Studer Community Institute

Thanks, Big Read

October 10, 2014
/ Reggie Dogan
/ civiccon

Woodrow Wilson said he would never read a book if it were possible for him to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it. I had the good fortune to do both after reading Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” and spending some time talking to the author on the telephone. Somehow I missed reading O’Brien’s riveting tale on the Vietnam War. I owe it to the West Florida Public Library for selecting O’Brien’s classic work” as the featured book in the national initiative aimed at improving literacy and encouraging more people to read and appreciate good literature. It should be required reading for anyone who loves great writing and abhor fighting — and dying — in war. His captivating words and powerful prose captured my mind and took me to the front lines of the Vietnam battlefields. O’Brien deftly blurred the lines between truth and make-believe to capture the raw emotions and images of struggle and survival, life and death, joy and pain. The book poignantly portrayed the horrors of war and the mechanisms of the mind with clarity of purpose and descriptive dialogue. O’Brien questioned the role that imagination plays in helping to form our memories and our own versions of truth, catapulting his wonderful work of art to the top of the list of the best fiction about any war. It’s clear from the start that the book is antiwar and that O’Brien hated being in it. He served because he feared the shame and humiliation of being a draft-dodging coward. So he traveled thousands of miles to an unfamiliar land to perform all too familiar duty. “A true war story is never moral,” O’Brien writes in the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story.” “It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the thing men have always done. 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 bee made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.” Reading O’Brien’s work was like sitting down to a full-course, five-star meal; talking to him was the delicious dessert. In his down-home, high-pitched Mid-western voice, O’Brien spoke as casual as a good friend. His conversation was as breezy as the wind blowing across a Minnesota lake. He seemed as eager to talk to me as I was excited to talk to him. We shared common interests and beliefs. Though more than a decade in age difference, one Southern, one Mid-western, one black, one white, one soldier, one civilian, the things we carry, like the ties that bind us, are stronger than the things that separate us. Like me, O’Brien can’t get his head around folks who think they are absolutely right about something that they would kill or send somebody to die for them. Absolutism, O’Brien maintains, can lead to real and dangerous problems. “People were sure about Indians — their savages. So sure about slavery — their less than human beings,” he said. “There’s something in the human spirit that craves certain absolutes to get through their lives.” “The Things They Carried,” is still taught in high schools and colleges across the nation. It should be required reading for our leaders in Congress and the White House. The book will always have a reserved spot on the bookshelf in my house. If you love reading good writing and hate the idea of people fighting and dying, make a place for O’Brien’s classic tale in your house, too.

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Thanks, Big Read

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