Many of O'Brien's stories seem to have some element of fiction to them, whether it's something as trivial as a made-up name or as significant as an imaginary daughter. It seems like O'Brien cares more about conveying feelings and emotions to the reader than giving accurate accounts of his experiences in Vietnam, even if this means mixing real events with imagined ones.
Sometimes in the middle or end of stories, O'Brien explicitly points out specific parts that he has fabricated. Although he doesn't do this in "The Ghost Soldiers" some events from this story seem unbelievable.
Tim wants revenge on Jorgensen so badly that he decides to scare Jorgensen with suspicious noises while he is on watch duty. Granted, he isn't on the front lines of battle when he does this, but making noise still seems quite risky. If Jorgensen had mistakenly thought that Azar and Tim were enemy soldiers, he could have killed them.
Throughout The Things They Carried, O'Brien seems to use made up stories to teach the readers about war. Most readers are probably not veterans and are not familiar with the psychological effects of war. An outside reader might not understand why a soldier would want to kill a comrade. Perhaps "The Ghost Soldiers" was written to show what could possibly cause a major conflict within a troop. Maybe O'Brien wants the readers to feel the pain that he experienced because of a new medic and to understand why he might have considered killing Jorgensen.
I'm not sure that in "The Ghost Soldiers", O'Brien was trying to make us feel the pain he felt. Since I assumed that some of the things in that story were either fabricated or over exaggerated, I thought that O'Brien was possibly trying to help us see how ridiculous his reaction was. It seems as though O'Brien and Jorgensen come to some kind of closure at the end, so looking back on it, O'Brien may have wanted to portray his actions against Jorgensen in a more ridiculous manner to make us see how war can make someone think. But, that's just a thought since O'Brien never tells us the real reason. It's all up for interpretation I suppose.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard for us to determine with any precision what is and isn't "believable" in the Vietnam context this book describes (do you "believe" the story about the mysterious music emanating from the rocks? or the one about the girl from America who becomes a virtual Green Beret and eventually disappears into the jungle?).
ReplyDeleteBut this reckless and really insane "prank" is of a piece with other risky behaviors we see narrated--the guy who goes swimming in the middle of enemy territory, for example. There is a sense of "playing with fire" in trying to get Jorgensen so scared that he might just start firing his gun recklessly. But the way that the prank's "plot" comes to take over Tim's consciousness, as he sort of becomes a soldier again, temporarily, clouding his better judgment and giving him the "thrill" he's been missing (and, for a short time, the sense of camaraderie), is very believable to me.
I agee that O'Brien is making a point, although I'm not sure he's exactly trying to give his audience the same feelings of pain or sadness that he experienced. Given the fact that so much of this book could be fabricated truth, I think O'Brien is just trying to give a clearer picture of what the war caused him to experience emotionally and psychologically.
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