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This evening I'm very pleased to welcome memoirists novelist and short story writer Tim O'Brien. For a 20th anniversary reading and discussion of his acclaimed book the things they carry it's 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 Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Immediately following the book's publication The 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 examine 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. OBrien places the things they carried high on the lists of the best fiction about any war. Ladies and gentlemen thank you for your patience. Please join

me in welcoming Tim O'Brien. Thank. You. Thank you. So sudden. Delighted to be back in Cambridge it's a kind of homecoming. I'm now two blocks from where I spent I misspent my youth it seems and it's that I feel as almost said I want to cry and maybe I will at some point in the saying so forgive me. It is a 20th birthday on the book and I'm really happy that the book is still being read in the country and that this is no. I'm not lauding the book. What I do feel that it's something of a miracle when any book two decades later is still mean

something to people. Many many many wonderful books are published every year as are well-reviewed and people like them and buy them and then they vanish. And now and then on rare occasions something something for mysterious reasons is way beyond my doing and a book will be read by junior high school students 20 years later and by morticians. Dr. Harrison it's 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 is 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

we are going to be uttered again tonight. How do you talk about a book you could I could select the chapter or I could talk about its composition. There are all kinds of angles to go up. So you know to approach a book and each has struck me as silly. That would be a little bit like pulling the thread out of a piece of cloth and you'd talk about it and the cloth would dissolve as you did. And my mind would be on everything I'm leaving out as I'm talking about that. So what I thought I'd do is try to approach the book instead from a reader's perspective and a back door 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. I'll come in to call her Nancy for the purposes of this little talk. And then I'm going to after reading the letter I'm going to talk about why I read it to you dear Mr.

O'BRIEN. I thought about writing this letter for the past ten 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 widened on the front. And I 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 pans 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'd brush 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 dollars in the bank when they got married. Both of them thinking it was a 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 of 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 for 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 his bed. 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 Hills 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 Duluth. But halfway through went to Vietnam then Germany finished college back at Duluth started at Luther seminary married my mother quit seminary had no money and so started working as a technical writer for computer company. A job I hated during my time in college. My father would find excuses to come down to Northfield St. 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 tasselled ornament in the box under is bad. It was really a part off a stripper costume in Vietnam. I learned that that story had lost part of his hearing that 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 aren't 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 but for all these years I've 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 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 Harden's hard right now. Is that letter and hundreds really thousands like it. I think demonstrate if I what it had a year to read them all to you the things they carried. Like any decent novel any piece of literature is finally aimed not just at the intellect but at the human heart. For all the complications and M-B ambiguities of that book 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 in 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 trudged 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 an abstract kind of way. Secondly I wanted to read this letter to you because it's a reminder to me and I hope to you that stories matter and the lives of real people out there in a real world. Too often it has seemed to me over the last twenty years that my books have gone out into a kind of black hole somewhere in the center of the universe where they are 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 late earlier today and you confront the faces of not just veterans other or many there but the faces of people who hadn't been born and

Vietnam you know was the center of my life. Those who have taught the book and 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 the hostilities are over long after we think of war as as history wars continue in the vet and the nightmares of veterans. But they also continue

in the unending grief of a mother whose son died in some far off desert or jungle and who 40 years later snaps awake at 4 in the morning and wonders where a baby is a baby dead now for four decades. And if you get a look at that mother's eyes I doubt she would tell you that Vietnam is history. Wars keep echoing in 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 to help 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 letter such as this one. Makes all the literary stuff pale. The awards that were mentioned in the introduction and the money and all 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. No I meant it. And not just declare it by reading that letter to you although I know that no book will hit home with the same ferocity with every reader or even comparable ferocity.

There is still the great satisfaction of being a novelist. When you get an of letters such as this one and you had that occasional realization that 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 inquiring my 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 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 Mustin mildew and algae and

human excrement and gunpowder and death. I knew I would carry the sound of that gunfire too that it would echo through my heart and through my dreams I knew I'd carry the fear and the sense of abandonment by God and 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 CONUS boys and the Lions Club and the Chaddy housewives and the pious holier than thou ministers and the country club boys.

Who in the end set not just me but all of the Middle America. To go to war a war. That. Were you to ask anything about its cause. Causes would have very little to say to you. I told a group at Bunker Hill today that I doubt very much that anyone in my hometown draft board could have spelled the word Hanoi. Even if you spotted him every vowel and consonant in the word they couldn't put him in the right order. I doubt they could have found Vietnam on a map those maps would get in first or second grade. You know they are blank and you fill in the name of the country. I don't think they could have found it. And not just that 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 certainly without carrying a whole lot about the world enough to read a little history of all this. The fear of betterness abandonment and the over sensing over arching sense of Raw. Anger 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 four year old and a six year old.

Yeah. I'm certainly proud of that and partly embarrassed. It's. I had mentioned to the group at Bunker Hill earlier today and I want to repeat it here because it seems somehow fitting and in a peculiar backdoor kind of way that that I've had to be in the position as 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 walk. And I mention this book The Things They Carried and the older kid asked what it was about and said it was about Vietnam and of 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 sprinkle Ajax on it for the kid and sanitize it. But I also didn't want to kind of cripple the kid for life to hurl here and age. And I did what I did and I made a very tentative stab at trying to describe what war wars are people killing one another and little Timmy looked at me with astonishment. He said really kill. And I said yeah. He said like on Star Wars and I said no no no if I can star wars. And he kept uttering the word really like really killed people do that. And the astonishment in the kid's voice and I guess he was first awakened to the reality in whatever way a 6 year old can imagine that stuff was part of the sadness that I mentioned when I first started

talking to you. Another incident I was a father that seemed to look to the things they carried is the story of the the things they carried is 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 then telling them again with a little new spin to it the way stories by and large always get told and I mentioned to the group this afternoon that. About oh I don't know year or year and I've trip time is tumbling in my head I don't know a whole lot bigger and 12 years ago except the kids aren't that old. But at some point in recent history that younger kid who's name nickname is Tad I found him peeing into a wastebasket in our bathroom. And I said I mean this was not just a waste. This was a wire mesh waste basket so. He'd just drill in through this. Purple

brand new carpet that we had laid. And I said Ted what are you doing this far why are you doing this why. I mean I got a very stern and really angry because he knew better and I kind of lost it and I kept yelling where I didn't yell but my voice was firm. And actually can see I really kind of paralyzed him. I mean it was like this 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 and I went back to my study where about an hour later and maybe maybe a little less. Dad came in and he said Daddy Daddy and I said what. He said I've got two hands. I said what. And he said I've got two heads. And I said what. And he said I've got two heads you and you asked me why and I got two heads one had said

Daddy's not going to like this. And the other had said this is going to be fine. As a. As a writer I have 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 story. They go on too long and that sort of thing. But I said that night I had Timmy on this side and had over here and it was the lights were out. And I said I turned to Ted 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. And you could look for the scar where the head where the head had been and and the look on his face was a bit like Timmy's during the war question earlier look of sort of befuddlement mixed with the kind of delight of happy that his dad had 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 essentially told the rainy river chapter and the things they carried into this kid trying to you know dampen down the language a bit use the language that you think when you get through to a 6 year old and a 4 year old. But I said you had gone through college essentially with two heads one head saying I don't like this war and you I'd better not go to it. And how do you say no to your country and to your home town that had talking to another head which said you know these things back to the first had such as you love your country and your dad was a sailor in World War II and your mom was a wave and you know you don't want to live in exile and things like that where these two heads are

yakking at each other all through my review from my sophomore through my senior year of college as the war became more more and more the wolf at the door and less and less abstract. And by this time of course I had as long a sleep and Tad Timmy's asleep and I was lying in the dark pretty much talking to myself. At first allowed and then silently but in my head retelling the Ronnie River story to myself trying to understand something about myself. And not long ago time the reason I mention this in 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. Why should I go to it 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 in the CIA isn't delivering raw intelligence to your doorstep to make you make decisions. It's imperfect knowledge thing. What do you do in circumstances such as that when your body is in at 10 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 enough you know class to cross the street here where the ambiguity 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 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 was one of the reasons why the book concludes by pretty much leaving

Vietnam and telling the story of little Linda character who when I was nine years old based on a real little girl who died when I was nine have a brain tumor and how that little girl although she has been gone from my life now for I don't know how long but 50 years is a long time. Half a century ago is alive live in my memory and it was alive in my dreams if she ever was wishes the aboutness of that story. Stories have a way of saving our bodies that life that they can save something in us the people we once were about the ghosts all around us. In a sense the things they carried for me is a much 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 is 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. That said Dad 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 can be natural miracles that we all witness everyday the miracle of a child gaining language. Or they can be supernatural. The dead sitting up were people or you know 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 entitled The things they carry. They just caught my title and the story. The article was they had a reporter go to get to LaGuardia JFK I can't remember which. And his article was this was the stuff the physical objects we carry on our persons and then deposited 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 you know the objects to come out of our pockets and not have 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 the recent memory of the twin towers coming down

and the remember the anthrax scare back then and now that had almost paralyzed our nation with a 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 happened. I want to spend all the rest of my time responding to. Whatever comments or questions you might have so ask them. All right so I have two questions. Number one where's the red sox at. And number two. 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

maturely understand what's been going on in your understand what the books just like to know them out. All this stuff. That's it. OK. My Red Sox my Red Sox hat is just dirty and I've been wearing it for two lions ready to fall apart. That's the answer to that. I live in Texas where you don't you don't can't find Red Sox fans at every stop along the way. The other question what might when 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's not going to hit everyone. And people who are in the junior high high school age can be literalists. 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 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 am not certain about much of anything in this world. For every certainty I run across I find them double crossed by the world and it comes back and I'm certain to use undermind well you get in a situation such as a war and that phenomenon is multiplied by a factor of I don't know five zillion. I was brought up a Methodist and we had these ten commandments that you know like Thou shalt not kill. And I believed in that. And then I go to a war and I'm told you had better kill or all Court-Martial your ass. While truth goes upside down and

that sort of thing has happened and anyone in this room was a veteran who's been through basic training much less war knows what I'm talking about that my ass is in there for a reason. Shows how you're taught that. But that absolute certainty in situations such as a war. But I think also in failing marriages and in broken homes 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 either. And what one once thought about one's self 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 as a sort of thing that brings us and to fight wars.

And I wanted to combat that too. I wanted the issue I suppose a kind of subtle warning which was told to 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 to truth in the book Truth truths change what was once true can be untrue the next day. I love you. 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 lying. She was just changing her mind every night. And that's the world we live and minds are changed and trews changes minds change the world was once flat. Now it's not anymore. Einstein came along and things went upside down as to what's true and not true. There was a temporal

component to truth. I'd say right now you know it's eight thirty or whatever time it is. I'm not at eight o'clock and I haven't. But it's not true in Tokyo is it. And that'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 through examples for a long time and I I try to do it. 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 that's the world there seems to be a kind of temperament of you of the literal versus whatever my temperament is that things are in competition in the human heart and the human mind and I try as I might I think I failed dismally to her to reach a certain temperament.

OK. Thank you. Yeah. Really quick here and just say it is about ten minutes to eight. And that's the all time here in Cambridge. So we have about 15 minutes for questions so if anybody could keep their questions to just want of peace and tell if they were able to get to the line and the woman holding the book at the very back of the line you're going to be our final question that evening. OK. Not long ago there was an article in The New York Times about soldiers returning from the two wars that we're conducting now and how that for the most part. They're critical but also in the end for the wars that 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't elaborate too long because of the time and I'll do my best. Yeah I'll I'll answer by way of story which is the best way I got

an assignment from Parade Magazine your favorite intellectual journal to do go to go to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio where we send our really badly wounded from news wars those people without legs and arms and noses and ears that are burned away. I mean really hideous hideous. Wounds beyond and beyond coming home movie from my air these are beyond born on the Fourth of July because these wounds are and these people are fresh into these hospitals and not all of them of course but a number of them. Well what I witnessed was partly this just a stunning mutilate you know waves ways in which the human body can be mutilated. But I also witnessed a different kind of soldier than the soldiers I served with all those decades ago. The absence of a draft makes for a different cap in the war. That's just

true. And all you have to do is get on an airplane flight a truck and spend a couple of hours and you'll find out what I mean. The diction and the lingo with which these men and women and there are women there too. Badly wounded. The addiction was the addiction of a wounded warrior and the war on global terrorism. These words being uttered without irony or adage but with real conviction with which you can argue he can't. Are you him. No I didn't. Of course I didn't try all I felt was was sadness. But certainly it was not the language with which veterans of my air would speak about the war in Vietnam with a kind of of what the word is. But having taken inhaled a vocabulary of seems to have come from

admin in 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 by volition go to a 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 that 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 on a whole number of reasons but I do know that there are different sorts of homogenous sense different kinds of human beings are fighting in war as we have now than were in my

war. At the same time I can quickly say that we share more than our differences in talking to these people. We share war is no enemy No. You know no uniforms no front no rear no up no down. Who do you kill. I don't know. Or is in which landmines were causing massive casualties. How do you kill a landmine. 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 into anger a sense of if you can't find the enemy the whole place is the enemy the streets of Fallujah are quite nice province becomes the enemy the whole place you're 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 of them I'm just I feel like I haven't done justice by my answer because it's so much more I want to say I see this line in front of me. Go ahead. Hi Mr. again. My name is Peter Harrison and I'm a college. 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 a bad answer. I wish I could give advice if I if I knew how to. 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 that's what I'm going to do it. I can tell by your voice that you're educated but you got to learn the difference between lie and lie

and if you don't know it it's going to be hard to write. And I know you do but you can't believe I'm reading I'm reading you know by my I 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 you know Molly lying dead in her crib. I'm thinking about this author who 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 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 to read books and then ask yourself what do I like it. And it's very simple questions which will give you you know the answers as soon as you ask it. Oh which books

in your life have really touched you and meant something to your heart not just your head and ask yourself why did it touch me. And the answer will be self-evident. You'll come right to you 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. Yes 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 give Iraq you know can do that I guess and some beautiful ones made. But if you want to use words you've got 26 letters and you better learn to you know put them in the right order and I'm talking partly to myself as I say these things. The second piece of advice is better and the less you know. Teacherly but it's

that you need a stubbornness of spirit kind of like military stubbornness where hot as the day is and tough as the marches you keep pumping. You take the next step and the next to write well you it requires a regularity. You can't say I'm going to do it today and then go bowling in an hour then come back and do it again. You have to set a schedule I think to be disciplined and and do it every day weekends when your girlfriend want you to do something else and when you want to do something else because making sentences is hard work. And for all the material that's in your head that happened and that happened this way I had 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 has to find that walk that odd writerly line between language and memory and language and imagination.

But by and large are sitting there writing writing sentences hoping through a nice phrase or a cool bit of dialogue that's off the path a bit. That sounds like human speech and yet it carries an edge or a bit of irony or a bit of laughter that goes beyond the ordinary or the stale. That doesn't sound like an Audie Murphy movie or a John Wayne movie or a Tim O'Brien book. It sounds different. The sound of Iraq thus the uses of the army lingo or the Marine lingo I don't know what you're in but whichever it was used a lingo. Don't be afraid and don't try to define it and so on. Language matters it's the music underneath stories. That's the big ocean of language and the stories are like a boat floating on it and pay attention to the language. That's the best I can do. I know it didn't help any. Good luck.

Hi 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 work. Short stories a collection of 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 this. OK great question. I can do that short answer to this one. I'm not good at short answers. The I don't care how its view is called and that title page a work of fiction and that's how I view it read to 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 nether or another world land. They are discrete stories and yet they're very same characters the same narrator Tim O'Brien character of 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 really each one is separate from the other. But I don't. That 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 it the world I forget. And so to 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 class today. What about. Last Tuesday. How much was 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 cup 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 that. The precise words spoken what you were doing you know say three hours before she told you. You probably remember what were you doing when you were told. But the three hours before. You probably erased and that's how the world comes at me and I tried to reflect that in the book where big and no transitions in the book between this and that and I tried to look back on Vietnam and tell stories about Vietnam without the DCs and the transitional material which novels traditionally do. Hi Mr. Ryan it's I 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 and strength in the endurance to sort of

stay a writer and stay focused when you have. I guess it's kind of hard to make a living out. I don't want. To do it hard to make a living that way to kind of stay a writer when maybe it's not bringing in the money here and we 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 doing just that. I mean I I I'm one of the more successful writers financially and God like a shortstop second string for the Yankees makes like 12 times what I make and I'm not kidding you know maybe 20 times more and you know that 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 got to eat and to survive. But writers have found ways of doing that. You know writing nonfiction pieces and doing journalism are waiting tables old. So you've got to love 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 then do it some more and then is slowly you're going to say I meant I was a great phrase and maybe there's another one around the corner and then you'll learn slowly as I had to learn with all these failed sentences in my every published sentence or 12 trillion bad sentences underneath it or more and a little to learn to have the courage to throw out bad sentences. But you've worked on a long time and that for me was really hard but you got to love that work and for its 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 icon the surface and you know some lousy little little league team in Minnesota. You know the Kawana is good guys. That little kid who was 6 years old would make more than you do. OK.

So 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 it. Do you feel it in your head you feel in your gut do you just know to just take over. Yes it was really a canny question and there's a way of knowing the way if you're say a singer and you know the sound of you've you've done it you've written a song a 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 akin to a runner's high or you will lift weights or Kinnaman 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 singing ever written are the saddest most macabre sentence ever written and yet you'll have a giddiness a laughter and then that's going to hit that librarian in Dubuque and make her really scared or really feeling. 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 buffaloes sections and things they carried that chapter where it's grim and it's it's it's bloody and macabre and it's not even to kill the buffalo it's to hurt it to not cause pain and shoot it in the tail and shoot it in the ears and shoot it in the flank and shoot it in the feet and shoot it everywhere except in 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. Well 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 that in the laugh aloud but a giddiness a happiness that maybe zestful crunched through with the abstraction of war that is just a word we will all utter without thinking much about the horrors underneath it. And so that's what that's the feel when you say man that that hit it. There's a line at the end of that water buffalo thing it was an

example of trying to search for an example to the previous two questions ago. There's a line and things they carried. So did a dialogue that your eye would probably go right over but 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 the weirdest thing I've ever seen and that I've never seen it before and I've never seen anything like it. And then a guy named Mitchell Sanders said well that's not 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 partly the word man is needed to make it sound that way. Probably it's a play on Garden of Eden garden of evil. Nahm felt like. But mostly it's the line when it gets to original sin you know. Over here man every scene is real fresh and original which has to do with you know sins like murder and war and

committed to the EON's. But when you do it and when you witness it and you're 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's all all that's when you know I felt as a writer that I'd hit it a note that chyme least for me. Now the junior high kid probably will say all but my heart chimed there. We're almost done. Hang on folks. I'm going to feel bad this might be a bit of a. Well my question is in the things they carried. There's a lot of there's a lot of times where the characters find themselves silenced where the man I killed. Tim can't Kiawah keeps asking him to talk and he won't. And there's a lot of moments of 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. I'm not sure I can answer it to your satisfaction or even the mind but sight noise requires silence to be noise. Otherwise it's you know it's not there. Everything is the one thing and the silences that accompany experience like war are pretty much the silences of the company the despair of any sort. You are in Auschwitz or you're you know you've got a broken home and you're a little kid and my dad is left and the utterance of language sometimes feels not only impossible but it sometimes feels inappropriate as if to utter a thing is two way disgraced because you're not doing service to it and the utterance itself is a disgrace. That's the times in my life when I felt most abandoned and most ditch the most

hurt and lost in the world. The only thing that really helps me in any way is a kind of reverential silence in the face of evil it's the only thing that 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 site and her father. And people stay silent about tragedy for good reasons and that's not always what you think that father may have been silent not just because it was too traumatic to talk about but he made it may have been silent out of politeness just simple politeness. Who wants to walk into a party and say I want to hear about Nahm or your buddies. If you go fishing I want to hear about Nahm.

And the answer can't be no. So it's going to be yes. And already you're there another reason for human beings falling silent. It can be. How do you get of a how I felt when I came out here this evening. Where do I start. What do I say and what do I select to say. You feel overwhelmed by it all. Tell me about Auschwitz. Where do you begin. How could begin in chrono chronology. I don't know if I could begin with shoveling up 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 get you feel tongue tied and brain locked because you can't find a starting point or an ending spot. I feel that way in answering all these questions.

So silence is. I 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 were up in that listening post and here all this weird stuff going on in the dark you know good cocktail parties and Haiphong Boys Choir is out there in the dark. And they come back off this hill having fun they called in artillery to scorch the mountains and the fat assed colonel asked you know what happened out there. Why why all why and why I just spend ten trillion dollars on artillery in those mountains. And the guys just salute the Focker and walk away because certain stories you just can't ever tell are beyond the telling. And at times I feel that way. OK. The book you can ask anything.

OK. Hi my name is khan academy. And we would like a little louder I can't hear you. Oh. And we would like to ask you in the book. Did you know exactly what you were fighting for. When you say that I know exactly what I was fighting for yeah I did you know I mean I was I was fighting for my soul I guess is the best way to save it sorry to salvage something about myself something decent and worth living for. Loving for a long long time to find it. And in some ways I still haven't but I knew what I was fighting for I was my soul. Thank you all for coming. In for questioning