O'Brien, Tim

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Tim O'Brien

Born October 1, 1946
Austin, Minnesota

American writer and Vietnam War veteran

Award-winning author Tim O'Brien is one of America's best-known writers about the Vietnam War. A Vietnam veteran, O'Brien has drawn upon his wartime experiences to write several classic literary works about the conflict, including Going after Cacciato (1978), The Things They Carried (1990), and In the Lake of the Woods (1994).

Growing up in Minnesota

Tim O'Brien was born in the small town of Austin, Minnesota, on October 1, 1946. His parents were William T. O'Brien, an insurance salesman, and Ava (Schulz) O'Brien, a schoolteacher. Looking back on his childhood, O'Brien described himself as a shy and lonely youngster who had difficulty making friends. As he grew older, he used magic tricks as a way to gain approval and applause from his peers. "There's a real appeal in that for a lonely little kid in a lonely little town, to get that kind of love and applause and to feel you have some control," O'Brien recalled in Booklist.

After graduating from high school, O'Brien enrolled at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He eventually became one of Macalester's leading student activists. In fact, he campaigned for a wide range of social and political causes around campus, ranging from efforts to reform the college's grading system and its policies toward women students to participation in demonstrations against the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam War was a conflict that pitted the U.S. supported nation of South Vietnam against the Communist nation of North Vietnam and its Viet Cong allies in the South. The Viet Cong were guerrilla fighters who wanted to overthrow the South Vietnamese government and unite the two countries under one Communist government. In the late 1950s and early 1960s the United States sent money, weapons, and military advisors to South Vietnam to help it fend off the Viet Cong. In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson (see entry) sent American combat troops to fight on the side of South Vietnam. But deepening U.S. involvement in the war failed to defeat the Communists. Instead, the war settled into a bloody stalemate, and the American public became bitterly divided about how to proceed in Vietnam.

O'Brien receives his draft notice

In 1968 O'Brien graduated from Macalester with a bachelor's degree in political science. An honor student, he was offered a full scholarship to continue his education at Harvard University. But then he received his draft notice to report for duty in the U.S. Army. O'Brien spent the next several months agonizing about whether to obey the draft. He thought about going to jail or fleeing the country in order to avoid being sent to fight a war in which he did not believe. But he knew that many of his family and friends would be angry and ashamed of him if he did not answer his country's call. "It was the most terrible summer of my life," he told the New York Times. "My conscience kept telling me not to go, but my whole upbringing told me I had to."

O'Brien finally decided to obey his draft notice. But he later confessed in the New York Times Magazine that he did so only because "I could not bear the prospect of rejection . . . by my family, my country, my friends, my hometown. I would risk conscience and rectitude [moral righteousness] before risking the loss of love. . . . I was a coward. I went to Vietnam."

O'Brien in Vietnam

O'Brien arrived in Vietnam in February 1969. He was assigned to an infantry unit in Quang Ngai Province, a region of central South Vietnam along the South China Sea. O'Brien soon learned that he had been sent to one of the country's deadliest places. Viet Cong guerrilla fighters roamed throughout the forests and villages of the region, despite the best efforts of American infantry squads and airpower.

O'Brien spent the next several months taking part in patrols deep into the Quang Ngai countryside. His unit regularly passed through My Lai, a village where hundreds of unarmed peasants had been brutally massacred by U.S. troops only a few months earlier. The My Lai atrocity was concealed from the American public and U.S. soldiers for more than a year, but O'Brien recalled that the atmosphere surrounding the village was tense and hateful. "The My Lai area . . . scared ... me, to be honest with you," he told Booklist. "It was a spooky, evil place on the earth. . . . It scared everybody, and that was before we knew what had gone on."

As the weeks passed by, O'Brien became accustomed to the death and destruction that surrounded him. "Back in 1969, the wreckage was all around us, so common it seemed part of the geography, as natural as any mountain or river," he wrote in the New York Times Magazine. "Wreckage was the rule. Brutality was S.O.P. [standard operating procedure]. Scalded children, pistol-whipped women, burning hooches [huts], free-fire zones [regions in which U.S. soldiers had approval to shoot anyone they saw], body counts, indiscriminate bombing and harassment fire, villages in ash, M-60 machine guns hosing down dark green tree lines and any human life behind them."

Returning home

In March 1970 O'Brien was discharged from the U.S. Army with the rank of sergeant. He returned home with a Purple Heart medal he received after suffering a minor shrapnel wound while out on patrol. Years later, O'Brien marveled at the swift change in environment that he and other soldiers experienced when they left the jungles of Vietnam to return to their hometowns. "It was fast and effortless, just like gliding out of a nightmare," he recalled in Publishers Weekly.

Upon returning to America, O'Brien enrolled at Harvard University to pursue a degree in government. But the year he spent in Vietnam continued to haunt him, and he began to compose a journal in which he described his wartime experiences. As O'Brien worked on the book, he spent hours thinking about the grim and horrible events that he witnessed during the war. But he also spent a lot of time reflecting about the ways in which Vietnam gave him a greater appreciation for love, friendship, and the simplest pleasures of life.

O'Brien's first book, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, was published in 1973. This nonfiction work described all stages of O'Brien's Vietnam experience—from military training through combat to homecoming—in a series of story-like essays that were praised for their realism and honesty. "In a style which is lucid [easily understood], relaxed, razor-sharp, and consciously dispassionate, the wasteland of Vietnam unreels before us [in O'Brien's memoir]," wrote one reviewer in The New Statesman.

Writing about the war

O'Brien followed up If I Die in a Combat Zone with Northern Lights (1975), his first novel. The story follows two brothers whose lives become endangered during a stormy cross-country ski trip. One of the brothers is a Vietnam War veteran who is loved by his patriotic father, while the other is the family "failure" who did not fight for his country. As the ski trip turns into a perilous struggle, however, it is the "failure" who takes the lead in ensuring their survival.

Northern Lights received mixed reviews from critics, but the experience of writing a novel convinced O'Brien to dedicate himself to a literary career. "There came a point when I had to decide where I was going to devote my time," he told Publishers Weekly, "and I decided that I wanted to be a writer and not a scholar." He dropped out of Harvard in 1976 and began writing full-time.

Going after Cacciato

In 1978 O'Brien published Going after Cacciato, a novel that wove two storylines together into one powerful work. Part of the novel describes the experiences of one battered, war-weary platoon of U.S. infantrymen as they struggle to survive in Vietnam.

The other section of the book follows the war-ravaged fantasies of one member of the unit. Assigned to night guard duty, the soldier imagines chasing an actual deserter from the platoon—Cacciato—all across Vietnam to the streets of Paris, France.

Going after Cacciato was widely hailed as one of the finest books ever written about the Vietnam War. It won the prestigious National Book Award and established O'Brien as one of the country's leading voices on the war. It also led many Vietnam veterans to contact him by telephone or letter to share their own wartime experiences. O'Brien confessed, however, that their letters and phone calls left him with mixed feelings. "It has been a bittersweet experience," he told the Christian Science Monitor. "The letters mean a lot because I had wanted to touch on something that was common to us all. But I found myself involved in so many hour-long phone calls from shattered guys that it was like reliving the war all over again."

The Things They Carried

In the mid-1980s O'Brien concentrated on writing projects that explored a variety of non-Vietnam topics. But in 1990 he returned to the Vietnam War again with a short story collection called The Things They Carried. Many of the events described in The Things They Carried closely mirrored O'Brien's own experiences. In addition, many of the interrelated stories are set in O'Brien's home state of Minnesota or in Quang Ngai Province, where he was stationed during the war. Moreover, the collection features several characters who are closely based on soldiers that O'Brien met in Vietnam. Finally, the volume is narrated by a character named "Tim O'Brien." Still, O'Brien has described the book as a work of fiction.

When The Things They Carried was published, it immediately attracted a great deal of popular and critical attention. Booklist hailed it as a "compassionate, complex, magnificent novel of self-acceptance and renewal." The New York Times Book Review offered a similar assessment, calling the collection "one of the finest books, fact or fiction, written about the Vietnam War.... By moving beyond the horror of the fighting to examine with sensitivity and insight 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] placed The Things They Carried high up on the list of best fiction about any war." And Publishers Weekly commented that "O'Brien's meditations—on war and memory, on darkness and light—suffuses [spreads through] the entire work with a kind of poetic form, making for a highly original, fully realized novel. . . . The book is persuasive in its desperate hope that stories can save us."

The Things They Carried received several literary awards in the months following its publication, and it was nominated for a number of other prestigious honors. Since then, O'Brien's collection has retained a prominent place in discussions about enduring Vietnam War literature. In fact, The Things They Carried is now generally regarded as the single greatest work of literature ever written about the American experience in Vietnam.

Returning to Vietnam

O'Brien wrote about Vietnam once again in 1994's In the Lake of the Woods. This novel explores the disappearance of a woman after her husband's political career is destroyed by revelations that he was present at the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. In the Lake of the Woods received several honors, including recognition from the New York Times Book Review as the best book of fiction of 1994. But it did not enjoy the same level of critical or popular success as The Things They Carried.

O'Brien also made a special journey to Vietnam in 1994. He returned to Quang Ngai Province, the region where he had served during the war. During his trip, he met many men and women who had been caught up in the war, including former Viet Cong officers and survivors of the My Lai massacre. Upon returning to the United States, O'Brien said that the trip helped heal some of the lingering emotional wounds from his first Vietnam experience. "There was a new Vietnam in my thoughts," he told Booklist. "It's a nice feeling to find the geography, to walk in the backyard again and not really remember what happened so much as feel blown away by the utter peace that's replaced what was horror."

O'Brien continues to explore a variety of subjects in his writing. His 1998 novel Tomcat in Love, for example, centered on the relationships between men and women. But he remains best known for his works on the Vietnam War. Indeed, it is the power of O'Brien's Vietnam-related works that led the San Francisco Examiner to call him the "best American writer of his generation" in 1998.