Truth, as the saying goes, is stranger than fiction. But sometimes fiction can be truer than truth. In his masterpiece The Things They Carried, writer and Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien creates a perfect horrific vision. His imaginary retelling of war is as real as it gets. A true war story, he says, is never moral. If you feel uplifted, you’ve been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude, no virtue. Sometimes, he says, a true war story is simply beyond telling.
There has been much debate about the truth behind the war in Iraq. One thing we know to be true—the reason justifying our being there turned out to be false. Some have responded by creating new justifications. In the meantime, every day, more civilians and soldiers are dying.
I was watching the news the day the number of dead American soldiers in Iraq reached 2,000. At the end, the newscaster announced that pictures of fallen soldiers would silently scroll across the screen. Shamefully, I started to change the channel. I had turned on the news to be informed, to fill my head with information and facts. I wasn’t prepared to feel. I wasn’t, as O’Brien would say, prepared to make my stomach believe.
Something, though, compelled me to watch. I looked into the eyes of the 19 year-old from Morrisville, Pennsylvania and the 23 year-old from Rosedale, Maryland and the 34 year-old from Arlington, Texas and the 22-year old from Knoxville, Tennessee. Some were dressed in uniform, some were not. Mostly they were smiling, all of them now gone. Numbers can lie, or at least they can hide things. Those photographs were the real news, the quiet faces of truth.
It goes without saying that on Veteran’s Day—on all days for that matter—we should honor those who fought for our country, remembering soldiers from every war, past and present. It is beyond “should.” It is our moral duty. We salute and we march and we pay tribute and we listen to the trumpet sounds and we hold our hand on our heart while we pledge allegiance and watch the flag ripple in the wind. We acknowledge bravery and respect sacrifice. You can be against a war and still support the soldier who fights in it.
And so on this Veteran’s Day I will read truthful fiction by someone who has lived through the very worst of human experience. I will enter the haunting stories he tells from the trenches of his gut. If nothing else, we must be reminded of the horrific in a way that takes us beyond generalizations, in a way that, like it or not, makes us feel. Though I will never come close to understanding the true horror of this thing called war, I hope I will never stop trying to understand.
As O’Brien writes, “In the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”
And that is the truth, plain and simple.
(This column was originally published on townonline.com September, 2005)
Saturday, January 20, 2007
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