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This evening I am very pleased to welcome memoirist novelist and short story writer Tim O'Brien for a 20th anniversary reading and discussion of his acclaimed book The Things They Carried since its initial publication 1990 and with over two million copies in print. The Things They Carried has become a staple of required reading lists and moreover a classic work of American literature. The book continues to engage readers with its exploration into war and memory and the mechanisms and the power of storytelling. The things they carry has received numerous accolades and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Awards and the people of surprise immediately following the book's publication New York Times wrote quote only a handful of novels and short stories have managed to clarify in any lasting way the meaning of the war in Vietnam for America and for the soldiers who served there by moving beyond the horror of the fighting to examined the nature of courage and fear by questioning the role that imagination plays in helping to form our memories and our own versions of truth. O'Brien places the things they carried high on the list of the best fiction about any war. Ladies and gentlemen thank you for your patience. Please

join me in welcoming Tim O'Brien. To all there was THANK YOU THANK YOU. I saw a son delighted to be back in Cambridge that kind of homecoming. I'm now two blocks from where I spent I misspent my youth it seems and I and it's and I feel almost like I want to cry and maybe I will at some point the saying so forgive me. I did the 20th birthday on the book and I'm really happy that the book is still being. I read in the country and it's not this is no i'm not lauding the book but I do feel that it's something of a miracle when any book. Two decades later he does still mean something to people. Many many

many wonderful books are published every year they're well reviewed and people like them and buy them and and they vanish. And now and then on rare occasions something something for mysterious reasons way beyond my doing and book will be read by junior high school students 20 years later and by morticians and doctors and it's just a surprise. But on the other hand there's a sadness that accompanies the event. Partly it's returning to Cambridge but more than that it's the sadness of repeating a great deal of stuff that I was saying 20 years ago. Only in the context of two new wars and that that feel of repetition the utterance of the same syllables that came out of my mouth two decades ago in this very place where are going to be uttered again tonight.

How do you talk about a book. You could I could select a chapter I could talk about its composition. There are all kinds of angles to go you know to approach a book and each of them struck me as silly that it would be a little bit like pulling the thread out of a piece of cloth and you talk about it and the cloth would dissolve as you did in my mind would be on everything I'm leaving out as I'm talking about that. So I thought I do is try to approach the book instead from a reader's perspective in a backdoor kind of way. This is a letter I received about almost exactly two years ago from a young woman who lives in my home state of Minnesota. I'm not going to use her real name. How come the caller Nancy for the purposes of this little talk. And then I after reading the letter I want to talk about why I read it to you dear Mr.

O'Brian. I thought about writing this letter for the past 10 years. In grade school when I needed to go to the basement closet to get a game or a sleeping bag I would stare at the two uniforms hanging still and gathering dust in my father's closet with the nameplate Wyden on the front and I'd just stand there wondering. When I went to high school I came across a carved dark wood box under my dad's bed. Inside the Box were shiny pens a tassel triangular ornament and a black and white photo of a younger smoking version of my father with another man in a place that was obviously not Minnesota. My dad never talked about Vietnam or he brushed it

off by saying yes yes he'd been there but that he hadn't done anything special. Nothing worth talking about. One thing the three of us kids knew growing up was that our parents loved us and would do and did anything for us. Something else we knew but didn't talk about was how bad things were. Between them they had known each other for six months and had $200 in the bank. When they got married both of them thinking it was the smart thing to do to get their lives on track. By the time I reached high school things were at their worst. I became more a friend and a counselor and then a daughter. My mother telling me everything that had gone wrong in her life.

Needing someone to understand the guilt she felt for not being able to fall in love with my father. My dad ever noble kept trying to keep their financial and personal problems away from us kids. I had grown very close to both of them but my father always listened. He never talked. I was first introduced to your writing in high school. I read the things they carried from my AP US History class. I passed the book on to my dad and asked him what he thought. I asked about the uniforms. Still in the basement closet and that box still under is bad. And finally after all those years my father began to

talk over the next few years we passed your books back and forth and I learned more and more about my dad. I learned about his bluegrass band back in high school called the Flint Hill singers that got offered a record deal that all their parents turned down so they go to college. I learned that my father was a theater major at the University of Minnesota and Duluth. But halfway through went to Vietnam then Germany finished college back at Duluth. I started at Luther seminary married my mother quit seminary had no money and so started working as a technical writer for a computer company has a job she hated. During my time in college my father would find excuses to come down to north field saying all of college and we'd end up talking over a beer at the

Rubenstein Pub. By that point I was hearing stories I had never imagined about my father. Like one summer after his sister put him to bed during a party when their parents were gone he snuck out of his bedroom window in Minneapolis. Drunk and laughing the whole time waking up the next morning 200 miles away in a field south of Duluth with a cow licking his window. I learned how he had volunteered for a position in Vietnam before he got drafted so he wouldn't have to kill anyone. I learned all part of his job was to help soldiers get over their drug addictions before they went home. I learned that that tasseled ornament in the box under is bad was really a part off a stripper's costume in Vietnam. I learned that that's where you had lost part of his hearing. But he felt lost and didn't know what to do with himself when he got home. A displaced folk singing

peaceful actor at heart. But the best part about all this talking was that my father finally talked about himself and about my mom being open and honest and not denying the situation anymore. They finally went back to counseling forgave one another and forgave themselves. They stayed together and have a life outside their three grown kids. They are not happy. I mean they aren't perfect but they are happy. I'm 26 married teaching elementary school music

and I have a life of my own. But my dad and I still share books. Something I think will always do. I realize this letter is long. More than you needed to hear and maybe lacking in a clear point. I guess that for all these years I just wanted to say thank you. Reading and sharing your books became a starting place to know and understand my father and through my father my mother. Reading those books helped start a conversation. That turned into something so much more important.

For that. I'll always be grateful. Nancy. Well why do I offer this letter. I chose it in part because I thought it wouldn't be able to hold it together. And that was hard and it's hard right now. Is that letter and hundreds and really thousands like it. I think demonstrate if I were to had a year to read them all to you The Things They Carried like any decent novel or any piece of literature is finally aimed not just at the intellect but at the human heart for all the complications and ambiguity use of that book and its structure the blur between reality and fiction. What we call reality for all that. The Things They Carried was written

to help readers feel something. Of what it was to be a foot soldier. And a long gone war in Vietnam but also to feel something of what it was to have a squeeze on their hearts. Unlike history or journalism so full of statistics and facts and dates. A novel is meant to transport you to a time to a place to put you inside the head of individual human beings as they crouch in ambush as they carried their wounded bodies to a medivac chopper as they trudge through the paddies and up into the mountains and through the swamps. Stories are meant to help us participate in events such as a war or a marriage.

Or a lonely childhood. And not just learn about those things in the abstract kind of way. Secondly I want to read this letter to you because it's a reminder to me and I hope to you that stories matter in the lives of real people out there in a real world. Too often it has seemed to me over the last 20 years that my books have gone out into a kind of black hole somewhere in the center of the universe where they're sucked up into oblivion. I know they're being rad but until you receive a letter such as this one. Or you go to a place called Bunker Hill Community College where I was layer earlier today and you confront the faces of not just veterans so there are many

there but the faces of people who hadn't been born. And Vietnam was the center of my life. For those who have taught the book those who encountered it in junior high or in high school until you faced the e-mails and the letters and the people themselves. It's hard to imagine what the word audience means. It means darkness until a letter like this one shows up in your mailbox. Third I read that letter to you tonight as a reminder mostly to myself that wars do not end when you sign a peace treaty. They go on and on in the lives of families such as that of Nancy long after hostilities are over. Long after we think of wars as history.

Wars continue in the vet and the nightmares of veterans. But they also continue in the on ending grief of a mother whose son died in some far off desert or jungle and who 40 years later snaps away at 4:00 in the morning and wonders where a baby as a baby dead now for four decades. And if you were to look at that mother's eyes I doubt she would tell you that Vietnam is history. Wars keep back owing and the lives of the widows. Brothers and sisters sons and daughters such as Nancy forth the letter reminds me of the power of stories to help us heal. To console us to give us late night company in those hours when we can't remember how we got from where we

were to where we are. If The Things They Carried helped Nancy and her father and her mother. Come to some kind of accommodation with their own personal histories. Those five years in my underwear in front of a computer are worth it. A love letter such as this one. Makes all the literary stuff pale. The awards that were mentioned in the introduction the money and everything else that can accompany even modest literary success. It just fades into nothingness and I wanted to let you feel it in my eyes. You know I meant it and not just declare by reading that letter to you.

Although I know that no book will hit home with the same for ah city with every reader or even comparable ferocity there is still the great satisfaction of being a novelist. When you get in a letter such as this one and you have that occasionally realisation the hearts are being moved. More than 40 years ago. In May of 1969 I found myself lying in an irrigation ditch outside a little village in quinine province. There was fierce gunfire all around me. People were dying. People were squealing. And it was there and that irrigation ditch that The Things They Carried. It was

conceived somewhere inside me. I knew that the stink of that irrigation ditch would be something I would carry in my lungs for the rest of my life. The smell of must and mildew and algae and human excrement gunpowder and death. I knew I would carry the sound of that gun fire too. It would echo through my heart and through my dreams. I knew I carry the fear and the sense of abandonment by God in my country which was half a planet away and all that felt holy to me. I knew I'd carry a certain bitterness as well. Anger at the politicians who made that war. Anger at the ignorance and platitudes fake simplistic patriotism and self righteousness and piety and hypocrisy and outright lies that underlay the

war. Anger at people in my hometown the quantised boys and the Lions Club and the chatty housewives and the pious holier than thou ministers and the Country Club boys. Who in the end sent not just me but all of Middle America. To go to war. A war that. Who are you to ask anything about its cause. Causes would have very little to say to you. I told the group at Bunker Hill today that I doubt very much that anyone in my hometown draft board could have spelled the word no way even if you're spotted in every Vall and consonant in the word they couldn't put them in the right order. I doubt they could have found Vietnam on a map those maps you get in first or second grade you know they're blank and you fill in the name of the country. I don't think they could have found it.

And I'm not Jewish but I don't think so I'm almost certain they couldn't. Beyond that I doubt that many of us in this room knew much about say what the Taliban was or what a Sunni or Shiite was until those two towers came tumbling down. And yet a week or a month later we're killing people. Without knowing a whole lot about the world and with certainly without caring a whole lot about the world enough to read a little history. Well all this the fear of betterness abandonment and the kind of over sensing over arching sense of of Raw. Anger It will be represented for me forever by that slimy irrigation ditch outside a village whose name I didn't know then and don't

know today. Well 20 years have passed. I'm 63 years old now and I'm a new daddy. I have a 4 year old and a 6 year old. Yeah. I. Am partly proud of that and partly embarrassed. It's. I had mention of the group at Bunker Hill earlier today and I want to repeat it here because it seems somehow fitting in a peculiar backdoor kind of way that I've had to be in the position I told my kids I was going on this book tour and they kind of they didn't have no idea what a book tour was and they asked for a lot and I mentioned this book The Things They Carried and the older kid asked what it was about. And I said it was about Vietnam and course what's that. And

then I uttered the word war and six year old looked at me with astonishment war you were in a war. I said yes. And he said well what is it. Well you try fielding that one from my six year old and I was caught in a situation where I didn't want to lie. And you know it's sprinkle Ajax on it for that and sanitize it. But I also don't want to you know cripple the kid for life to hurl here an age. And I did what I did and I made a very tentative stab at trying to describe what wars are. People killing one another and little Timmy looked at me with and just astonished me. You sort of really kill. And I said yeah. He said like on Star Wars and Sinaloa and I can Star Wars. And he kept. Uttering the words really really kill people do that.

And the astonishment in the kid's voice Yes he was first awakened to the reality. You know whatever way a six year old can imagine this stuff was part of the sadness that I mentioned when I first started talking to you. Another incident as a father that seems to hook you to The Things They Carried is the story of the things they carried as you know if you've read the book has to do with an older writer. Looking back on the war and telling stories and retelling them from different angles of vision and telling them again with a little new spin to it the way stories by and large always get told. And I mention to the group this afternoon that I don't know a year year and I've tried time is tumbling in my head I don't know how long 12 years ago except the kids aren't that old. But at some point in recent history the younger kid whose name nickname is tab I found him peeing into a

wastebasket in the bathroom. And I said I mean this was not just a waste. This was a wire mesh wastebasket. He just triple in through this purple. Brand new carpet that we had laid and I said Ted what are you doing this for why are you doing this why me I got my very stern and really angry if you because he knew better and I kind of lost it and I kept yelling the way I didn't yell but my voice was firm. And actually can I think I really kind of paralyzed him. I mean it was like this with because I try to be a good dad and not do that sort of thing but I did. I was angry and I made him get down on his hands and knees with toilet paper and try to blot it up. And that didn't do much to solve the problem. And I kept saying to him why why. And finally my wife took over the discipline I went back to my study where about an hour later and maybe maybe a little last

Tad came in and he said Daddy Daddy. I said what he said I've got two heads. I said what. And he said I've got two heads. And I said what. And he said I've got two heads you know ask me why and I've got two heads one had said Daddy's not going to like this. And the other had said this is going to be fun. And. As a writer I had this ritual and maybe all fathers do this I tell the kids stories at bedtime mine are pretty elaborate they're a kind of a writer's stories that go on too long and that's sort of thing. But I said that night I had to me on the side pad over here and it was the lights are out and and I said I turned to Tad and I said you know I knew somebody who had two heads once upon a time and said What was his name and I said his name was daddy and he said really and I said yeah. And he

looked at my head or my neck looking for the scar where the head where the head had been and and look on his face was a bit like Timmy's during the war question earlier look of befuddlement mixed with a kind of delight kind of happy that his dad once had two heads. And as they lay there I tried as best I could because I was thinking about this upcoming You know anniversary which then probably was two years away still the 20th but it was on my mind. And I told I centrally told the Rainy River chapter in the things they carried into this kid trying to you know dampen down the language and better use the language that you think we're going to get through to a 6 year old a four year old. But I said yeah I've gone through college essentially with two heads one head saying I don't like this war and you better not go do it. And how do you say no to your country and your hometown.

That head talking to another head which you know sings back to the first had such as you love your country and your dad was a sailor in World War 2 and your mom was away. And you know you don't want to live in exile and things like that with these two heads are yakking at each other all through my review from my sophomore through my senior year of colleges the war became more. More and more the wolf at the door and less and less abstract. And by this time of course Tad is long asleep in 10 he's asleep and I was lying in the dark pretty much talking to myself. It first aloud and then silently but in my head. Retelling the Rainy River story to myself trying to understand something about myself in that long ago time. The reason I mention this and part is that for me The Things They Carried although on the surface is a book

about war and one you know one way. The real war for me was the war about should I go to order or not. What's the right way to comport oneself as a human being when you think something's wrong. And yet you're 21 years old and you don't know everything and you have imperfect knowledge and the CIA isn't delivering raw intelligence to your doorstep to make you make decisions just imperfect knowledge thing. What do you do in circumstances such as that when your body is in it and your body is going to have to make a motion either toward the war or away from it. There's no in between there might be in a you know a class across the street here where the ambiguities can be debated for a long time and remain ambiguous. The problem with the real world is your body is going to move into it one way or another even if it stays still it's a kind of movement. Well.

Although The Things They Carried is a book in about war and about the Vietnam War in particular. Even as I was writing it I was trying to reach beyond the war. I was trying to reach into your lives. And which is one of the reasons why the book concludes by pretty much leaving Vietnam and telling the story of a little island character who when I was 9 years old based on a real little girl who died when I was 9 have a brain tumor and how that little girl although she's been gone from my life now for I don't know how long but 50 years a long time half a century ago it was live in my memory and it was alive in my dreams as she ever was which is the aboutness of that story. Stories have a weight not of saving our bodies that life that they can save something in us. The people we once were. And about the ghosts all around us.

In a sense the things they carried for me is a much is much a ghost book as it is a war book for those ghosts are among the things all of us carry. My dad died which seems recently it's probably now four years ago but it feels like yesterday. And. In the hours before he died. I could have gone into that hospital room and taken him in my arms and said Dad I love you. I didn't for a bunch of Midwestern reasons reasons of terror and avoiding you know avoiding sentiment but in a story even if it's invented my dad can

sit up from the dad and he can say that's OK I know you love me. And although that's plainly never happened. You just said don't do that sort of thing. That puts a little moisture in my throat in a way that the first declaration about my dad died recently didn't do anything to me really it's just a statement of fact. That's why I write novels and don't do nonfiction in novels miracles can happen. They could be natural miracles that we all witness every day the miracle of a child Gaining language. They can be supernatural. The dead sitting up for people are doing it falling into rabbit holes. It doesn't matter much what does matter is that in a story I can write about

not just what happened but I can write also about what almost happened or what could have happened and what should have happened. Which partly is also one of the strands I mentioned earlier about the things they carried something I could have pulled out of the book and talked about in a kind of lecturing sort of way. In the end The Things They Carried is meant to stand as an emblem for the things all of us carry. The New York Times ran a piece not long after 9/11 and titled the things they carry they just caught my title and the story in the article was they had a reporter go to a guest either LaGuardia or JFK I can't remember which. And it is his article was this was of the stuff the physical objects we carry on our persons and then deposit in those trays as we go through security. And what they say about the people we are

and the surmises and guesses we make about the objects to come out of our pockets and out of our purses and our knapsacks and so on. And then the article went beyond that to talk about the common emotional burden all these travelers were carrying with their recent memory of the twin towers coming down and the number of the anthrax scare back then that had almost paralyzed our nation with fear and that those emotional burdens too are among the things we all carried. So my hope was that that title would have reverberations way beyond Vietnam. And and I think that's happened. I want to spend all the rest of my time responding to. Whatever comments or questions you might have. So ask them. Thank you.

It was. All right so I have two questions. Number one where's the Red Sox and number two. Yeah. I'm a junior in high school we just read your book. So I'm curious when do you think your children are going to be old enough to truly understand what's been going on in your book to understand what the books just like to know about a fic all the stuff that's in it. OK. My read sat my Red Sox hat is just dirty and I've been wearing it for two lines are to fall apart. That's the answer to that I live in Texas where you know you don't can't find Red Sox ads at every stop along the way. The other question what might what do I think my children will be able to understand something of the books I don't know. I don't know if they ever will. It takes a mindset that's beyond the literal to like these books if you are a literalist you're not going to like The Things They Carried and that's what I meant when I said

not this book is not going to hit everyone. And people who are in the junior high high school age can be a literalist. Why are you messing with my head and why aren't you just telling me exactly what happened and why you're changing the stories around and there's a frustration that comes of why why why. Which I can understand because I was frustrated with little to add and why why why. But I did have reasons behind that to make you frustrated and myriad reasons. One is that that notion that notion of absolutism with which we use that word truth scares me. Yet I don't I'm not certain about much of anything in this world. For every certainty I run across I find I'm double crossed by the world and it comes back and I'm my certainty is undermined. Well you're going to situations such as a war and that phenomenon is multiplied by a factor of 5

zillion. I was brought up a Methodist and we had these ten commandments that thou shalt not kill and I believed in that. And then I go to a war and I'm told you had better kill me or I'll court martial your ass. Well truth goes upside down when that sort of thing is happening anyone in this room was a veteran has been through basic training much less war knows what I'm talking about that my ass is in there for a reason which is how you're talked at. But that absolute certainty in situations such as a war but I think also in failing marriages and broken homes and and alcohol problems I mean all the sorrows that can visit us when those things strike one

sense of the definite slips out from beneath you and what one once thought about oneself or others or both gets gets even slipperier than you thought it was before and I wanted to capture that in The Things They Carried. That absolutism is the sort of thing that brings us to fight wars and I want to combat that too. I want to issue I suppose a kind of subtle warning which was DOA watch out for absolutes of any sort cultural religious political. Watch out. That kind of thing is dangerous. And that's another reason that there's a shifting fluid ground truth in the book truths change. What was once true can be untrue the next day I love you a girl

says as a girl did to me once in high school and the next night man you are a creep. And then I love you. Well she was never a lying. She was just changing her mind every night. And that's the world we live in and minds are changed and truth changes minds change. The world was once flatness not anymore. Einstein came along and things went upside down as to what's true and not true. There's a temporal component to truth. I would say right now you know it's 8:30 or whatever time it is I'm no idea eight o'clock and I. But it's not true in Tokyo is it. And it's not true on Saturn is it. And the declarations such as that we sometimes have to be qualified or turned upside down. Well I could wax eloquent on this subject to Rexan ples for a long time and I I try to do it for you know junior high and high school classes trying to argue them out of their

literalism always with stunning failure. After I'm all finished I'll say yeah but did that happen or did that happen. And. And and so that's the world there seems to be a kind of temperament of the literal versus the whatever my temperament is that these things are in competition in the human heart and the human mind. And try as I might I think I feel dismally to reach a certain temperament. OK thank you. Yeah. Really quick here and just say it is about 10 minutes to 8:00 and that's all time here in Cambridge. So we have about 15 minutes for questions out there but it could keep their questions to just one apiece and hopefully we'll get to the line and the woman holding the book at the very back of the line you're going to your final question of the evening. OK. Not long ago there was an article in The New York Times about soldiers returning from the two wars

they were conducting. And how they for the most part they're critical but also in the end for the wars. And you were you were in this article and you referred to their ideas of war as Victorian and I would just like you to elaborate on that. Yeah. I mean I'll do my best to I can elaborate too long because of the time but I'll do my best. Yeah I'll tell to you answer by way of story which is not the best waived I would get an assignment from Parade Magazine your favorite intellectual journal to you to go to go to the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio where we send our really badly wounded from these war zones people without legs and arms and noses and ears that are and burned away I mean really hideous hideous wounds beyond beyond.

Coming home movie from my era. These are beyond born on the Fourth of July because these wounds are and these people are fresh into these hospitals and when not all of course but a number of them. While what I witnessed was partly just a stunning mutilate you know ways in which the human body can be mutilated. But I also witnessed a different kind of soldier than the soldiers I had served with all those decades ago. The absence of a draft makes for a different cat in war. It's just true. And all you have to do is get on an airplane fly to Brooklyn spend a couple of hours and you'll find out what I mean. The diction and the lingo with which the men and women and there are women there too. Badly wounded. The diction was the diction of wounded warrior and war on global terrorism. These words being uttered without irony or adage but with real conviction

yet with which you can argue you can't. And I didn't. Course didn't try all I felt was sadness. But certainly it was not the language with which veterans of my era would speak about. The war in Vietnam with a kind of of the word is but having so taken inhaled a vocabulary of it seems to have come from the admin and the Pentagon and believed and well what do you say. You don't argue with belief. It's believed it's believed but you can only thing you can say is there's a radical difference of temperament between those who buy volition go to war or at least join the armed forces and those who such as myself people who were dragged out of their houses kicking and

screaming by Uncle Sam for that Greetings letter. There are different kinds of people. They go to war for different reasons some for adventure some for macho reasons some to learn about themselves some to test themselves some for patriotic reasons some out of fear that is fear of embarrassment. As I went all whole number of reasons but I do know that there are different sorts of homogenized sense different kinds of human beings are fighting in the wars we have now than were in my war. At the same time I can quickly say that we share more than our differences. Talking of these people we share wars and with no enemy and no you know no uniforms no front no rear no up down would be a kill I don't know. Or as in which land mines are causing massive casualties how do you kill a landmine. Dad you can't shoot back at it. How do you kill an IED. It's dead

and it's blowing you up. A sense of frustration that sometimes mounts and anger a sense of if you can't find the enemy the whole place is the enemy. The streets of Fallujah. Province becomes the enemy the whole place is yours. It's so fearful the ground seems to shimmer with dread and evil and death. Those things that are shared our way overwhelm the differences of mindset with which you enter a war. Each of these topics I mean they're great questions but each and I'm just I feel like I haven't done justice by my answer because it's so much more I want to say see this line in front of me. Hi Mr. O'Brien My name is Peter Harrison and I'm a college student. My question is What advice would you give new veterans coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq who are trying to find their own voice in writing about their experiences

overseas. What advice would you give to them as they sit down and try to write their experiences. Great question and bad answer. I wish I could give advice if I if I knew how to. What I mean I would love to give wisdom and advice but I don't know much I know only things I don't think people want to hear. And it scares me to look in your eyes and utter this but I'm going to do it. I can tell by your your voice that you're educated but you've got to learn the difference between law and lie. And if you don't know it it is going to be hard to write. And I know you do but hear can't believe I'm reading now I'm reading and you know people by my teach writing a little bit not much but I find myself correcting grammar most of the time because those kinds of errors jerked me out of the story. And I'm not thinking about it. You know Molly lying dead in her crib. I'm thinking about this author doesn't know

the difference between lie and lay. And I'm out of the story as a whole bunch of readers will be those who don't know the difference between lie and lay aren't going to know you did it correctly anyway so you're not going to lose them and you're just going to only going to lose those who do know the difference. Well I'm not talking just about grammar I'm trying to go beyond that. That I think I would give the advice of pay attention and read books and then ask yourself why do I like it. This sort of simple questions but which will give you you know the answers as soon as you ask it or which books in your life have really touched you and meant something to your heart not just your head and ask yourself why did you touch me. And the answer will be self-evident will come right to right away. Why did I care about that story and not the one. And you're your objective in writing about what's going on now is mine we share that and

you know I told this group this afternoon this is I mean it's worth saying this I guess that. To write about this stuff you've got 26 letters in the alphabet and you've got some punctuation marks and that's it nothing else unless you want to do a graphic book. You know I'm going to rock it on you can do that I guess and there's some beautiful ones made. But if you want to use words you got 26 letters and you better learn to you know put them in the right order I'm talking partly in myself as I say these things. The second piece of advice is better unless you know the teacher early. But it's that you're need a stubbornness of spirit kind of like military stubbornness where hot as the day is and tough as the march is you keep Compean may take the next step and the next to right well you requires a regularity. You can't say I'm going to do it today and then go bowling in an hour and come back and. Do it again. You have to set a

schedule I think to be disciplined and do it every day. Weekends when your girlfriend want to do something else and when you want to do something else and because making sentences is hard work and for all the material it's in your head that happened and that happened. This is how to get that out. It all has to come out through sentences making that sentence and then making the next one and then the next one for five years or three years and it's to find that walk that it's odd writerly line between language and memory and language and imagination. But by and large or certain there are writers writing sentences hoping through nice phrases or cool bit of dialogue that's off the path a bit. That sounds like human speech and yet it carries an edge or bit of irony or a bit of laughter that goes beyond the ordinary or the stale and doesn't sound like an Audi Murphy movie or

a John Wayne movie or Tim O'Brien book. It sounds different. The sound of a rock. That's the uses of the army lingo or the Marine language I don't know what you're in but whichever it was you used the lingo. Don't be afraid. You know I don't try to find it and so on. Language matters it's the music underneath stories. That's just a big ocean of language and the story is like a boat floating on it and pay attention to the language. That's the best I can do and I know it didn't help any. Good luck. Right. I'm a student at Emerson College and I'm teaching a course on American Short Stories and on the Rainy River is on our curriculum and I was wondering how you feel about the things they carried being considered a work of short stories a collection of short short stories versus a novel. What your opinion on that is and if you do consider them to be just a bunch of you know a bunch of short stories

why you think that form was the best for telling us. OK great question I can do that short answer to this one. I'm not good at short answers. I don't care how it's viewed as called on the title page a work of fiction and that's how I view it. We my publisher and I debated this for weeks on end what should we call it. And finally settled on a work of fiction because it falls in this kind of another or another world land. They are discrete stories and yet they're the same characters the same narrator Tim O'Brien character the recurrent themes throughout the book. So I look at it as an integrated book so I don't think it's the book of stories a really rich one is separate from the other. But I don't certainly isn't what we would think of in a standard sense as a novel. The book is written as it is because that's how the world comes at me. The world comes at me and clusters of stuff. Most of the world I forget and so do you.

What do you remember about today really in detail. The words that came out of your mouth all that stuff most of it's best today. What about last Tuesday. How much is with you and then go back a year. How much do you have of it. Whole days are gone. January 15th 2007 What did you do. That's what I mean about the human life kind of a racing itself as you live it. Every dish you washed in every pickup you made and every word you uttered it's gone. You might have a vague recollection of certain events in your life the day your wife left you. But you may not remember all of that the precise words spoken. What you were doing you know say three hours before she told you. You probably remember what you're doing when you were told. But the three hours before. You probably are racist and that's how the world comes at me and I try to reflect that in the book where big There are no

transitions in the book between this and that and I tried to look back on Vietnam and tell stories about Vietnam without the inner species and the transitional material which novels traditionally do. OK. I have a server and it's I'm here to meet you. I actually I was a reporter about a year ago and I lost my job and I've been kind of floating ever since. And I kind of want to know how did you manage the strength and the endurance to sort of stay right or stay focused when you have. I guess it's kind of hard to make a living that way. How do what. Hard to do what. Hard to make a living that way to kind of stay a writer when maybe it's not bringing in the money or if you don't I mean if you don't become a writer to make money because you may become an investment banker and make a lot of money just that I'm one of the more successful writers financially and God I could

shortstop second string for the Yankees makes like 12 times what I make and I'm not I'm not kidding you. Maybe 20 times more. Then you know that the guy couldn't spell cat you know and yet he's making trillions of dollars and that's so I don't think money is the. Yeah you gotta eat and survive but writers have found ways of doing that. You know I'm writing nonfiction pieces and doing journalism or waiting tables or saw that you've got a lot of storytelling and you have to have a confidence in your own voice to tell the story. And that means to get confident you've got to do it a lot and and do it some more and slowly you're going to stay and then I was a great phrase and maybe there's another one around the corner. And then you learn slowly as I had to learn with all these failures sentences in my life every published sentence or 12 trillion bad sentences underneath it or more.

And to learn to have the courage to throw out bad sentences with which you've worked on a long time and for me was really hard but you gotta love that work and efforts own sake I think and not worry too much about money because you're never going to make as much as a left fielder you know for the Dubuque icons or so you know some lousy little little league team in Minnesota. You know Cole Juanes But guys that little kid who's 6 years old made more than you. OK. I just have one real quick personal question. When you read or write a really good story or something you feel is great. Where do you feel that you feel it in your head you feel in your gut. Do you just know that I just take over. Yeah that is really a canny question there's a way of knowing the way if you're say a singer and you know the sound of you've done it you've written up you've sung a bit of

melody and you've hit the notes correctly. There's a chime thing that happens accompanying that as a kind of endorphin rush that's a kin to a runner's high or if you will lift the weights or zone and kind of gorge weird feeling you get in your muscles it partly hurts and probably feels incredibly great that there's a giddiness to it. It could be the saddest most macabre scene ever written. Are the saddest most macabre sentence ever written. And yet you'll have a giddiness a laughter on that. That's going to hit that librarian and Dubuque and Maker really scared or really feeling and that you really feel happy for that that even though it's sad I felt that way when I was writing the killing the water buffalo sections and the things they carry that chapter where it's grim and it's it's it's bloody and Mike Cobb and it's not even to kill the buffalo it's to hurt it to cause pain and shoot it in the tail and shoot it in the years and shoot in the flank and shoot in the feet and shoot it everywhere except in the you know the head. So you

just heard it and then heard it again and heard it again and then and do it for about a page and a half while. Yes grim to read and hard to read. Well that's war for you number one tough. And beyond that I'm finding myself I can remember being I can laugh aloud but a giddiness a happiness that maybe this will crunch through the abstraction of war that is just a word we all order without thinking much about the horrors underneath it. And it's that's what that's the feel when you said Man that that that hit it. There's a line at the end of that water buffalo thing is an example of trying to search for an example to the previous two questions ago. There's a line in Things They Carried. It's a bit of dialogue that you're I would probably go right over that I felt really delighted by in that giddy feeling where after this buffalo has been shot and shot and shot and finally dies they pick it up they carried over this is well they dump it into the village well and afterward a guy says

man that's that's the weirdest thing I've ever seen and that I've never seen it before. You know it's never seen anything like it and a guy named Michel Sanders So let's nom for you. Garden of evil over here man. Every since real fresh and original. And that line I like and I like it for a variety of reasons it sounds like Nom and I like that. Probably the word man is needed to make it sound that way. Probably it's a play on Garden of Eden garden of evil which felt like but mostly it's the line when it gets to original sin. You know over here man every sins real fresh and original which has to do with you know sins like murder and war been committed through the EON's and. But when you do it. And when you witness it and your part of it it's fresh and it's original and may have been done a billion times in history but it's brand new and profound to you. And that wall of you that's when you know I felt as a writer that I had hit a note that chime at least for

me. Now the junior high kid prolly will say all but my heart John. Oh they're almost done. Hang in folks. I'm going to feel bad this might be a bit of a. Well my question is The Things They Carried. There's a lot of there's a lot of times where the characters find themselves silenced where it like in the man I killed Tim can't work keeps asking him to talk and he won't and there's a lot of moments of like silence in this and I kind of wanted to know what your thoughts are on silence because being able to talk and tell these stories is such an important part of the things they carried so I wanted to just know a little more about silence good that's a great question and run not sure I can answer it to your satisfaction even in mine but noways requires silence to be noise.

Otherwise it's not there. Everything is one thing. And the silences that accompany experience like war are pretty much the silences that accompany the despair of any sort. OK you're an Auschwitz or you're you know you're going to a broken home and you're a little kid and my your dad has left and the utterance of languages sometimes feels not only impossible but it sometimes feels inappropriate as if to utter a thing is to disgrace it because you're not doing service to it. And the utterance itself is a disgrace at the times of my life when I felt most abandoned and most that ditch the most hurt and lost in the world. The only thing that really helps me anyway is a kind of reverential silence in the face of evil as only think it matters because every utterance of frustration seems seems hapless and feckless and useless.

On top of that there is that letter I read to you to start this talk of Nancy and her father. And people stay silent about tragedy for good reasons. And it's not always what you think. That father may have been silent not just because it was too traumatic to talk about but he meant it may have been silent out of politeness. This simple politeness. Who wants to walk into a party and say I want to hear about Nom. Or was your buddy it is if you go fishing. I want to hear about anon. And the answer can't be No. So that's going to be yes. And already here there and. There another reason for human beings falling silent. I can be kind of a ho I

felt when I came out here this evening. Where do I start or what do I say and what do I select to say. You feel overwhelmed by it all. Tell me about Auschwitz where you began. You could begin in chrono chronology I don't know if I could begin with shoveling snow out the ovens I don't know where you would start or where you would end the question is going to be sometimes so overwhelming that you feel tongue tied and brain locked because you can't find a starting or an ending spot I feel that way in answering all these questions. So silence is mean there is a chapter in the book called How to tell a true war story that in a way is about silence. Those guys are up in that listening post and. You hear all this weird stuff going on in the dark you know cocktail parties and

Haiphong Boys Choir is out there in the dark you know and they come back off this hill having fun they called in artillery to scorch the mountains and the bad ass Colonel ask you know what happened out there why I although I just spend ten trillion dollars on artillery and I was mountains and the guys just salute the Fokker and walk away because certain stories you just can't ever tell you're beyond the telling. And at times I feel that way. OK. Yeah. Oh yes. This is about the book I really love that you like you can ask anything. OK. My name is Kimberly Hi Alex. And we go to common Academy and we would like to hear a little louder I can't hear you. Oh if you would like to ask you in the book do you know exactly what you were fighting for when you and I know

exactly what I was fighting for. Yeah I did. You know I mean it's I mean I was I was fighting for my soul I guess is the best way to save it to start to salvage something about myself something decent and worth living for and loving for took a long long time to find it and some ways I still have it. But I knew what I was fighting for was my soul. Thank you all for common. Thank you for calling.