“Take it easy, Emmett. It’s all right.” Lonnie climbed in the driver’s seat and turned the key.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Lonnie!” said Emmett in a loud, hot whisper. “Be quiet! And don’t turn your lights on. Cut that engine! Let’s coast down to Highway 1.”
“No sweat, Emmett. Just hold tight.”
“What did you see, Emmett?” asked Sam, reaching to touch his shoulder.
“Don’t do that!” Emmett cried, jerking away from her.
“He just got spooked,” Lonnie said, backing out of the clearing. “It wasn’t anything.”
“Oh, shit,” Sam said. “Are you O.K., Emmett?”
Emmett mumbled. “Hurry,” he said. “I can’t stand this.”
“We’re going home, Emmett,” said Lonnie as they bumped across the gravel in the moonlight. “Keep your skirt on.”
An Appreciation of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried
Of all the stories I’ve read in the last decade, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried hit me hardest. It knocked me down, just as if a hundredpound rucksack had been thrown right at me. The weight of the things the American soldiers carried on their interminable journey through the jungle in Vietnam sets the tone for this story. But the power of it is not just the poundage they were humping on their backs. The story’s list of “things they carried” extends to the burden of memory and desire and confusion and grief. It’s the weight of America’s involvement in the war. You can hardly bear to contemplate all that this story evokes with its matter-of-fact yet electrifying details.
The way this story works makes me think of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. The memorial is just a list of names, in a simple, dark—yet soaring—design. Its power is in the simplicity of presentation and in what lies behind each of those names.
In the story, there is a central incident, the company’s first casualty on its march through the jungle. But the immediate drama is the effort—by the main character, by the narrator, by the writer himself—to contain the emotion, to carry it. When faced with a subject almost too great to manage or confront, the mind wants to organize, to categorize, to simplify. Restraint and matter-of-factness are appropriate deflective techniques for dealing with pain, and they work on several levels in the story. Sometimes it is more affecting to see someone dealing with pain than it is to know about the pain itself. That’s what’s happening here.
By using the simplicity of a list and trying to categorize the simple items the soldiers carried, O’Brien reveals the real terror of the war itself. And the categories go from the tangible—foot powder, photographs, chewing gum—to the intangible. They carried disease; memory. When it rained, they carried the sky. The weight of what they carried moves expansively, opens out, grows from the stuff in the rucksack to the whole weight of the American war chest, with its litter of ammo and packaging through the landscape of Vietnam. And then it moves back, away from the huge outer world, back into the interior of the self. The story details the way they carried themselves (dignity, laughter, words) as well as what they carried inside (fear, “emotional baggage”).
And within the solemn effort to list and categorize, a story unfolds. PFO Ted Lavender, a grunt who carries tranquilizers, is on his way back from relieving himself in the jungle when he is shot by a sniper. The irony and horror of it are unbearable. Almost instantaneously, it seems, the central character, Lieutenant Cross, changes from a romantic youth to a man of action and duty. With his new, hard clarity, he is carried forward by his determination not to be caught unprepared again. And the way he prepares to lead his group is to list his resolves. He has to assert power over the event by detaching himself. It is a life-and-death matter.
So this effort to detach and control becomes both the drama and the technique of the story. For it is our impulse to deal with the unspeakable horror and sadness by fashioning some kind of order, story, to clarify and contain our emotions. As the writer, Tim O’Brien stands back far enough not to be seen but not so far that he isn’t in charge.
“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”
Big Bertha Stories
FROM Love Life (1989)
Donald is home again, laughing and singing. He comes home from Central City, near the strip mines, only when he feels like it, like an absentee landlord checking on his property. He is always in such a good humor when he returns that Jeannette forgives him. She cooks for him—ugly, pasty things she gets with food stamps. Sometimes he brings steaks and ice cream, occasionally money. Rodney, their child, hides in the closet when he arrives, and Donald goes around the house talking loudly about the little boy named Rodney who used to live there—the one who fell into a septic tank, or the one stolen by gypsies. The stories change. Rodney usually stays in the closet until he has to pee, and then he hugs his father’s knees, forgiving him, just as Jeannette does. The way Donald saunters through the door, swinging a six-pack of beer, with a big grin on his face, takes her breath away. He leans against the door facing, looking sexy in his baseball cap and his shaggy red beard and his sunglasses. He wears sunglasses to be like the Blues Brothers, but he in no way resembles either of the Blues Brothers. I should have my head examined, Jeannette thinks.
The last time Donald was home, they went to the shopping center to buy Rodney some shoes advertised on sale. They stayed at the shopping center half the afternoon, just looking around. Donald and Rodney played video games. Jeannette felt they were a normal family. Then, in the parking lot, they stopped to watch a man on a platform demonstrating snakes. Children were petting a twelve-foot python coiled around the man’s shoulders. Jeannette felt faint.
“Snakes won’t hurt you unless you hurt them,” said Donald as Rodney stroked the snake.
“It feels like chocolate,” he said.
The snake man took a tarantula from a plastic box and held it lovingly in his palm. He said, “If you drop a tarantula, it will shatter like a Christmas ornament.”
“I hate this,” said Jeannette.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Donald.
Jeannette felt her family disintegrating like a spider shattering as Donald hurried them away from the shopping center. Rodney squalled and Donald dragged him along. Jeannette wanted to stop for ice cream. She wanted them all to sit quietly together in a booth, but Donald rushed them to the car, and he drove them home in silence, his face growing grim.
“Did you have bad dreams about the snakes?” Jeannette asked Rodney the next morning at breakfast. They were eating pancakes made with generic pancake mix. Rodney slapped his fork in the pond of syrup on his pancakes. “The black racer is the farmer’s friend,” he said soberly, repeating a fact learned from the snake man.
“Big Bertha kept black racers,” said Donald. “She trained them for the 500.” Donald doesn’t tell Rodney ordinary children’s stories. He tells him a series of strange stories he makes up about Big Bertha. Big Bertha is what he calls the huge strip-mining machine in Muhlenberg County, but he has Rodney believing that Big Bertha is a female version of Paul Bunyan.
“Snakes don’t run in the 500,” said Rodney.
“This wasn’t the Indy 500 or the Daytona 500—none of your wellknown 500s,” said Donald. “This was the Possum Trot 500, and it was a long time ago. Big Bertha started the original 500, with snakes. Black racers and blue racers mainly. Also some red-and-white-striped racers, but those are rare.”
“We always ran for the hoe if we saw a black racer,” Jeannette said, remembering her childhood in the country.
In a way, Donald’s absences are a fine arrangement, even considerate. He is sparing them his darkest moods, when he can’t cope with his memories of Vietnam. Vietnam had never seemed such a meaningful fact until a couple of years ago, when he grew depressed and moody, and then he started going away to Central City. He frightened Jeannette, and she always said the wrong thing in her efforts to soothe him. If the welfare peo
ple find out he is spending occasional weekends at home, and even bringing some money, they will cut off her assistance. She applied for welfare because she can’t depend on him to send money, but she knows he blames her for losing faith in him. He isn’t really working regularly at the strip mines. He is mostly just hanging around there, watching the land being scraped away, trees coming down, bushes flung in the air. Sometimes he operates a steam shovel, and when he comes home his clothes are filled with the clay and it is caked on his shoes. The clay is the color of butterscotch pudding.
At first, he tried to explain to Jeannette. He said, “If we could have had tanks over there as big as Big Bertha, we wouldn’t have lost the war. Strip mining is just like what we were doing over there. We were stripping off the top. The topsoil is like the culture and the people, the best part of the land and the country. America was just stripping off the top, the best. We ruined it. Here, at least the coal companies have to plant vetch and loblolly pines and all kinds of trees and bushes. If we’d done that in Vietnam, maybe we’d have left that country in better shape.”
“Wasn’t Vietnam a long time ago?” Jeanette asked.
She didn’t want to hear about Vietnam. She thought it was unhealthy to dwell on it so much. He should live in the present. Her mother is afraid Donald will do something violent, because she once read in the newspaper that a veteran in Louisville held his little girl hostage in their apartment until he had a shootout with the police and was killed. But Jeannette can’t imagine Donald doing anything so extreme. When she first met him, several years ago, at her parents’ pit-barbecue luncheonette, where she was working then, he had a good job at a lumberyard and he dressed nicely. He took her out to eat at a fancy restaurant. They got plastered and ended up in a motel in Tupelo, Mississippi, on Elvis Presley Boulevard. Back then, he talked nostalgically about his year in Vietnam, about how beautiful it was, how different the people were. He could never seem to explain what he meant. “They’re just different,” he said.
They went riding around in a yellow 1957 Chevy convertible. He drives too fast now, but he didn’t then, maybe because he was so protective of the car. It was a classic. He sold it three years ago and made a good profit. About the time he sold the Chevy, his moods began changing, his even-tempered nature shifting, like driving on a smooth interstate and then switching to a secondary road. He had headaches and bad dreams. But his nightmares seemed trivial. He dreamed of riding a train through the Rocky Mountains, of hijacking a plane to Cuba, of stringing up barbed wire around the house. He dreamed he lost a doll. He got drunk and rammed the car, the Chevy’s successor, into a Civil War statue in front of the courthouse. When he got depressed over the meaninglessness of his job, Jeannette felt guilty about spending money on something nice for the house, and she tried to make him feel his job had meaning by reminding him that, after all, they had a child to think of. “I don’t like his name,” Donald said once. “What a stupid name. Rodney. I never did like it.”
Rodney has dreams about Big Bertha, echoes of his father’s nightmare, like TV cartoon versions of Donald’s memories of the war. But Rodney loves the stories, even though they are confusing, with lots of loose ends. The latest in the Big Bertha series is “Big Bertha and the Neutron Bomb.” Last week it was “Big Bertha and the MX Missile.” In the new story, Big Bertha takes a trip to California to go surfing with Big Mo, her male counterpart. On the beach, corn dogs and snow cones are free and the surfboards turn into dolphins. Everyone is having fun until the neutron bomb comes. Rodney loves the part where everyone keels over dead. Donald acts it out, collapsing on the rug. All the dolphins and the surfers keel over, everyone except Big Bertha. Big Bertha is so big she is immune to the neutron bomb.
“Those stories aren’t true,” Jeannette tells Rodney.
Rodney staggers and falls down on the rug, his arms and legs akimbo. He gets the giggles and can’t stop. When his spasms finally subside, he says, “I told Scottie Bidwell about Big Bertha and he didn’t believe me.”
Donald picks Rodney up under the armpits and sets him upright. “You tell Scottie Bidwell if he saw Big Bertha he would pee in his pants on the spot, he would be so impressed.”
“Are you scared of Big Bertha?”
“No, I’m not. Big Bertha is just like a wonderful woman, a big fat woman who can sing the blues. Have you ever heard Big Mama Thornton?”
“No.”
“Well, Big Bertha’s like her, only she’s the size of a tall building. She’s slow as a turtle and when she crosses the road they have to reroute traffic. She’s big enough to straddle a four-lane highway. She’s so tall she can see all the way to Tennessee, and when she belches, there’s a tornado. She’s really something. She can even fly.”
“She’s too big to fly,” Rodney says doubtfully. He makes a face like a wadded-up washrag and Donald wrestles him to the floor again.
Donald has been drinking all evening, but he isn’t drunk. The ice cubes melt and he pours the drink out and refills it. He keeps on talking. Jeannette cannot remember him talking so much about the war. He is telling her about an ammunitions dump. Jeannette had the vague idea that an ammo dump is a mound of shotgun shells, heaps of cartridge casings and bomb shells, or whatever is left over, a vast waste pile from the war, but Donald says that is wrong. He has spent an hour describing it in detail, so that she will understand.
He refills the glass with ice, some 7-Up, and a shot of Jim Beam. He slams doors and drawers, looking for a compass. Jeannette can’t keep track of the conversation. It doesn’t matter that her hair is uncombed and her lipstick eaten away. He isn’t seeing her.
“I want to draw the compound for you,” he says, sitting down at the table with a sheet of Rodney’s tablet paper.
Donald draws the map in red and blue ballpoint, with asterisks and technical labels that mean nothing to her. He draws some circles with the compass and measures some angles. He makes a red dot on an oblique line, a path that leads to the ammo dump.
“That’s where I was. Right there,” he says. “There was a water buffalo that tripped a land mine and its horn just flew off and stuck in the wall of the barracks like a machete thrown backhanded.” He puts a dot where the land mine was, and he doodles awhile with the red ballpoint pen, scribbling something on the edge of the map that looks like feathers. “The dump was here and I was there and over there was where we piled the sandbags. And here were the tanks.” He draws tanks, a row of squares with handles—guns sticking out.
“Why are you going to so much trouble to tell me about a buffalo horn that got stuck in a wall?” she wants to know.
But Donald just looks at her as though she has asked something obvious.
“Maybe I could understand if you’d let me,” she says cautiously.
“You could never understand.” He draws another tank.
In bed, it is the same as it has been since he started going away to Central City—the way he claims his side of the bed, turning away from her. Tonight, she reaches for him and he lets her be close to him. She cries for a while and he lies there, waiting for her to finish, as though she were merely putting on makeup.
“Do you want me to tell you a Big Bertha story?” he asks playfully.
“You act like you’re in love with Big Bertha.”
He laughs, breathing on her. But he won’t come closer.
“You don’t care what I look like anymore,” she says. “What am I supposed to think?”
“There’s nobody else. There’s not anybody but you.”
Loving a giant machine is incomprehensible to Jeannette. There must be another woman, someone that large in his mind. Jeannette has seen the strip-mining machine. The top of the crane is visible beyond a rise along the parkway. The strip mining is kept just out of sight of travelers because it would give them a poor image of Kentucky.
For three weeks, Jeannette has been seeing a psychologist at the free mental health clinic. He’s a small man from out of state. His name is Dr. Robinson, but she cal
ls him The Rapist, because the word therapist can be divided into two words, the rapist. He doesn’t think her joke is clever, and he acts as though he has heard it a thousand times before. He has a habit of saying, “Go with that feeling,” the same way Bob Newhart did on his old TV show. It’s probably the first lesson in the textbook, Jeannette thinks.
She told him about Donald’s last days on his job at the lumberyard—how he let the stack of lumber fall deliberately and didn’t know why, and about how he went away soon after that, and how the Big Bertha stories started. Dr. Robinson seems to be waiting for her to make something out of it all, but it’s maddening that he won’t tell her what to do. After three visits, Jeannette has grown angry with him, and now she’s holding back things. She won’t tell him whether Donald slept with her or not when he came home last. Let him guess, she thinks.
“Talk about yourself,” he says.
“What about me?”
“You speak so vaguely about Donald that I get the feeling that you see him as somebody larger than life. I can’t quite picture him. That makes me wonder what that says about you.” He touches the end of his tie to his nose and sniffs it.
When Jeannette suggests that she bring Donald in, the therapist looks bored and says nothing.
“He had another nightmare when he was home last,” Jeannette says. “He dreamed he was crawling through tall grass and people were after him.”
“How do you feel about that?” The Rapist asks eagerly.
“I didn’t have the nightmare,” she says coldly. “Donald did. I came to you to get advice about Donald, and you’re acting like I’m the one who’s crazy. I’m not crazy. But I’m lonely.”
Jeannette’s mother, behind the counter of the luncheonette, looks lovingly at Rodney pushing buttons on the jukebox in the corner. “It’s a shame about that youngun,” she says tearfully. “That boy needs a daddy.”
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