Carried away

War, sang Edwin Starr all those years ago, what is it good for? The song's answer: Absolutely nothing. And Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried makes that absolutely clear. How I missed O'Brien's book for so long – he wrote it in 1990 – I don't know, but it is astonishing.

In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. ...
Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn't,
because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe
the truly incredible craziness.

The crystal clear images continue to reverberate days after I finished the last page. The young VC he killed. The pieces of a fellow soldier he had to remove from a tree after a land mine exploded. The death of his best buddy in a field of human waste. Chapter after chapter, incident after incident, O'Brien drew me – a person who has never been closer to battle than riding on a training flight with a KC-135 refueling plane – into the paddies and jungle paths of Vietnam. I was there with him as he tried to stay calm on a pitch-black patrol shift or waited impatiently for the medic to treat him after he was shot in the buttocks. Today's soldiers are all volunteers, people who choose to enlist. O'Brien almost left for Canada when he got his draft notice – he fled north to within a canoe ride from the border – but ultimately he obeyed the summons from Uncle Sam, then spent the next 20 years trying to exorcise the painful memories by writing about them.

Purely by chance, two days after I finished O'Brien's book I saw the film The Beautiful Country, which begins in Vietnam. It is a postwar tale about a young Vietnamese man's quest to find his father, who had been an American soldier stationed there. I marveled at the contrast between the grim reality of the war depicted in O'Brien's book and the serene beauty of the land itself. Binh's mixed-race background makes him a pariah in his home country, but the journey he sets out on seems one he can't possibly complete.