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4d96140
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They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.
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Tim O'Brien |
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ca4ee83
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A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.
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war
truth
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Tim O'Brien |
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6c0eace
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A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no re..
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Tim O'Brien |
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783c338
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But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.
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remembering
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Tim O'Brien |
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b4ac0b3
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They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.
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Tim O'Brien |
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af6b0e6
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Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.
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Tim O'Brien |
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e4f6ace
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I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.
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Tim O'Brien |
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df61577
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I survived, but it's not a happy ending.
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life
survival
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Tim O'Brien |
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3aaa4e4
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War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.
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Tim O'Brien |
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2de7610
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you're never more alive than when you're almost dead.
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Tim O'Brien |
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5fdaa83
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But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.
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Tim O'Brien |
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1af9be9
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But this too is true: stories can save us.
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tim-obrien
vietnam-war
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Tim O'Brien |
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efa8b8b
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It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.
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Tim O'Brien |
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21b60b1
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What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end...
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Tim O'Brien |
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c02cb2d
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And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.
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Tim O'Brien |
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22b9433
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He wished he could've explained some of this. How he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to be. The distinction was important.
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Tim O'Brien |
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d30d340
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It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.
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war
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Tim O'Brien |
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79ea81d
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his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered.
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Tim O'Brien |
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29438c5
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In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. .. The pictures get jumbled, you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seem..
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war
writing
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Tim O'Brien |
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4d48ad3
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It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.
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Tim O'Brien |
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068afd7
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Together we understood what terror was: you're not human anymore. You're a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted to believed in. You know you're about to die. And it's not a movie and you aren't a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait.
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Tim O'Brien |
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e1abd71
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To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil--everything. All around you things..
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Tim O'Brien |
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8e24a7b
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Well, right now I'm dead. But when I am, it's like...I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading. [...] An old one. It's up on a library shelf, so you're safe and everything, but the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody'll pick it up and start reading.
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death
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Tim O'Brien |
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38362c8
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you can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.
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war
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Tim O'Brien |
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0e54bce
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I was a coward. I went to the war.
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war
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Tim O'Brien |
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58f4e72
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Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love...it had all the shadings and complexities of mature adult love and maybe more, because there were not yet words for it, and because it was not yet fixed to comparisons or chronologies or the ways by which adults measure such things...I just loved her. Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones -- that kind of love.
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Tim O'Brien |
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b6b73a5
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They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.
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Tim O'Brien |
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4b62641
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It's a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn't felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you're afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood- you give it together, you take it together.
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war
death
friendship
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Tim O'Brien |
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2bc650a
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You don't know. When I'm out there at night I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and fingernails, everything, it's like I'm full of electricity and I'm glowing in the dark - I'm on fire almost - I'm burning away into nothing - but it doesn't matter because I know exactly who I am.
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Tim O'Brien |
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6f57477
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When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war, You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going to it. You could blame the rain. You could blame the river. You could blame the field, the mud, the climate. You could blame the enemy. You could blame the mortar rounds. You could blame people who were too lazy to read a newspaper, who were bored by the daily body counts,..
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Tim O'Brien |
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2e83283
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Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea.
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Tim O'Brien |
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33ff63e
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But I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you're in a forest and everything's really quiet, expect there's still this sound you can't hear.
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Tim O'Brien |
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7fabd09
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But in a story I can steal her soul.
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Tim O'Brien |
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fd6d3c2
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The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.
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Tim O'Brien |
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8582b55
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I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.
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war
vietnam
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Tim O'Brien |
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9f5a02b
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We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible.
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spirit
walls
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Tim O'Brien |
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27ad08d
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Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.
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words
science
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Tim O'Brien |
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dc7bf8f
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Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.
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Tim O'Brien |
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4812f1d
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A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.
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Tim O'Brien |
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86e3cd4
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Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing t..
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stories
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Tim O'Brien |
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da57fc5
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For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.
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Tim O'Brien |
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7802e60
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He had an opinion of himself, I think, that was too high for his own good. Or maybe it was the reverse. Maybe it was a low opinion that he kept trying to erase.
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Tim O'Brien |
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d5c8ae2
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In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.
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Tim O'Brien |
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3fa479a
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I'll picture Rat Kiley face, his grief, and I'll think, You dumb cooze. Because she wasn't listening. It wasn't a war story. It was a love story.
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Tim O'Brien |