Chasing love in The Things They Carried
In The Things They Carried, Tim O' Brien dispels any notion of universal truths about war. War, he writes, can be anything, it can fun, boring, exciting, hell, and everything in between, and the range of stories he tells makes me believe that. Yet on the subject of love, Tim O Brien almost seems to be making a generalization: that love is sometimes illusionary and always fleeting, especially in wartime. It could be broken by death, the realities of war, or simply circumstance. And after being broken, it turns into something new.
Sometimes, as in the case of Henry Dobbins, the illusion of love is ripped away, only to reveal there was no such thing there at all. Dobbins wears the pantyhose of his girlfriend as a good luck charm, but when his girlfriend dumps him, he continues wearing them as if nothing had happened, "the magic doesn't go away." Maybe at the start of the war, the pantyhose were defined by his love, but they've transformed by firefights and landmines into something mysterious. They have taken on a magic.
Sometimes, it's very blatant the notion of love is being destroyed. Mary Anne begins her time in Vietnam innocent, wide-eyed, and cute. From her time conducting missions with the Green Berets, Mary Anne-- the brightest symbol of innocence in The Things They Carried-- has become someone that embodies the landscape of war. And of course, she falls out of love with Mark Fossie in the process.
Right after the death of one his soldiers, Jimmy Cross even burns the letters he's been carrying from a girl back home. He's realized he can't bear the burden of the war has placed on him and what he's brought from home. Could it be that in war, the idea of romance seems to die, the slow kind of attachment that requires an mental effort to maintain? There's nothing romantic about a true war story, O Brien says. Maybe the way he writes love in The Things They Carried isn't some kind of larger moral-- that war and love are incompatible-- but another facet of war's diversity.
We see this between the men of Alpha company. Based on the blame everyone feels after Kiowa's death, it's safe to say that they had strong feelings for him. But the love Alpha Company has for Kiowa isn't quite the romantic kind: it's of sort of camaraderie and faith that feeds on the fear of death and danger, the same fear that seems to squash down Jimmy Cross's feelings, that twists the heart of Mark Fossie's girl.
I realized O Brien has accomplished a magic trick. He's taken what we might think of romance born in peacetime, killed it, and replaced it with something new born of wartime, something I can't quite understand but probably gets closer to the truth.
I agree! I think this all ties into the notion that war changes people. It seems that because the soldiers are cut off from the rest of the world while they're at war, all relationships, even more platonic "brotherly" like relationships, they have outside of that group seem to be weakened compared to the bonds that are formed while in the group. We see this in the end when Tim is "replaced" in the group by Bobby Jorgenson just because Tim had been out of the group recovering for awhile.
ReplyDeleteI think it's interesting that the only long distance relationships between the states and the soldiers that are talked about in "The Things They Carried" are romantic ones.
Indeed! I like your tying this together to Kiowa at the end -- I think the same could be said about Kurt Lemon and Rat Kiley. I guess the question is then, from your points: is the love a way to enhance war narrative, or vice versa, in this case?
ReplyDeleteThe main thing that makes a wartime setting distinct from a non-wartime setting, I suppose, is the constant threat of sudden (and often absurd) death. This is a theme throughout _The Things They Carried_, where we see very familiar kinds of interactions among friends (or co-workers, that kind of friendship born of proximity and shared duties). These guys are often just goofing around in rather familiar ways when suddenly a bullet flies out of the bushes and kills one of them, or Curt Lemon steps on a charge and is turned into mist. In a significant sense, though, this is true of the contingency of all human life--it's all fleeting, and love is contingent and always threatened by annihilation. It's just that war makes this state of affairs more evident, more urgent, and even more contingent. It's impossible to forget how it can all be taken away in an instant, whereas for us in peacetime, we forget this simple fact all the time.
ReplyDeleteI really get the sense (especially since we've been reading In Our Time) that war is the perfect environment for fostering disillusionment, with romantic love in particular. I agree that the bonds between soldiers during the war is very strong, and anything outside of that might seem trivial to the soldiers. In many stories, including the one about Norman Bowker and the Hemingway one we just read, "Soldier's Home," there seems to be a common theme that men returning from war are disinterested in creating romantic relationships. It's not necessarily that they don't want to get girls, but there's an unspoken sentiment that the girls back home simply won't understand. They'll want to ask about the war, but they'll never truly understand, and the returning soldiers are understandably frustrated by this. For some veterans, romance isn't worth the struggle it would take to be understood.
ReplyDeleteI imagine that the wartime setting, relationships are significantly stronger than those in civilian life. With the constant threat of death and danger, the bonds you would form with those around you would be incredibly close knit and strong. Also, without your family and loved ones near you for a long period of time, many of the people you surround yourself with during war would end up substituting for close family and friends until (and if) they went home. The bond that soldiers share is unlike any other, because they understand each other. In "Fire and Forget" we saw how hard it was for soldiers to talk about the war when they got home. With this being such a difficult thing, I imagine soldiers take great comfort in friends from war, as they understand, and they can talk to them about things that happened in war without having to explain themselves.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't say that the Things They Carried completely dispels the idea of love while at war. While they are disillusioned from it, there are still some fleeting instances of it. The ones that really stick out to are in the chapter "In The Field". Here we watch as the platoon scours a literal shit field in search of the body of Kiowa. Despite the tragedy of the situation, this seems to be a great example of the "brotherly love" the soldiers have with each other, it really takes a commitment to someone in order to intentionally wade through a shit field for a day. Also on the more romantic side, there is the story of the unnamed soldier searching through the field for the picture of his girlfriend. Once again that it is quite the commitment to another person, a commitment that one might just call love.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't say that the Things They Carried completely dispels the idea of love while at war. While they are disillusioned from it, there are still some fleeting instances of it. The ones that really stick out to are in the chapter "In The Field". Here we watch as the platoon scours a literal shit field in search of the body of Kiowa. Despite the tragedy of the situation, this seems to be a great example of the "brotherly love" the soldiers have with each other, it really takes a commitment to someone in order to intentionally wade through a shit field for a day. Also on the more romantic side, there is the story of the unnamed soldier searching through the field for the picture of his girlfriend. Once again that it is quite the commitment to another person, a commitment that one might just call love.
ReplyDelete