Dad’s Maybe Book was my subject from last week, and after writing about it I was reminded of the documentary that came with it, The War and Peace of Tim O’Brien. I first saw it last year and then watched it again this week.
It’s great just to see O’Brien himself. He’s humane, down-to-earth, eloquent, fiercely critical but always kind. That last part, the ferocity crossed with kindness, is the most remarkable. Imagine the sharp and sophisticated indignation you can find in George Orwell, in an essay like “Shooting an Elephant”, but coming out of an amiable Midwesterner, just a guy from your hometown.
And it fascinates me that he can turn this indignation so freely onto himself and still maintain his composure, still speak with grace and keep a stable sense of his own identity. He doesn’t crouch under judgment, he doesn’t lose himself. In fact, it seems strangely life-giving for him to recognize the moral wretchedness of his own actions, to account for his share of human evil.
There’s no apparent religious dimension to his self-chastising. It is a wholly natural shame, a self-knowledge that springs forth on its own when writing is done correctly. For O’Brien, shame and self-consciousness and storytelling are all the same activity — they always come together. He has elevated shame to a universal principle.
It’s odd that at first this seems commonplace, at least abstractly, and then you look again and see how rare a sensibility he has. How many of us can talk about our own shame, write about it like he does? How often are we honest with ourselves and others? Try saying to the world: “this is my shame and my shame made me”, and see how long you can stand it. O’Brien does it all the time, and he seems to find in it a difficult kind of gratification. He trades the pain for a story, which gives life back to him.
All this makes him unusual and unusual especially among many — perhaps he would say most — aging Vietnam veterans. He says in the film that even though he loves other soldiers like brothers and sisters, that he has the deepest respect for their bravery and their service to their country, that the bonds with his old war buddies are so strong as to make him break into tears just at the thought of them — even given all this, he feels he never fit in with them, and still doesn’t. He sees around him the veterans of his war beginning to soften their memories. They have started to wipe away the destruction, the horrifying violence and cruelty, all done by ordinary young men from places like Worthington, Minnesota. They have stopped questioning the war’s purpose, stopped questioning the meaning of their own role in it. They rightfully have pride in their service, but no accompanying self-reflection. They have shut their eyes to the evil, O’Brien insists, and to its real costs.
O’Brien often attacks a kind of lazy vanity he finds in people, a cowardly little wish to keep things easy and to appease and congratulate ourselves, that hides us from true shame and the harsh light of judgment. It’s the very cowardice that led O’Brien to Vietnam in the first place — he didn’t even support the war in 1968. He was mortified when he received the draft notice, but he felt he had no choice. If he had run from his duty, he felt he would never be able to face his family or his community again.
At a veterans’ meeting in the film, fifty years later, he says, disgusted with himself, that he wished he’d had the courage to flee to Canada to dodge the draft, and so have been true to his own beliefs. That would have been brave, he says. Instead he went to Vietnam to avoid looking like a fool, and though he spent only fourteen months of his life there, in a way he’s never left.
It’s grim, but according to O’Brien’s moral vision it’s merely correct that his decision to go to Vietnam has overwhelmingly defined his life. He deserves it because humanity deserves it.
I’m sorry to admit that I’m somewhat reluctant to actually recommend the film. It’s certainly worth it if you’re already a fan of O’Brien and you come in with low expectations. Just hang around to appreciate the effective biographical sketch in the first quarter of it, and then to observe some interesting details in the rest. But you’ll have to fight through the annoying armory of the film’s insistence on making some kind of narrative moment out of everything to get to what’s worth paying attention to. And even then you’ll often find that the best moments are cut short. The filmmakers seem to have wanted badly to make some kind of neat three-act structure out of the thing, when they should have let it breathe. Why spend so much time on silly bullshit like O’Brien’s car getting towed, or his credit card getting jammed at the gas pump? I guess these are meant to depict the mundane worries of peacetime, but it doesn’t work. We could have had maybe one of those scenes, and half as long.
And why so goofy and obvious sometimes with handing the viewer the plot? There’s a sequence in which we’re meant to understand that O’Brien is struggling to write, and the film lingers long on a family bowling trip, where O’Brien keeps missing his shots. “This place has the best nachos!” he says, and then gripes that he can’t get his damn shots right. A voiceover interview with his wife cuts in, saying something like “Tim still sits at his desk every day, but he’s hardly written for months …”. I would have taken more of the nachos!
We should have seen more of O’Brien as a writing teacher, talking to vets young and old, and on the road giving speeches. All of this material is cut too short, and peskily edited. The audio keeps jumping around, like they’re taking snippets and making up whole new sentences, almost reminiscent of reality TV editing.
The best of it is already in the book. O’Brien is often just reading from the book anyway. He is a very good reader of his own work, which isn’t as common as it should be.
Anyway, now that you almost certainly won’t watch this movie, even though it still has its merits, I’ll leave you with something memorable. At one point in the film, he reads a version of this passage from the book:
I am a fiction writer. I have written about war. And so, not long ago, I found myself in an auditorium, reading aloud a short piece called “The Man I Killed,” which seeks to portray a character’s response to viewing the corpse of an enemy soldier he had blown into eternity with a hand grenade. The story’s details — emotional and physical — were unpleasant. Memories surfaced. My voice broke. It was hard going. Afterward, in a lobby outside the auditorium, I was approached by a young man of about twenty. “I could tell that was tough for you,” he said, “and I appreciate your honesty.” I thanked him. He thanked me. The young man began moving away but then stopped and said, “Listen, I’ve been thinking about joining the Marine Corps. You helped a lot. Now I know for sure I’ll be joining.”
This was not a singular occurrence. It has happened a dozen or so times over thirty years, virtually the same conversation, occasionally concluding in an awkward hug.
I am always shocked.
I’ll go back to my motel room, pull off my tie, look in the mirror, and think: You poor dumb useless yo-yo. … 1
In the film he changes this last line to “You poor dumb useless fucker.”
Ok, one more. He talks about getting to sleep:
Now, at age seventy-one, I’m still scooping out a trench each night. The trench is how I get by. It’s how I’ve gotten by for decades. In my imagination, after the lights go out, I transform my bed into a shallow hole in the earth. I string barbed wire, emplace machine guns, put out the claymores and trip flares, establish listening posts, load my weapon, walk the perimeter for a time, check to be sure my helmet and flak jacket are nearby, and then ease into the make-believe sleeping trench and eventually sleep. Some people lock their doors at night. I lock the doors in my head.2
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