blond girls and a mother and a father. He is your life, and he is your altar
and God combined.
All: And, for the man stumbling along behind you, you alone are his torch.”