836 O’Brien, Tim
to Bowker and then studying them from the outside.
What the narrator learns, at least for himself, is that
we cannot absolve our guilt, real or imagined. He
returns after 20 years to the field where Kiowa died,
“where I looked for signs of forgiveness or personal
grace or whatever else the land might offer.” O’Brien
does not make it clear if the narrator finds what he
is looking for.
Michael Little
Innocence and experIence in The Things
They Carried
The narrator of The Things They Carried offers no
extended commentary, rumination, or observations
about the degree to which war’s brutal and dehu-
manizing violence destroys the innocence of young
soldiers. But the loss of innocence is a recurring
theme in the novel as O’Brien recounts a number of
incidents in which characters show themselves to be
unprepared for their experiences of war. Characters
are innocently ignorant of harsh realities, which
in this novel take the form of death and violence,
always cruelly random and always pitiless. Charac-
ters respond in different ways, though. One of the
most striking is the extended story of Mary Anne
Bell, a woman who joins her high school sweetheart
in Vietnam and quickly loses herself to the wilder-
ness and the war. O’Brien’s characters pay consider-
able attention to the incongruity of Mary Anne’s
appearance and the situations in which she willingly
engages. She arrives with a midwestern, whole-
some prettiness but quickly begins to participate in
trauma triage, then goes on extended missions with
a detachment of Green Berets. By the end of her
story, she has abandoned all pretense to civilization
to become a savage killer in the jungle.
Not all of the characters are innocent. This is
most true in Azar, a character at the center of many
of the novel’s ugliest incidents. Azar kills a puppy
by “strapping it to a Claymore antipersonnel mine
and [squeezing] the trigger.” When the platoon
comes across a village that has been destroyed and
sees a local girl dancing in the ruins, Azar mocks
her dancing. When the narrator asks for Azar’s help
getting revenge on a medic but then tries to back
out, Azar just stares at him and finally says, “Poor,
poor boy.” Azar justifies his behavior by claiming
innocence: “ ‘What’s everybody so upset about?’ Azar
said. ‘I mean, Christ, I’m just a boy.’ ” One way to
understand O’Brien’s depiction of Azar is to see a
character who coldly justifies his actions by claim-
ing an innocence that he does not have. Yet it is also
possible to read Azar as a representative of the true
core of humanity: We believe we start out innocent
and experience strips away our blinders, but in truth
our innocence is a sham that tries to cover our essen-
tial viciousness.
This reading is complicated by studying the
character of Rat Kiley, who savagely maims and then
kills a baby water buffalo by shooting it carefully to
pieces. This is a cruelty worthy of Azar, but in Kiley
it takes on a brutal irony. Kiley is a medic, a lifesaver,
driven mad by the arbitrary viciousness of war to the
point that he brutalizes an innocent animal. Azar’s
deliberately cold acts are contrasted with Kiley’s
crazed actions, and in this way O’Brien steers us
back from the bleak determination that innocence
is an illusion.
Whether or not innocence is an illusion to be
stripped away by experience or our true self that
experience slowly corrupts, O’Brien ends the novel
with a story that emphasizes innocence and shows
our need to retain or reclaim it. In “The Lives of
the Dead,” O’Brien tells the story of the narrator’s
love for Linda when the narrator and Linda were
only nine years old. Linda dies of a brain tumor,
a tragedy too enormous for the narrator to fully
understand at nine years old and that he still does
not understand at 43, even though the accumulation
of his experiences in life and at war show him that
arbitrary death is not an aberration but an unhappy
norm. The narrator tells the story sweetly but with
a weariness that contrasts with the naive ignorance
of his nine-year-old counterpart, Timmy. Linda
wears a stocking cap all the time and is the source
of ridicule until another kid yanks it from her head
in class. The sight of her near-baldness is a rough
moment of awakening for the bully and for Timmy,
a moment that indicates to the children that they
are more innocently ignorant than they realize, and
the story suggests that they cannot understand this
intellectually but are fully aware of it as raw emotion.
Finally, the narrator tells us of his determination to
salvage innocence, as much as possible, through the