Humanity and Reverence

Wow.

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Writing a "Palpable Sensation"

"Some folks want to believe that the writing must have been a wonderful cathartic; "playing all those horror tapes," as one guy put it. But I have not found it so. Writing as therapy, God help us; the world doesn't work that way. Let's just say that both of my war novels were written out of deep bitterness; put another way, the impulse to tell the story of the war rose out of an undeniable authenticity of exhausted, smothered rage, perhaps more bitter than tongue can tell. Someone once asked me why I wrote war novels, and I told him that writing novels was more elegant than a simple "Fuck you."

"My war-year was like a nail in my head, like a corpse in my house, and I wanted it out, but for the longest time now, I have had the unshakable, melancholy understanding that the war will always be vividly present in me, a literal physical, palpable sensation."

From Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam
a memoir by Larry Heinemann

What's it all about, anyway?

One morning in Saigon she'd asked what it was all about. "This whole war," she said, " why was everybody so mad at everybody else?"

I shook my head. "They weren't mad, exactly. Some people wanted one thing, other people wanted another thing." 

"What did you want?" 

"Nothing," I said. "To stay alive."

"That's all?"

"Yes."

From "Field Trip" by Tim O'Brien in The Things They Carried

Truth

"I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. 

Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief. 

Here is the story-truth. He was a slip, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was sut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him." 

From "Good Form" by Tim O'Brien in The Things They Carried