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d3dbf39
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What they carried was partly a function of rank, partly of field specialty.
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Tim O'Brien |
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dff22a7
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What they carried varied by mission.
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Tim O'Brien |
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93de133
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The things they carried were determined to some extent by superstition.
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Tim O'Brien |
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6191b72
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In June of 1968, a month after graduating from Macalester College, I was drafted to fight a war I hated. I was twenty-one years old. Young, yes, and politically naive, but even so the American war in Vietnam seemed to me wrong. Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons. I saw no unity of purpose, no consensus on matters of philosophy or history or law. The very facts were shrouded in uncertainty: Was it a civil war? A war of nation..
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Tim O'Brien |
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002cf87
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All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit...If the stakes ever became high enough--if the evil were evil enough, if the good were good enough--I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had been accumulating inside me over the years. Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite quantities..
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Tim O'Brien |
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fa32f8b
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My sole fond memory from this period is of a rubbery little Appalachian number by the name of June. Acrobatic tongue. Tooth decay. Illiterate in everything but love.)
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Tim O'Brien |
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94b92d0
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Olebilecek adamlarin butun duygusal yukunu tasirlardi. Elem, dehset, sevgi, ozlem - soyut seylerdi bunlar, fakat soyut seylerin de somut bir agirligi vardi. Utanc verici anilar tasirlardi. Zor zapt edilen korkakliklarin ortak sirrini tasirlardi, kacma veya donup kalma ya da gizlenme icgudusu ve pek cok acidan yuklerin en agiriydi bu, cunku hicbir zaman sirtindan indiremezdin, mukemmel bir denge ve durus gerektirirdi. Onurlarini tasirlardi. ..
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Tim O'Brien |
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d9ef349
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Money was never a problem, passports were never required. There were always new places to dance.
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Tim O'Brien |
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5fdf06c
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They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often,
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Tim O'Brien |
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2bf939d
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War makes you a man; war makes you dead.
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Tim O'Brien |
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90db710
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Kogda umiraet chelovek, polozheno vinit' kogo-to ili chto-to. Dzhimmi Kross eto ponimal. Mozhno vinit' voinu. Mozhno vinit' idiotov, kotorye voinu razviazali. Mozhno vinit' Kaiovu za to, chto na nee poshel. Mozhno vinit' dozhd'. Mozhno vinit' reku. Mozhno vinit' pole, griaz', klimat. Mozhno vinit' vraga. Mozhno vinit' artilleriiskie snariady. Mozhno vinit' liudei, kotorye polenilis' prochest' gazetu, kotorym naskuchili ezhednevnye soobshche..
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war
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Tim O'Brien |
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7b0575c
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A hundred stories [...] Ghosts rising from the dead. Ghosts behind you and in front of you and inside you.
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Tim O'Brien |
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810e81d
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And right then I submitted. I would go to the war--I would kill and maybe die--because I was embarrassed not to. That was the sad thing. And so I sat in the bow of the boat and cried. It was loud now. Loud, hard crying.
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Tim O'Brien |
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747d0e1
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Garden of Evil. Over here, man, every sin's real fresh and original." (p80 Mitch Sanders in "How to Tell a True War Story")"
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Tim O'Brien |
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bea2594
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I'm not 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.
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Tim O'Brien |
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20a4b7e
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It was boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom that caused stomach disorders." (p 34 "Spin")"
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Tim O'Brien |
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d3ef04d
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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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Tim O'Brien |
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c82a95c
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By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.
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Tim O'Brien |
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89b5866
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Yes," she said, "television is one of those unique products of the American genius. A means of keeping a complex country intact. Just as America begins to explode every which way, riches and opportunity and complexity, just then along comes the TV to bring it all together. Rich and poor, black and white--they share the same heroes, Matt Dillon and Paladin. In January the talk is of Superbowl. In October, baseball. Say what you will, but onl..
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Tim O'Brien |
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204b704
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They didn't know the first thing about Diem's tyranny, or the nature of Vietnamese nationalism, or the long colonialism of the French--this was all too damned complicated, it required some reading--but no matter, it was a war to stop the Communists, plain and simple, which was how they liked things, and you were a treasonous pussy if you had second thoughts about killing or dying for plain and simple reasons. I
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Tim O'Brien |
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7541599
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beyond
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Tim O'Brien |
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86f1786
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Why do we care about Lizzie Borden, or Judge Crater, or Lee Harvey Oswald, or the Little Big Horn? Mystery! Because of all that cannot be known. And what if we did know? What if it were proved--absolutely and purely--that Lizzie Borden took an ax? That Oswald acted alone? That Judge Crater fell into Sicilian hands? Nothing more would beckon, nothing would tantalize. The thing about Custer is this: no survivors. Hence, eternal doubt, which b..
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Tim O'Brien |
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9b27886
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Though it's odd, you're never more alive than when you're almost dead. You recognize what's valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what's best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost.
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Tim O'Brien |
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a35a05c
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They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor.
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Tim O'Brien |
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a3601ab
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The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar last names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.
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Tim O'Brien |
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b976373
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Mrs. Kooshof's intolerance for complexity, for the looping circuitry of a well-told tale, symptomizes an epidemic disease of our modern world. (I see it daily among my students. The short attention span, the appetite limited to linearity. Too much Melrose Place.)
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Tim O'Brien |
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4ce3eb3
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But this, too, was a performance.
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Tim O'Brien |
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7a2ce84
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I heard water evaporating. I heard the tick of my own biology.
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Tim O'Brien |
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06e0ab3
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Because it's all relative. You're pinned down in some filthy hellhole of a paddy, getting your ass delivered to kingdom come, but then for a few seconds everything goes quiet and you look up and see the sun and a few puffy white clouds, and the immense serenity flashes against your eyeballs--the whole world gets rearranged--and even though you're pinned down by a war you never felt more at peace. What
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Tim O'Brien |
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4469757
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The afternoon had passed to a ghostly gray. She was struck by the immensity of things, so much water and sky and forest, and after a time it occurred to her that she'd lived a life almost entirely indoors. Her memories were indoor memories, fixed by ceilings and plastered white walls. Her whole life had been locked to geometries: suburban rectangles, city squares. First the house she'd grown up in, then dorms and apartments. The open air ha..
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nature
life
indoors
lake
growing-up
rooms
sky
house
home
thought
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Tim O'Brien |
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28bdc45
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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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c133476
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Smelost', dumalos' mne, kak nasledstvo, otpushchena nam v ogranichennom razmere, i esli byt' ekonomnym, ne tratit' ee po pustiakam, to na moral'nyi kapital tozhe poidut protsenty i my reshitel'nyi chas vstretim vo vseoruzhii. Udobnaia teoriia. Ona otmakhivaetsia ot melochnoi povsednevnoi khrabrosti, obydennoi trusosti pridaet pristoinuiu okrasku, opravdyvaet proshloe i podslashchaet budushchee.
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Tim O'Brien |
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e004dc6
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Inoi raz ty sposoben na podvig, idesh' priamo na vrazheskii ogon', a posle, kogda vsia obstanovka vokrug nesravnimo legche, ogromnykh usilii stoit ne zakryvat' glaza. A inogda, kak na tom pole, gran' mezhdu otvagoi i trusost'iu opredeliaetsia nelepost'iu, erundoi.
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Tim O'Brien |
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926cd79
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Delat' obobshcheniia otnositel'no voiny - vse ravno, chto delat' obobshcheniia otnositel'no mira. Pochti vse pravda. Pochti vse vymysel. Strannost' voiny v tom, chto vy nikogda ne budete zhivy bol'she, chem kogda nakhodilis' odnoi nogoi na tom svete. Vy razlichaete to, chto imeet znachenie. S chistogo lista, kak v pervyi raz, vy liubite lish' luchshee v sebe i v mire, vse, chto mozhet byt' poteriano. V chas nochi vy sidite v svoei iacheike ..
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Tim O'Brien |
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de28219
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Oh, man, you fuckin' trashed the fucker," Azar said. " You scrambled his sorry self, look at that, you did, you laid him out like Shredded fuckin' Wheat" "Go away," Kiowa said. "I'm just saying the truth. Like oatmeal." --
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Tim O'Brien |
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5044422
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They would repair the leaks in their eyes.
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war
manliness
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Tim O'Brien |
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84d58d7
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Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.
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war
manliness
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Tim O'Brien |
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e8753b7
|
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. Still,
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Tim O'Brien |
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c37b8dc
|
Well right now,' she said, 'I'm not 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.
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Tim O'Brien |
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eec1cd9
|
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.
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Tim O'Brien |
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5e87b7c
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They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it.
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Tim O'Brien |
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57a7a48
|
Well, right now," she said, "I'm not 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."
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Tim O'Brien |
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3e43aff
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He killed me at the Scrabble board, barely concentrating, and on those occasions when speech was necessary he had a way of compressing large thoughts into small, cryptic packets of language.
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Tim O'Brien |
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1abf863
|
They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried. In
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Tim O'Brien |