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The Author Reinvents Himself --The Fiction of Tim O'Brien
| Article
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20007 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
3,388 Words |
| Author
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Philip Gerard
Philip Gerard is the author of eight books, most recently
Secret Soldiers: The Story of World War II's Heroic Army of
Deception (Dutton, 2002). He holds a Distinguished Teaching
Professorship in the creative writing department of the
University of North Carolina at Wilmington. |
Tim O'Brien sits onstage in a University of North Carolina lecture hall in Wilmington packed with students, professors, writers, Marines from Camp Lejeune, people from town. He's wearing his trademark Boston Red Sox cap, jeans, and a golf shirt--a wiry, strong guy in his early forties. He leans forward, getting revved up.
"This is one story I've never told before, not to anyone," he confides. His voice carries intensity, an urgency, that captures the room. Listen up, his tone says, this is important stuff.
It is the story of how he became a writer, which is the same story as how he went to the Vietnam War as a foot soldier in 1968. He spins it out, piece by piece: He was a college grad, an activist against the war, who suddenly found himself in his hometown of Worthington, Minnesota, with a draft notice in his pocket.
That summer, he got a job on the "disassembly" line at the Armour meat packing plant, blasting clots of blood and tissue out of eviscerated hog carcasses with a high-pressure water gun. All summer long, he smelled of pigs and worried about going to the war.
When he just couldn't face another day at that awful job--such a literal metaphor for what lay ahead--he ran away. He drove north as far as a fishing camp on the Rainy River, at the Canadian border. There he paused to lie low for a few days and get the nerve to cross the border to political asylum. The elderly proprietor of the Tip Top Lodge, Elroy Berdahl, took him in, no questions asked. But Berdahl sensed immediately what was going on. He let O'Brien hang around the place, working through his decision. They didn't talk much. O'Brien just needed to be left alone.
On the sixth and last day, Berdahl took O'Brien out on the river in his skiff. They fished and talked about nothing in particular. By and by, the boat drifted to ward the Canadian side of the river, so close that O'Brien could have stepped ashore. Berdahl did it on purpose.
But at that moment, O'Brien had a vision of all the people who were counting on him--family, friends, relatives, his town, his country: "I did try. It just wasn't possible. All those eyes on me--the town, the whole universe--and I couldn't risk the embarrassment. It was as if there were an audience to my life . . . Traitor! They yelled. Turncoat!" He couldn't make himself get out of the boat. With Canada literally with in reach, he cried
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