In an interview on Vietnam

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. 

I like that book because it was his second book about Vietnam. The first one, Going after Cacciato, was very surreal. It was about a patrol looking for Cacciato who was going to Paris, so they followed him to Paris. I don’t know O’Brien but my feeling was that it was an attempt by an author to try and have some artistic expression of what at that time in our history was looking pretty surreal. Apocalypse Now is not about Vietnam, it’s a surreal movie set in Vietnam but it could have been World War I. But when O’Brien wrote The Things They Carried he came down to absolute real brass tacks. It was no longer surreal, it was like here’s a list of what a grunt carries, an infantry soldier…

A grunt?

Right. Because they carry so much weight. That’s where the nickname came from because these people carry from 80-120lb on their backs. It’s the same now in Afghanistan and Iraq. There have been enormous technological changes but that infantry soldier on the ground, who actually is the sharp end of the stick, carries a lot of stuff from pictures of girlfriends to ammunition. The Things They Carried is a series of short stories involving those things, things that bring you to reality. 

It can be the most poignant thing about a soldier’s death – a little object that appears to sum them up. 

I think because it snaps you between the two worlds. When you’re in the world of combat it’s a totally different psychic space. I don’t know what else to call it. The first time I lost somebody, one of my guys, I had to go through his pockets to get his personal effects, and in his left breast pocket was a picture of his high school girlfriend. He was just out of high school, of course. And the bullet had gone right through her face. And I just started to tremble… it was so… here’s a high school girl in his pocket with the bullet obliterating her face. It was just so bizarre. And then I had to get an artillery mission organised because they were landing too close to us and quickly you’re back into the… there’s no time to contemplate or mourn. It’s just like: ‘Oh God the shells are coming in…aaaaaargh.’ And you’re back into the other space. That’s why these poignant little bits are so…

The psychic space is interesting. Obviously Vietnam was a long time ago and you’ve just written this book now. What do you do with the space for 30 years?

Well, raise five kids? No, I worked on the book for 30 years. Not out of choice but nobody would publish it or even read it, so I kept saying: ‘Well, I can make it better.’ In some ways it was a two-edged sword. A typical way of dealing with war and trauma is to go to the bar or do drugs and shift jobs every six months. I would go into the basement and work on my novel and I think that was healthy. On the other hand, while I was working on the novel I would get into certain scenes that were very close to things I had witnessed and it would trigger memories and the unconscious and my post-traumatic stress disorder which goes by a thousand names but has been with us since The Odyssey. If you read The Odyssey, Ulysses has every symptom when he has that banquet. Fascinating. Homer obviously understood post-traumatic stress disorder. The other classic description of it is by Robert Graves in Goodbye to All That.

In an interview on Human Dramas

It sounds like it. Your next book, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, is about Vietnam and playing with the truth.

Yes, it’s short stories about Vietnam written by a guy who was there as a very young man. And it really is a book about what it is like to be a regular ordinary American teenager and suddenly find yourself neck-deep in a jungle fighting a war that you neither understand nor care about. Killing people that are so different from you with no opportunity to understand or appreciate their culture. And, just as Stephen King shocks you by presenting the surreal against the banal, so Tim O’Brien creates characters for you that are so immensely believable, based on real people and based on himself, and he also presents you with situations that just defy comprehension as far as any point of reference or context is concerned. 

He presents you with a gang of teenagers carrying 60 or 70 pounds of equipment in 40-plus centigrade temperatures with malaria, fighting insects, fighting monsoons, fighting conscience, fighting political ideology, fighting religious ideas and their own code of ethics and morals even more than they are fighting what they have been told is the common enemy. And I think the way that he does that with such humanity and such heart is outstanding. And again it is a book I have read probably three times.

Many authors I talk to think that character and a sense of place are just as important as plot. What about you?

I absolutely agree. I and other crime authors I know have been asked many times what creates tension and I believe the real tension is created by people being interested in and caring enough about their characters to want to know what is going to happen to them next. I think that is where real tension comes from irrespective of the genre.

What about this idea of a sense of place, because all the books you have described are very evocative and that is a big part of your novels as well?

I am of the opinion that the location, the setting and the time period are just as important as any of the individuals in the books. I think the worst criticism for an author is: I read your book and I can’t remember what it was about. I want people to be unsettled, I want people to feel uncomfortable and challenged, I want people to have to think. I really couldn’t care whether people remember the title of the book they have read by me or even remember my name. That is of no concern. However, what is important to me is that someone is reminded of a book of mine they read six months ago, not because of all the characters and the plot, but because of the way it made them feel. And that is as much the job of putting them in New York or putting them in Washington in the middle of a political conspiracy or putting them in Georgia in the Depression in 1939 while there were child murders going on and feeling the heat and the dust and the parched air. All that kind of stuff is just as important to me because I think it contributes so much of the story.