Tim O??™Brien
HICKS, PATRICK
THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW by Patrick Hicks Tim O'Brien Tim O'Brien never intended to fight in the Vietnam War. In fact, after graduating summa cum laude from Macalester College in May 1968, he...
...Then I think there would be a little more caution, and a little more patience, and a little more diplomacy...
...It doesn't stop...
...Usually through military means we think we'll repair the problems of the world, but real enduring fixes aren't quick because they require diplomacy and an understanding of history...
...These people were cheering us in the street not long ago as liberators...
...In fact, after graduating summa cum laude from Macalester College in May 1968, he planned to study politics at Harvard...
...I don't have answers to any of these questions...
...Q: Why did we forget the lessons of Vietnam...
...We look forward as a nation, and we tend to erase our flaws: like the genocide of the American Indians, and slavery, and Jim Crow laws...
...Imagine a guy, a barber, some guy cutting hair in downtown Baghdad, and he watches a bunch of white faces go by with rifles...
...It didn't work...
...I'm starting to feel an uncanny sense of déjà vu...
...War is nasty and brings out the worst in people...
...Patrick Hicks teaches creative writing at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota...
...Q: Can you leave Vietnam behind and heal...
...We have a quick-fix mentality...
...You know, Kurt Vonnegut has this incredibly great line in Slaughterhouse-Five where someone asks if this is an anti-war book, and Vonnegut says, "I could no more write an anti-war book than an anti-glacier book...
...Q: Are there other lessons we missed...
...What if we had taken Berlin and captured Hitler and the war was getting worse, not better...
...It's as if I'm watching the same headlines and the same story except now it's set in a desert world and not in a jungle world...
...Q: Do you think the United States has learned anything from Vietnam...
...O'Brien: A sense of futility, because there is no front line, no rear, nowhere is it safe...
...My friend Chip Merricks keeps soaring into a tree after he steps on a land mine...
...Wars don't end when you sign a peace treaty...
...O'Brien: No, they thought they were going to go overthrow a bad guy, and find some weapons of mass destruction, and set up a democracy, and then walk away...
...Anger...
...Do you think that abuses like Abu Ghraib can be prevented during times of war...
...Even if it's not formally an occupation, it sure looks like one...
...Healing is an inappropriate word...
...But what does interest me is what happens to a human being's soul when stress is put on it, and not just physical stress but moral stress...
...But there's no bright light at the end of this tunnel that I can see, and I don't think any soldier can see it either...
...We thought that if enough bombs were dropped, and enough people were killed, and enough infrastructure was destroyed, that would change the situation...
...The reason why we so overwhelmingly supported the Iraq War early on was to find weapons of mass destruction...
...O'Brien: I think it will be sobering, if only in the sense that soldiers might be thinking to themselves, "Now we'd better be careful, keep it quiet, don't do it because we might be caught...
...Frustration...
...Should I go to war, or not...
...And it's a lot worse, not just a little worse, a lot worse...
...O'Brien: It's part of our nature as a country...
...They're not about bullets and bombs and military maneuvers and tactics...
...It feels like an occupation to him and it looks like one...
...They're about people going up one way, and coming back another way...
...I'm starting to share that sad cynicism that we just don't learn...
...And to find out that it was all inaccurate does something to a soldier because he's the person over there paying a price for this...
...The Crusades were the same, I'm sure...
...These foxhole scribblings are now lost, but the memory of Vietnam continues to burn throughout his writing...
...The casualties are piling up, and frustration is climbing, and the citizenry of Baghdad-you can see the anger in their faces...
...O'Brien: No, I don't believe in healing...
...It was seen on a daily basis in Vietnam with prisoners...
...O'Brien: Yes...
...I just don't know where they are...
...Q: Do you think it will get worse before it gets better...
...I spoke with him recently about Vietnam and Iraq...
...He has also won the National Magazine Award, the O. Henry Award, and the Society of American Historians' Cooper Prize for best historical fiction...
...The Purple Heart was meaningful because it meant that you were hurt...
...In fact, it's worse now that we've captured Saddam...
...I think I got eight or nine of them and my mom at one point put them in a dresser drawer in the basement of our house in Worthington [Minnesota...
...We used to laugh at them, except for a couple of them...
...Then we wouldn't be quite the quick-draw nation that we are...
...All I have are a bunch of stories about human beings making their way through an uncertain world...
...You deal with it, cope with it, pledge to do better...
...In a war, you're up against not just your own mortality, but you're up against a lifetime of memory...
...When are we are going to learn that we're as capable of evil as the next guy in the next country...
...This was usually done by kids, and even if they were officers they were still only twenty-two or twenty-three years old...
...What do we have to do to win...
...They're not aiming for Berlin or Tokyo with a sense of destination or goal...
...Watching all your friends die around you...
...This indictment against the war brought him immediate attention and launched his literary career...
...And then this [Abu Ghraib] comes up...
...Q: Do you think Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld knew what they were getting into with Iraq...
...And he never stops going into that tree, and I never stop having to climb up and peel him off and throw him back down...
...Q: What do you imagine the soldierly experience to be like over there...
...I had a room in the basement, and we had a flood...
...You try to learn and try to be more morally courageous...
...Tim O'Brien: No, I'm not surprised in the least...
...The nastiness comes out...
...If you don't like the nastiness of war, you shouldn't be making wars in the first place...
...I don't hear that from him...
...Wars are all alike...
...Q: What type of war stories do you think our soldiers will be returning with from Iraq...
...We've got the capital in our hands...
...Q: What lessons from Vietnam do you wish America had learned...
...this stuff never interested me...
...Some sores are best left open so that we don't forget, so that we learn and remember...
...Violence is sanctioned, and you're an eighteen-year-old kid, and nobody is overseeing you...
...When the draft notice arrived in August of that same year, O'Brien reluctantly left his home in Minnesota and was assigned to the Quang Ngai Province of Vietnam, where he served with the 46th Infantry, 198th Infantry Brigade...
...They gave them away in Vietnam like Cracker Jack toys...
...We then doubled the tonnage of bombs, and that didn't work either...
...O'Brien: This isn't political...
...Stories of confusion: Who's the enemy...
...The abuses of the prisoners are going to compound the outrage of the Iraqis who don't want us there in the first place...
...Some kid in the back of the room got really angry at me and said, "You can't compare American soldiers to the evil sons of Saddam Hussein...
...Back in the old days, Geronimo and Crazy Horse led the troops and so did Julius Caesar...
...The one that really mattered to me was a thing called the Combat Infantryman's Badge, which wasn't even a medal...
...He's been attacked recently by the Republicans who said something like, "You weren't wounded so badly the first time, it wasn't that bad...
...He went to Harvard, worked as a national affairs reporter for The Washington Post, and wrote his first book, If I Die in a Combat Zone (1973...
...O'Brien: I think the stories will be very similar to what we returned with from Vietnam...
...Everything else seems very similar...
...After he returned to the United States in March 1970, O'Brien picked up where he left off...
...There was some rhetoric about it taking time, but I don't think they anticipated the guerrilla warfare going on now...
...Q: There has been some discussion about what Kerry did with the medals he received in Vietnam...
...With the war in Iraq, we thought that by occupying it, and destroying an army, and overthrowing a regime, that all the pieces would fall tidily into place...
...His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in more than twenty international journals, and he has just completed his first novel...
...I don't think we learned that lesson at all...
...Another has to do with what happens when a bunch of white faces show up in a culture with few white faces...
...I don't mean they can't be discouraged with good training and oversight-perhaps they can even be reduced in frequency-but I really don't think abuse like this can be entirely eliminated...
...Is it ever right...
...But he was shot three or four times, and the people attacking him were safely in the National Guard or in graduate school...
...That's what they thought, more or less...
...O'Brien came to understand the soldierly experience with horrifying intimacy, and each night he wrote about what he saw...
...He was really angry...
...O'Brien: I thought so up until two years ago...
...I tried to talk about My Lai, what I'd witnessed, what American soldiers can do, but he just got up and walked out...
...And how do we find them...
...O'Brien: No matter what the war-whether it's a glorious war like World War II or a stinky war like Vietnam-the facts are always the same when you're a soldier...
...The objectives that the soldiers were given in Iraq have all been achieved, and yet it's not getting any better...
...We were terrified after 9/11 of anthrax and chemical weapons and nuclear weapons...
...Q: Our soldiers have seen their medical benefits cut and their tours of duty extended...
...Q: The prison abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib has become a defining moment of the war...
...A sense of guilt for all the civilian casualties and the difficulty in finding the enemy...
...And where are they...
...It's a part of our character for some reason to view ourselves with complacent rectitude...
...These are the very same people who are forcing a new war on us...
...It's much like what we saw in Vietnam...
...It meant that you were there, and that you weren't in Texas...
...I was talking in Texas at a school before the Iraq abuses came out...
...It won't be avoided out of any sense of repulsion or outrage or horror...
...When is it right to say no to your politicians...
...There's death and horror and maiming and widows and orphans...
...But even there you could have been hurt badly or just a scrape and you'd still get a Purple Heart...
...O'Brien: One is the quality of patience...
...I don't believe you heal from horror and evil...
...Every day that goes by I think it's just going to get worse, not better...
...That's what wars in general are all about...
...They didn't put their bodies where their mouth is...
...Should I kill that person, or not...
...What have you done with your medals...
...He is the author of six subsequent novels, including Going After Cacciato (1978), which received the National Book Award, and The Things They Carried (1990), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize...
...The truth is that our politicians send other people off to do their dying, usually the poor people, especially from the rural South-they're doing the dying...
...O'Brien: Yes...
...There's no happy ending...
...Medals are meaningless, really...
...Aside from being demoralized by this, what else do you think might be going through their minds right now...
...Yet when we displayed the corpses of Saddam Hussein's sons there was no outcry or disbelief...
...Another lesson is underestimating the enemy's capacity for endurance...
...Q: John Kerry's experiences in Vietnam are shaping his Presidential campaign and I was wondering what your opinion of him is, as a veteran...
...An absence of clear purpose for it all...
...They go on and on in memory...
...O'Brien: Once you start making war, the consequences are, at least they seem to me, almost inevitable...
...We forget these things, these flaws, these misdeeds...
...Are you surprised that prisoners were mistreated in Iraq...
...I think he's self-effacing about it all and says that he went over there to do his duty...
...It's not that way anymore...
...O'Brien currently lives in Texas...
...Is that possible...
...That's what the guys in Iraq are up against...
...In the end, I'm a fiction writer, not a politician, and I'm trying to write stories that aren't about war, per se...
...Q: What effect do you think the prison scandal will have on our troops over there...
...Where they went after the flood-I was in grad school at the time-they vanished...
...I would have been surprised if they hadn't been mistreated...
...There is a disbelief that Americans could do this sort of thing, but it's a common occurrence in war...
...That's not true anymore...
...O'Brien: I don't think he himself is bragging about being a hero...
...Q: You write about abuses by soldiers in your novel In the Lake of the Woods...
...After all, we've won the war, we've deposed Saddam, we've actually got him as our prisoner, and it's still not over...
...There ought to be a law where it's fine to be for war, but you should send your own son or daughter, not somebody else's...
...It's what you got after being in combat...
...On the one hand, I feel that my point has been made again, but on the other hand, I feel a sense of weariness about it all...
...The answer is no, I don't believe we have...
...We need to be more patient with the world...
...I talked about how our country was so upset about our soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu...
Vol. 68 • July 2004 • No. 7
