November 24, 2000|By RAFAEL ALVAREZ | RAFAEL ALVAREZ,SUN STAFF
SAN MARCOS, Texas - Tim O'Brien would like to be known for his long and difficult labor to illuminate the one thing that William Faulkner believed worth writing about: the human heart in conflict with itself.
Instead, the heavily lauded author of "The Things They Carried," "Going After Cacciato" and "In the Lake of the Woods" is known for stories of human beings trying to kill one another. Fate assigned O'Brien war as the great subject of his life. The anguish in these books is, in every case, traceable to the characters' having been in Vietnam, as their author was, or somehow having being marked by America's war there.
Vietnam was O'Brien's war and, for a time, his world, as it was for his generation. It has never seemed entirely past; it has remained as current as President Clinton's trip last week to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, the first visit to Vietnam by an American president since the war.
"It's about time," says O'Brien. "I hope it eases the hurt on both sides."
Other writers have chosen Vietnam as a subject. But because no one has written more poetically in fiction about grunts in Southeast Asia than the former foot soldier who pulled duty in Quang Ngai in 1969-1970, O'Brien has been tagged as a Vietnam writer.
While he finds that label unfortunate - Is Faulkner merely a Mississippi writer, Phillip Roth simply a narrator for Jews? - O'Brien knows that it's the mystery of art, and not the tyranny of facts, that "keep things alive." It is his sorcerer's gift for weaving war narrative in which the fight for love is more mythic than the fight for land that keeps Vietnam fresh.
"First though, there was Vietnam," says the narrator of "In the Lake of the Woods," the 1994 novel about a man named Wade, known to his platoon as Sorcerer. Vietnam, "where John Wade killed people and where he composed long letters full of observations about the nature of ... love."
If America has a 51st state, one that is mapped with a million pins on the psyche of the country, it is Vietnam. Americans were there for two decades, suffered the deaths of 58,152 men and women, saw their own nation rent with fierce protest over those deaths, and left in humiliation.
Jimmy Carter's presidency began with a pardon for all draft dodgers and people criticized him for it. Ronald Reagan said the United States didn't really lose the war and found millions eager to agree. Some have said that the United States could have won if the country had only tried. And to this day, some veterans and their families wonder in pain and anger whether all soldiers missing or taken prisoner have been accounted for.
"It was a war of incredible ambiguity and confusion," says O'Brien. "It's the back yard where my generation spent its bad childhood."
Today, O'Brien shares what he knows about writing fiction with students at Lyndon Johnson's alma mater: Southwest Texas State University in this town a half-hour south of Austin. To be teaching at the old school of a president whose administration was crippled by Vietnam is an irony O'Brien finds "weirdly coincidental."
He is available to the apprentice writers on almost any subject - indeed, there's nary a subject that isn't broached when O'Brien holds court at the Red River Pub after class - but he doesn't talk much about Vietnam.
"People have asked him about the war outside of class, but it's his work as an editor that's most important to me," says student and aspiring novelist Chad Hammet, 28. "He makes you aware that a writer only has 26 letters and 10 punctuation marks to work with and has to use them well."
It is storytelling that O'Brien was lured to Texas to teach: all the ways to put something as limited as language around something as unlimited as the heart in conflict with itself.
"As a boy, I practiced magic but discovered it was trickery," the author tells the class. "Why not someday use my wand to wake up the dead? So I took up a new hobby - writing stories."
O'Brien is 54. Most of his graduate students are half that age or younger, born about the time Saigon fell, and the author suspects they know more about the Beatles - whose "Hey Jude" provided succor to him and his fellow infantrymen - than Vietnam.
"I travel to a lot of campuses," says O'Brien. "And I don't think the kids think about Vietnam at all. To them, it might as well be the Battle of Hastings." It is his hope that Clinton's trip to Vietnam will have begun to change that.
"We have to start treating Vietnam as a country and not a war. It'll take the old age and death of all the veterans before it stops being our 51st state," O'Brien says over pitchers of beer at the pub. "Vietnam is not an appendage of America. That sort of thinking got us into the mess in the first place. We're bound together by some painful history, but it's not our liver or our appendix - it's a country."
