War author O’Brien speaks for Themester

The cold rain didn’t stop a crowd of people from gathering in Ballantine Hall on Wednesday and filling the room with buzz about the man in the front corner in the blue cap.

Tim O’Brien, author of award-winning “The Things They Carried” and “Going After Cacciato,” visited IU as part of the Themester “Making War, Making Peace” because he’s written several books about the subject.

Before O’Brien, there were two kinds of war stories. Some shed a positive light on war, and others opposed it, but his books go beyond teaching a lesson.

“I think war has been the basis of my writing career because it was my first encounter with hard choices, my first encounter with death and facing my mortality,” O’Brien said. “It was traumatic, and what’s traumatic sticks with you.”

O’Brien, like so many others, was drafted to fight in Vietnam but said he struggled with the decision to go or not.

“I wore two heads that summer,” he said.  “One was fiercely patriotic and believed in duty and country and all that. The other head believed in all that but knew that certain blood was being spilled for uncertain reasons.”

This internal conflict of two-headedness is necessary to handle the pesky ambiguities and unknowns in life, O’Brien said.

“Let us not commit the sin of one-headedness,” he said. “Watch out for such platitudes as ‘the courage of conviction.’ Your two heads will be heavy, but carry them high.”

Even though “The Things They Carried” and “Going After Cacciato” are war stories on the surface, they also delve into other experiences that come with being a soldier.

“I think war can be a platform for talking about other things: conscience, mothers, fathers, girlfriends,” he said.

“What I try to avoid is the standard war story, which is typical. It’s easy and fast. It’s the story of basic training, trained to be a killer, baptism under fire, followed by going home. It’s a standard arc, so standard it’s boring. You’ve heard it a thousand times and seen it in a million movies.”

In his lecture, O’Brien said literature is now under attack and expected to do more than tell a story, but this is a problem.

“One doesn’t have to defend story, like you don’t have to defend breathing,” he said. “I wanted the reader to participate in the lifelong guilt of staring at a dead man.”

While members of the current generation haven’t faced a draft, O’Brien said there are basic similarities about how they experience war and peace compared to the generation that went through Vietnam.

“The fear, the sorrow, the returning home and trying to make a life out of the chaos and butchery, in those ways it’s identical to what I went through,” he said.

O’Brien’s iconic baseball cap also tells a war story.

“It has to do with coming home from Vietnam,” he said.

“I got on a plane to go back to Minnesota and was still wearing my uniform, and during the flight I went in the back of the plane, and I took off my uniform and put on jeans, a sweater, and put on a baseball cap and haven’t taken them off since.”

Later, he said his favorite cap is, “the one I have on, of course,” a red cap with white letters spelling “Indiana.”