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Nonfiction
Vietnam Made Him a Writer. His Anger Still Burns on the Page.
A new biography of Tim O’Brien examines his formative time at war and the esteemed literary career that followed.
Scott Anderson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. His next book, “King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution, a Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation,” will be published in August.
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PEACE IS A SHY THING: The Life and Art of Tim O’Brien, by Alex Vernon
At a time when a serial draft dodger has made it his mission to reinvigorate American jingoism, it might be instructive to remember an American draftee who actually went to war. Not just any veteran or any war, but Sgt. Tim O’Brien of the Fifth Battalion, 46th Light Infantry Regiment, who was a 22-year-old private from small-town Minnesota when he landed in the murderous Chu Lai district of South Vietnam in February 1969.
His was a harrowing tour, detailed in Alex Vernon’s exhaustive new biography. As his unit’s radiotelephone operator, O’Brien was positioned near the front of the column whenever his company ventured from base on reconnaissance patrols or ambush missions against the Vietcong. It was a position that required extraordinary poise. He was in charge of calling in the coordinates for an artillery or airstrike while under fire, and radioing for helicopter “dust-offs,” or evacuations, for the unit’s dead and wounded.
During his 13 months in Chu Lai, there were too many dust-offs to count, and death rarely looked how it was depicted in movies: O’Brien saw his comrades cut in half on booby-trapped pathways, crushed beneath armored vehicles in flooded rice paddies, killed by the friendly fire of panic-stricken newbies. He also saw his comrades routinely abuse and burn down the homes of those they were ostensibly there to protect.
From his experiences, O’Brien, now 78, emerged as one of the foremost chroniclers of the Vietnam War. His second novel, the astonishing “Going After Cacciato,” won the National Book Award in 1979 and drew comparisons to “Catch-22” and “Slaughterhouse-Five.” He is best known for his semi-autobiographical collection of short stories, “The Things They Carried” (1990), which has become required reading for war reporters, politicos and literary writers alike.
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O’Brien’s writings have derived much of their influence not from the stories themselves — as searing and raw as they often are — but from the pitiless emotional honesty that undergirds them. His work, which also includes novels about domestic strains and lifelong regrets, lays bare a tortured and angry soul, a conscience that won’t allow absolution for either himself or society. Although O’Brien was adamantly opposed to American involvement in Vietnam, he dutifully showed up when his draft number was called because he “lacked the courage” to do otherwise.
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A correction was made on
June 3, 2025
:
An earlier version of this review referred incorrectly to Tim O’Brien’s book “Going After Cacciato” as his first novel. It is his second novel; his first is “Northern Lights.”
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