Tim O’Brien: Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here tonight. I’ve got a really bad cold-both of my ears are stopped up; I can barely hear my own voice. I’ve got people in the audience kind of going like this and like this (gestures with hands) to kind of modulate my volume. When I began preparing this little talk, I was very quickly reminded that one of the reasons I became a fiction writer is I don’t know anything. I don’t mean this in a falsely humble sense. I mean, quite literally, that I have very little to offer you in the way of abstraction or generalization; the sort of thing that can be communicated in a President’s Lecture. I’m not a literary historian, I’m not a critic, I’m not a teacher. I spend my days, and a good many of my nights, writing stories. And I don’t devote a lot of time or a lot of energy worrying about the hows or the whys of it all, instead taking a kind of lazy man’s conviction in the belief that stories require no justification; they just are. It’s a conviction, too, I suppose, that abstraction and generalization are precisely the reverse of what I do as a storyteller. Abstraction may make your head believe, but a good story, well told, will also make your kidneys believe, and your scalp and your tear ducts, your heart, and your stomach, the whole human being. In any case, after, I don’t know, twenty aborted attempts to compose a lecture for tonight, I finally gave it up, and decided to spend my time with you doing what I do best, which is to tell stories. I did, however, save a few nuggets from my original efforts at a lecture. I just want to share them with you; it’ll only take about four seconds:
As a fiction writer, I do not write just about the world we live in, but I also write about the world we ought to live in, and could, which is a world of imagination. I grew up, I left Worthington, went to college at a place called Macalaster College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and during my four years in college, the Vietnam War began more and more raising its head. The war was escalating rapidly, and I spent my four years in Macalaster doing two things sort of simultaneously, and they were contradictory things. One was kind of trying to ignore it all, hoping it would go away, that it wouldn’t capture me as a person. I had kind of a smug attitude about it all, thinking, “well, I’m a good student, and smart, and they won’t take me as a soldier,” I really believed that it was impossible. But by the time I became a senior I began to realize that it was more and more possible. I rang some doorbells for Gene McCarthy, running as a peace candidate. Uh, I was student body president, tried to use that as a, you know, in a minor kind of way, as a way of showing my opposition to the war. Stood in peace vigils on campus – I graduated in May of nineteen sixty-eight, which now seems a lifetime ago, returned to Worthington for the summer. I remember coming off the golf course in an afternoon in mid-June and going to the mailbox, and finding in the mailbox my draft notice. I took it into the kitchen where my mother and father were having lunch, and I dropped it on the table. My father looked at it, and my mom looked at it, and I looked at it, and there was an absolute silence in that kitchen. They knew about my feelings toward the war, how much I despised it, but they also knew I was a child of Worthington, this place, this Turkey Capital place I just told you about. My father had been a sailor in World War Two; my mother was a Wave, you know, a kind of Navy woman. Uh, there was a tradition of service to country in my family.
Well, anyway, a long time passed in that kitchen; it might have been a half an hour, when no one spoke. My mother fiddled at the stove, and my dad would you know, just sort of ate his soup, and, uh, finally he looked up at me and said, “What are you going to do?” And I said, “I don’t know. Wait.” Which was what I did for the rest of the summer of nineteen sixty-eight. I took a job in a meat-packing plant in my hometown, where I worked on an assembly line eight hours a day, or more properly, a disassembly line. It was a pig factory. The hogs were butchered in one part of the plant, they were strung up by their hind hocks, on a kind of high conveyer belt, and as they came by, my job was, I held a – it looked like a machine gun – it was a thing that was this big, it weighed maybe eighty pounds, and it was suspended from the ceiling by a heavy rubber cord strong enough to actually hold it, but it had some give to it, you could move this thing around. And as the hogs came by, the heads had been cut off, they’d been split open down the belly and pried open, so the blood had all congealed in the neck cavity – they were upside down – and my job was to get rid of the blood clots, essentially, these kind of big, grapefruit-sized clots of blood. And to do this, I’d take this machine which had a roller brush on one end and a trigger on this end, and I’d put the roller brush into the pig’s, uh, neck cavity, pull the trigger, the brush would spin, water would come out, and these clots of blood would, uh, would dissolve into kind of a fine red mist. I spent the summer, essentially, breathing pig blood. Not a nice job. And especially not a nice job when one has a draft notice tucked away in a back pocket.
My dreams, obviously, were dreams of slaughter that summer – blood dreams. On top of everything else, I might add, I smelled like a pork chop. You couldn’t get that pig factory smell out of your skin and your hair. You know, you’d shower at the plant and then again at home, but you really did smell like bacon or a pork chop as you’d spend your nights, you know, cruising around this small town in your father’s car, stopping at the A&W for a root beer, and staring at the town lake, wondering what’s going to become of me when the summer is over. Well, I’ve told this story before, and I’ve written about it in The Things They Carried, as some of you know, that read it. But parts of the story are hard to tell, and now I’m at one of those points. Near the end of the summer, something happened to me that, to this day, I don’t fully understand. One day, at a pig line, as I was pulling this trigger, something exploded in my stomach. It felt like a water balloon that popped open inside of me. It was a leaky, gaseous, watery feeling – a feeling of, uh, real despair. I nearly began crying. I immediately put this gun down, walked out of the plant without taking a shower, got in my dad’s car, drove home, uh, went in the house, and just stood in that kitchen, the kitchen I told you about, looking – my mom and dad weren’t home, I don’t know where they were that afternoon. Uh, I went down into the basement where my room was, and I packed a bag, filled it up with clothing – I had a passport from a trip to Europe the previous summer. I got back in my mom’s car, and took off.
For those of you who don’t know the geography, Minnesota is on the Canadian border, and eight hours later, after a drive I essentially forget, a blurry drive, just pure velocity, I found myself in a place called International Falls, Minnesota, up on the Minnesota-Canadian border. I hadn’t planned any of this-I had sort of half-daydreamed about it, but never seriously. By that time it was close to midnight; I spent the night in the car, uh, in a-a closed-down gas station-very –. It was a sleepless night. In the morning, as dawn began to break, I got-I started the car, and I began driving east, along the Rainy River, which is a river that physically separates, uh, Minnesota from Canada. It’s not just a river: it’s as wide as a lake, in parts. It’s a big river. Um, I was looking for a way across, you know, a bridge. Within a half an hour or so, I came across a closed-down, uh, resort along the river, a place called the Tip-Top Lodge. It wasn’t really a lodge: it was a sort of-ten yellow cabins along the river. Tourist season was over by then, so the place was abandoned, but I stopped anyway, thinking, well, I’ll think it over for one last night before I walk away from my own life and from the world I knew. I went up to the main building and knocked on the door. A little man came to the door. He was really a small guy, he was like a foot tall. I mean he was really a tiny little guy. He was dressed all in, all in brown, you know, the kind of north woods look – brown shirt and brown pants – brown everything. Uh, for the first time in my life I could actually look down at somebody-I remember looking down at the guy, and he looking up at me, and he said, “What do you want?” And I said, “A place to stay.” He introduced himself to me; his name was Elroy Berdahl. The man is the hero of my life. If, uh, heroes come – come in small packages, this guy did. He took one look at me and I know that instantly he knew that here’s a kid in deep trouble. Uh, he was no dummy. He knew there was a war on, he knew this was the Canadian border, he could see how old I was, he could see the terror in my eyes, I’m sure. He said, “No problem.” He gave me a key, and walked me to one of his little cabins, and said to me, “I hope you like fish,” and I said, “Yeah.”
Well, I spent the next six days with old Elroy Berdahl on the Rainy River, trying to decide what to do with my, you know, my life. On the one hand, I did oppose the war. It seemed to me that certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons – that is to say, the reasons for the war were all under dispute. It was a time when Hawks were at the throats of Doves, when smart people in pinstripes couldn’t make their minds up about the rectitude of the war. You know, smart people were saying the war was right; smart people were saying it’s dead wrong, and where was the truth in all this swirling ambiguity? Uh, I opposed it, but on the other hand, I was a child of Worthington, Minnesota. I didn’t know everything. Uh, I didn’t know much about the history of Vietnam, the politics of it all – maybe I was mistaken. Beyond that, I felt drawn by America itself, even by this little shitty town that I told you about. I felt drawn to it because, as bad it was, it was mine, and I didn’t want to leave it, and I didn’t want to leave America. I felt like I was one of those pigs that had been pried open, pulled two different ways – part of me being pulled toward the war; part of me being pulled toward Canada. And I was, hell, I was your age! And that’s a tough thing to do when you’re that old, to decide to walk away from your whole history.
Well, during those six days at the Tip-Top Lodge, what do I tell you? They were as important as anything that later happened in Vietnam. They were much more traumatic than anything that happened in Vietnam – I was wounded, and I saw death all around me. But those six days at the Tip-Top lodge were a lot worse. It was a poignant decision that I can’t, uh, even begin here to describe for you, except as a storyteller. I remember old Ellroy watching me all the time during these six days – he was a very quiet guy. As I said, he knew something was wrong, but he was the sort of person who would never talk about it or ask about it. I mean, he was the kind of guy who, if you were to walk into a bar with two heads, and old Ellroy’s sitting there, he would talk about everything except that extra head. He’d talk about the weather, and, you know, and Lutheranism, but not the extra head. That’s the kind of Midwestern, even Minnesotan, way of dealing with things like this. Uh, but he saw some strange behavior on my part. I remember one afternoon we were out behind the – his lodge. He was showing me how to split wood. And I began sweating-I just couldn’t shut the sweat off; I just was like a spigot had been turned on inside me, just full of it. One night I vomited at his table. Not out of – it wasn’t the fish; it was a spiritual sickness inside of me. I remember lying awake at night, full of very peculiar hallucinations – I mean , it wasn’t, it wasn’t hallucination, really, but the kind of thoughts you have when you’re suffering from the flu, or you’re really sick. I’d imagine being chased through the Canadian woods by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and dogs barking, and spotlights on me – people even in my hometown yelling deserter, sissy, coward – things like this.
Well, near the end of my stay on the sixth and last day there, Ellroy did a thing that, in a way, made me into a writer, as much as, you know, Larry of the Little League. He said to me, uh, “Let’s get in the boat. We’ll go fishing.” So we got into this, you know, little twelve foot boat of his, and we went across to the Canadian side, and he stopped the boat, maybe, I don’t know, fifteen yards or so, from the Canadian, you know, where the wilderness was, and he tossed his line in and started fishing. I was in the front of the boat, in the bow, and he was in the back, where the engine was, and I can now, again like that library, I can feel myself there, bobbing in that slate-gray water, fifteen yards from Canada. It was as close to me as the third row here, fourth row, I could see the berries on the bushes and the blackbirds and stones, my coming future. I could have done it, I could have jumped out of that boat, started swimming for my life. So time went by; again, old Ellroy just said nothing, just let me bob there. I think he knew what he was doing. He was bringing me face to face with it all, and wanted to kind of be there for me the way God is there for us, you know – not really present, but sort of over our shoulder somewhere, whatever the stand-in for God might be for you, like a conscience bearing witness, and just here. After – not long, a couple of minutes – I started crying. It wasn’t loud, just kind of like the chest-chokes, when you’re crying, but you’re trying not to, and even then, he said nothing, not a word. After, what, twenty minutes or so, he reeled his line in, said “Ain’t bitin.'” Turned on the engine, and took me back. Well, after we got back to the Minnesota shore, I went back to my cabin, and I knew it was all over.
What I was crying about, you see, was – was not self-pity. I was crying with the knowledge that I’d be going to Vietnam, that I was essentially a coward, that I couldn’t do the right thing, I couldn’t go to Canada. Given what I believed, anyway, the right thing would have been to follow your conscience, and I couldn’t do it. Why, to this day, I’m not sure, I can speculate it. Some of it had to do with raw embarrassment, a fear of blushing, a fear of some old farmer in my town saying to another farmer, “Did you hear what the O’Brien kid did? The sissy went to Canada.” And imagining my mom and dad sitting in the next booth over, overhearing this, you know, and imagining their eyes colliding and bouncing away, and-uh, I was afraid of embarrassment. Men died in Vietnam, by the way, out of the same fear-you know, not out of nobility or patriotism; they were just af-they charged bunkers and machine gun nests, just because they would be embarrassed not to, later on, in front of their buddies. Not a noble motive for human behavior, but I tell you one thing, one you’d better think about in your lives, that sometimes doing the hard thing is also doing the embarrassing thing, and when that moment strikes, it hits you hard. I didn’t see Ellroy again. I got up the next morning, and I went to, you know, his little lodge thing, and I knocked on the door, and he wasn’t there. I could see right way he was gone, his pickup was gone. I left a little note for him, saying thank you. Uh, I got in my-the car, and I drove north-or drove south, rather, out of the pine forest, down to the prairies of Southern Minnesota. Within two weeks I was in the Army, and about four months after that in Vietnam.
Now, what I have told you is, is a war story. War stories aren’t always about war, per se. They aren’t about bombs and bullets and military maneuvers. They aren’t about tactics, they aren’t about foxholes and canteens. War stories, like any good story, is finally about the human heart. About the choices we make, or fail to make. The forfeitures in our lives. Stories are to console and to inspire and to help us heal. 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. And a good war story, in my opinion, is a story that strikes you as important, not for war content, but for its heart content. The second reason I told you this story is that none of it’s true. Or very little of it. It’s – invented. No Ellroy, no Tip-Top Lodge, no pig factory, I’m trying to think of what else. I’ve never been to the Rainy River in my life. Uh, not even close to it. I haven’t been within two hundred miles of the place. No boats. But, although the story I invented, it’s still true, which is what fiction is all about. Uh, if I were to tell you the literal truth of what happened to me in the summer of nineteen sixty-eight, all I could tell you was that I played golf, and I worried about getting drafted. But that’s a crappy story. Isn’t it? It doesn’t – it doesn’t open any door to what I was feeling in the summer of nineteen sixty-eight. That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth. The pig factory is there for those dreams of slaughter – they were quite real inside of me. And in my own heart, I was certainly on that rainy river, trying to decide what to do, whether to go to the war or not go to it, say no or say yes. The story is still true, even though on one level it’s not; it’s made up.
The point was not to pull a fast one, any more than, you know, Mark Twain is trying to pull a fast one in Huckleberry Finn. Stories make you believe, that’s what dialogue is for, that’s what plot is for, and character. It’s there to make you believe it as you’re reading it. You don’t read Huckleberry Finn saying “This never happened, this never happened, this never happened, this never happened-” I mean, you don’t do that, or go to The Godfather and say, you know, no horse head. I mean, you don’t think that way; you believe. A verisimilitude and truth in that literal sense, to me, is ultimately irrelevant. What is relevant is the human heart.