{"id":40743,"date":"2012-10-30T10:00:48","date_gmt":"2012-10-30T14:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=40743"},"modified":"2012-10-31T15:18:18","modified_gmt":"2012-10-31T19:18:18","slug":"document-tim-o%e2%80%99brien%e2%80%99s-archive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/10\/30\/document-tim-o%e2%80%99brien%e2%80%99s-archive\/","title":{"rendered":"Document: Tim O\u2019Brien\u2019s Archive"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

The Professional, edited by Tim O'Brien, October 11, 1969. Reproduced by permission of Tim O'Brien, courtesy the Harry Ransom Center.<\/p><\/div>\n

Tim O\u2019Brien was drafted into the U.S. Army and sent to Vietnam on April 5, 1969, to serve with the Third Platoon, Company A, Fifth Battalion, Forty-Sixth Infantry Division. What he saw in battle has been so well documented that while reading his memoir I expected each page to be his last, anticipating the report of his own death. After eight months he secured a coveted rear job where his most onerous task was the preparation of The Professional<\/em>, \u201ca weekly authorized publication of the 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry, APO 96219,\u201d of which he said this:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

The newsletter\u00a0was one of my assigned duties as battalion clerk, the job to which I was assigned\u00a0after 8 months in the field with Alpha Company.\u00a0By that point in my tour,\u00a0as I discussed in some detail in If I Die<\/em>\u2026\u00a0I was no longer doing\u00a0infantry stuff, just the typical things you might expect of a clerk\u2014typing letters and reports,\u00a0filing paperwork,\u00a0counting casualties, etc.\u00a0(I despised the job, and I especially despised that ridiculous newsletter.\u00a0But it beat getting shot dead.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

After the war O\u2019Brien went for a graduate degree at Harvard, where he prepared his memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone<\/em>. Not much draft material survives for that book, but we never doubt its veracity. In his\u00a0archive<\/a>, now ensconced at the Harry Ransom Center<\/a> at the University of Texas at Austin, there are letters home, to his parents; there are photographs<\/a>; there is a uniform; there are medals. There is a lot of material from the nineties as he tracked down fellow members of Alpha Company, and as he revisited Vietnam. And there are two copies of The Professional<\/em>: October 11 and October 20, 1969. The first issue, two pages from which are reproduced here, includes illustrations, cartoons, Vietnamese-English vocabulary lists, stories, and news. It also prints a story by O\u2019Brien entitled \u201cTrick or Treat,\u201d portions of which appear verbatim in If I Die<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Professional<\/em> is a remarkable survival, especially given the handful of specific objects O\u2019Brien mentions in the memoir which have not surfaced: letters from a girl he loves, unrequitedly, who sends him a poem by Auden, and who tells him, he writes, that he \u201ccreated her out of the mind. The mind, she said, can make wonderful changes in the real stuff.\u201d A letter to his parents, asking for his passport and immunization card, as he considers the appeal of Europe over Vietnam. Escape plans he kept folded up in his wallet. A journal he began, \u201cvaguely hoping it will never be read.\u201d And, perhaps most interesting, two letters from his first army friend, Erik Hansen, transcribed into the book. None of these narrative prompts within If I Die<\/em> appear to have survived.<\/p>\n

Perhaps surprisingly, much more of the more fictional The Things They Carried<\/em> is documented by material in the archive. Why surprising? He’s prepared us to believe it’s as true as it isn’t. He writes that, \u201cstory-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth,\u201d and \u201cBut only to say another truth will I let the half-truths stand.\u201d In the chapter \u201cHow to Tell a True War Story,\u201d O\u2019Brien writes that a \u201ctrue war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.\u201d In the chapter \u201cNotes,\u201d he explains, \u201cBy telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened \u2026 and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.\u201d In \u201cGood Form\u201d: \u201cIt\u2019s time to be blunt. I\u2019m forty-three years old, true, and I\u2019m a writer now, and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier. Almost everything else is invented.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet, it\u2019s not, not from the opening line:<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl name Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey.\u201d Tim O\u2019Brien carried letters from a girl named Gayle, and carried them back to civilization, and preserved them for decades. He also saved a letter he wrote to her on October 17, 1968, but never mailed. In his youthful, tense, inconsistent hand, he is already conscious of the disconnect and unity between reality and his presentation of it:<\/p>\n

\n

The very form of the letters and words here (my penmanship is straight & jerky & kinda childlike) conveys wrong things now. Add to that the fact that the thoughts themselves, the substance I put down, is inaccurate to reality, and you have a real problem. \u2026 I can go over to Vietnam, set up shop, and try to keep bullets & shrapnel & blood off my body & hands; the other choice is desertion, pure and simple. No, just pure. Not so simple, if you think about it, and I admit that I have done that. All night after getting the news.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Martha of the first chapter, the reader eventually learns, was not Jimmy\u2019s\u2014or even O\u2019Brien\u2019s\u2014first love. That place of honor was held by the nine-year-old Linda of the last chapter: his fourth-grade sweetheart who died of a brain tumor in the summer of 1956, before returning for the fifth grade. Linda, the book version of a girl named Lorna Lou Moeller with whom O\u2019Brien had been in love at the age of nine, incites and dominates the book\u2019s final chapter, \u201cThe Lives of the Dead,\u201d which appeared on its own (as did several chapters of the book) in Esquire<\/em>. After publication O\u2019Brien received a five-page letter from Mrs. Moeller, who had read the chapter, recognized her daughter, and remembered the O\u2019Brien boys. She sent O\u2019Brien a dozen photos of Lorna Lou, and a clipping documenting the too short life of a girl who would occupy space in O\u2019Brien\u2019s consciousness throughout his teens and adulthood. Moeller recalls her daughter\u2019s feelings for the O\u2019Brien siblings, and recounts the course of her illness and death.<\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Lives of the Dead\u201d O\u2019Brien had written, \u201cIt is now 1990. I\u2019m forty-three years old, which would\u2019ve seemed impossible to a fourth grader \u2026 And as a writer now, I want to save Linda\u2019s life. Not her body\u2014her life.\u201d These thoughts dated back, though, to the late fifties: two stories, composed in high school, have been preserved, in which he grapples with Lorna Lou\u2019s illness and inevitable death. In \u201cTwo Minutes,\u201d composed on seven leaves of his father\u2019s letterhead from the Equitable Life Assurance Society, he recounts his futile attempt to save \u201cNancy,\u201d who killed herself because \u201cI\u2019d persuaded her\u2014no forced her would be a better word\u2014to come with me to New York from her Indiana farm.\u201d He races home in his car, knowing she is at death\u2019s door, hoping he\u2019ll make it in time to save her. Another story, called \u201cTulips,\u201d filling twenty-two leaves of letterhead, is about a girl named Linda and a boy named Tim. O\u2019Brien writes in 1990 that he had, in his youth, \u201csaved\u201d Lorna Lou in his dreams, always seeing her alive, sometimes discussing her death with her. In one dream he asks her what it\u2019s like to be dead. She responds, \u201cI guess it\u2019s like being inside a book that nobody\u2019s reading.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time O\u2019Brien came to write The Things They Carried<\/em>, he had experienced staggering death and loss as an adult, but his mind returned, still, to the nine-year-old girl:<\/p>\n

\n

And then it becomes 1990. I\u2019m forty-three years old, and a writer now, still dreaming Linda alive in exactly the same way. She\u2019s not the embodied Linda; she\u2019s mostly made up, with a new identity and a new name \u2026 She was nine years old. I loved her and then she died. And yet right here, in the spell of memory and imagination, I can still see her as if through ice, as if I\u2019m gazing into some other world a place where there are no brain tumors and no funeral homes, where there are no bodies at all.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He can also see his dead Company mates, Kiowa, Ted Lavender, Curt Lemon. \u201cAnd sometimes I can ever see Timmy skating with Linda under the yellow floodlights. I\u2019m young and happy I\u2019ll never die.\u201d<\/p>\n

In response to my description of The Things They Carried<\/em> as \u201c(perhaps marginally) more fictional than If I Die<\/em>,\u201d O\u2019Brien commented,<\/p>\n

\n

by any ordinary standard the vast bulk of TTTC is invented and is fiction. Even the Gayle\/Martha material is almost entirely the product of my imagination, both in terms of its detail and in its rendering of events. The Lorna Lou\/Linda stuff calls more heavily on actual events, yet 80 or 90 percent of the chapter is completely invented. As a novelist, I have ruthlessly (and joyously) sacrificed the so-called \u2018real world\u2019 for the sake of story.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What interests me, then, is the process by which O\u2019Brien cast and shaped and finessed objects, facts, memories, and dreams into a compelling narrative. Working papers for this\u2014though not for If I Die<\/em>\u2014proliferate in his archive. In addition to raw drafts of individual chapters and two annotated rounds of the complete manuscript, I saw page proofs, with O\u2019Brien\u2019s final autograph revisions throughout.<\/p>\n

He put his hand to eighty-five pages, sometimes adding, dropping, or changing a word, other times, revising an entire speech or paragraph or striking through a line or series of lines. He seems to have had the most difficulty settling on text in \u201cIn the Field\u201d and its complement, \u201cField Trip,\u201d but the distribution of the balance of revisions is fairly even throughout the book.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Where we\u2019ve all seen \u201cJoint Chiefs of Staff,\u201d he originally had \u201cBobby Kennedy.\u201d The \u201corange glow of napalm\u201d was originally black. Bad breath had been fever blisters, and before that, acne. An aluminum suitcase turned into a cardboard box, and then back, to \u201ca metal suitcase.\u201d A banyan tree became a palm tree. Was it \u201chot and steamy,\u201d or, better, \u201ccold and steamy?\u201d High school had been college, and a \u201clacy red blouse\u201d had originally been a pink T-shirt. More substantively, he deletes \u201cI was a coward\u201d and a discussion of gallantry, and rewrites a sentence about losing the Silver Star. Such examples convey the spirit of this final round of revision and show a fair sampling of the sort of changes that could be either alterations to enhance the story, or more simply reversions to accuracy (after all, if Faulkner was right, \u201cmemory believes before knowing remembers\u201d).<\/p>\n

O\u2019Brien has played so much, and so successfully, with genre that I wonder that we bother to acknowledge some of the distinctions that seem so important to the publishing sales force and the bookstore buyers and the talk-show hosts. Does it make any kind of sense to separate If I Die <\/em>from The Things They Carried <\/em>and even Going After Cacciato<\/em> in the bookstore? Clearly, someone thinks we as readers care. I\u2019d argue strenuously that we should not. We should simply take a page out of one of O\u2019Brien\u2019s books: \u201cThe thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sarah Funke Butler is a literary archivist and agent at\u00a0Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, Inc<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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