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4b818bf
|
Psychology--that was one thing I knew. You don't try to scare people in broad daylight. You wait. Because the darkness squeezes you inside yourself, you get cut off from the outside world, the imagination takes over. That's basic psychology. I'd pulled enough night guard to know how the fear factor gets multiplied as you sit there hour after hour, nobody to talk to, nothing to do but stare into the big black hole at the center of your..
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Tim O'Brien |
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2344e74
|
A few names were known in full, some in part, some not at all. No one cared. Except in clearly unreasonable cases, a soldier was generally called by the name he preferred, or by what he called himself, and no great effort was made to disentangle Christian names from surnames from nicknames.
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Tim O'Brien |
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4c33189
|
He believed in mission. But . . . he did not believe in it as an intellectual imperative, or even as a professional standard. Mission . . . was an abstract notion that took meaning in concrete situations.
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Tim O'Brien |
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20e2fa6
|
They would get their shit together, and keep it together, and maintain it neatly and in good working order.
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tim-o-brien
together
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Tim O'Brien |
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1ef714c
|
And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever.
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the-things-they-carried
tim-o-brien
vietnam-war
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Tim O'Brien |
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982cc7c
|
Hear that quiet, man?' he said. 'That quiet - just listen. There's your moral.
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Tim O'Brien |
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7a73b85
|
You learn, finally, that you'll die, and so you try to hang on to your own life, that gentle, naive kid you used to be, but then after a while the sentiment takes over, and the sadness, because you know for a fact that you can't ever bring any of it back again. You just can't.
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war
growing-up
|
Tim O'Brien |
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8be58e1
|
The days seemed to stretch out toward infinity, blank and humid, without purpose, and at night I was kept awake by the endless drone of mosquitoes and helicopters. (Why wars must be contested under such conditions I shall never understand. Is not death sufficient?)
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Tim O'Brien |
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ab03d0b
|
for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.
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Tim O'Brien |
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fc17b77
|
I suppose if we gain anything from this unsought experience it will be an appreciation for honesty- frankness on the part of our politicians, our friends, our loves, ourselves. No more liars in public places. (And the bed and the bar are, in their way, as public as the floor of Congress.)
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lying
war
politics
|
Tim O'Brien |
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400af2f
|
I hated him for making me stop hating him
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war
|
Tim O'Brien |
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64c73aa
|
Everywhere, it seemed, in the tress and water and sky, a great worldwide sadness came pressing down on me, a crushing sorrow, sorrow like I had never known it before.
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Tim O'Brien |
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7b6a4fe
|
My whole life seemed to spill out into the river, swirling away from me, everything I had ever been or ever wanted to be.
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Tim O'Brien |
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2df1255
|
He'd been coiled like a snake for years and the tension had gone slack and when he was ready to spring the spring wasn't there, but it could be recoiled.
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Tim O'Brien |
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bb56282
|
They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased they'd say. Offed, lit up, zapped while zipping. It wasn't cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors. When someone died, it wasn't quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had their lives mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and because they called it by other names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of death itself.
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war
vietnam
|
Tim O'Brien |
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14f6398
|
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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Tim O'Brien |
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a58b372
|
Stories can save us.
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the-things-they-carried
tim-o-brien
vietnam-war
stories
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
07c589a
|
I remember Mitchell Sanders sitting quietly in the shade of an old banyan tree. He was using a thumbnail to pry off the body lice, working slowly, carefully depositing the lice in a blue USO envelope. His eyes were tired. It had been a long two weeks in the bush. After an hour or so he sealed up the envelope, wrote FREE in the upper right-hand corner, and addressed it to his draft board in Ohio.
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war
reality
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
6113809
|
Not a minister," he said, "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, except there's still this sound you can't hear."
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Tim O'Brien |
|
e9f92dd
|
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 or 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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1f85f58
|
In a way I wanted to stop myself. It was cruel, I knew that, but right and wrong were somewhere else.
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|
Tim O'Brien |
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474fcac
|
Zapped while zipping.
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|
Tim O'Brien |
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d9a5d49
|
Every dark cloud may well have its silver lining, but I have come to learn that every silver lining has its dark consequences.
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|
Tim O'Brien |
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8fd6bed
|
He felt crazy sometimes. Real depravity. Late at night an electric sizzle came into his blood, a tight pumped-up killing rage, and he couldn't keep it in and he couldn't let it out. He wanted to hurt things. Grab a knife and start cutting and slashing and never stop. All those years. Climbing like a son of a bitch, clawing his way up inch by fucking inch, and then it all came crashing down at once.
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Tim O'Brien |
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611171c
|
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.
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Tim O'Brien |
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ed97966
|
There it is, they'd say. Over and over--there it is, my friend, there it is --as if the repetition itself were an act of poise, a balance between crazy and almost crazy, knowing without going, there it is, which meant be cool, let it ride, because Oh yeah, man, you can't change what can't be changed, there it is, there it absolutely and positively and fucking well is.
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Tim O'Brien |
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5c79781
|
In the next days it took little provocation for us to flick the flint of our Zippo lighters. Thatched roofs take the flame quickly, and on bad days the hamlets of Pinkville burned, taking our revenge in fire. It was good to walk from Pinkville and to see fire behind Alpha Company. It was good, just as pure hate is good.
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|
Tim O'Brien |
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24bd5ac
|
Twenty years. A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.
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|
Tim O'Brien |
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569d1b6
|
She'd say amazing things sometimes. "Once you're alive," she'd say, "you can't ever be dead." --
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|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
756cd20
|
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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f3ea243
|
The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.
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|
Tim O'Brien |
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1c68249
|
Bir seyi tasimak, sirtlamak demekti; Ustegmen Jimmy Cross'un Martha'ya olan askini tepeler ve batakliklar boyunca sirtlamasi gibi. Gecissiz kullanildiginda yurumek anlamina gelirdi, fakat bunun otesinde yukler ima ederdi.
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|
Tim O'Brien |
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c355435
|
you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.
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|
Tim O'Brien |
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2f17358
|
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.
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Tim O'Brien |
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2344a9b
|
And 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.
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Tim O'Brien |
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0c85d09
|
Sert bir dil kullanirlardi o korkunc yumusakligi kapsayabilmek icin. Nallandi derlerdi. Goctu, iserken sislendi. Acimasizlik degildi, sahne durusuydu sadece. Oyuncuydular. Biri oldugunde tam olmek gibi degildi, cunku tuhaf bir bicimde senaryo geregiydi ve repliklerini ezbere biliyorlardi sanki, ironi katilmis trajedi. Ve bu yuzden farkli adlar yakistirmayi severlerdi, olum gercegini parcalamak icin. Cesetleri tekmelerlerdi. Bas parmaklari k..
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|
Tim O'Brien |
|
5c20b2b
|
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." (p 38 "Spin")"
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|
Tim O'Brien |
|
d67af48
|
What is love, for God's sake, if not the most distilled obsession?
|
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|
Tim O'Brien |
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befb4c4
|
Can a word stop your heart as surely as arsenic?
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|
Tim O'Brien |
|
2499db7
|
Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move.
|
|
the-things-they-carried
tim-o-brien
mgg
vietnam-war
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
e9f105f
|
Stories are for joining the past to the future.
|
|
the-things-they-carried
tim-o-brien
vietnam-war
stories
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
b437003
|
There should be a law, I thought. If you support a war, if you think it's worth the price, that's fine, but you have to put your own precious fluids on the line. You have to head for the front and hook up with an infantry unit and help spill the blood.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
f6a2af7
|
Is there sound, he wondered, without reception? Do you hear the shot that gets you? How big, in fact, was the Big Bang? Do our pathetic earthly squeals fall upon deaf ears? Is silence golden or common stone.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
a5912c3
|
The things they carried were largely determined by necessity.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |