The author Tim O’Brien is not unlike the character called “Tim” that he created for his novel, The Things They Carried, as both author and character carry the stories of similarly experienced lives. O’Brien not only shares the same name as his protagonist but also a similar biographical background. Readers should note and remember that although the actual and fictional O’Briens have some experiences in common, The Things They Carried is a work of fiction and not a non-fiction autobiography. This distinction is key and central to understanding the novel.
The Early Years
Like “O’Brien,” Tim O’Brien, born William Timothy O’Brien, Jr., spent his early life first in Austin, Minnesota, and later in Worthington, Minnesota, a small, insulated community near the borders of Iowa and South Dakota. The first of three children, O’Brien was born on October 1, 1946, at the beginning of the post-World War II baby boom era.
His childhood was an American childhood. O’Brien’s hometown is small-town, Midwestern America, a town that once billed itself as “the turkey capital of the world,” exactly the sort of odd and telling detail that appears in O’Brien’s work. Worthington had a large influence on O’Brien’s imagination and early development as an author: O’Brien describes himself as an avid reader when he was a child. And like his other main childhood interest, magic tricks, books were a form of bending reality and escaping it. O’Brien’s parents were reading enthusiasts, his father on the local library board and his mother a second grade teacher.
O’Brien’s childhood is much like that of his characters—marked by an all-American kid-ness, summers spent on little league baseball teams and, later, on jobs and meeting girls. Eventually, the national quiescence and contentment of the 1950s gave way to the political awareness and turbulence of the 1960s, and as the all-American baby boom generation reached the end of adolescence, they faced the reality of military engagement in Vietnam and a growing divisiveness over war at home.
Education and Vietnam
O’Brien was drafted for military service in 1968, two weeks after completing his undergraduate degree at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he had enrolled in 1964. He earned a bachelor’s degree in government and politics. An excellent student, O’Brien looked forward to attending graduate school and studying political science. During the course of his college career, O’Brien came to oppose the war, not as a radical activist but as a campaign supporter and volunteer of Eugene McCarthy, a candidate in the 1968 presidential election who was openly against the Vietnam War.
In 1968, the war in Vietnam reached its bloodiest point in terms of American casualties, and the government relied on conscription to recruit more soldiers. Further, graduate school deferments, which exempted students from the draft, were beginning to be discontinued, though O’Brien did not seek out this recourse. Disappointed and worried, O’Brien—like his character “Tim O’Brien”—spent the summer after his graduation working in a meatpacking plant. Unlike his character, however, O’Brien passed his nights pouring out his anxiety and grief onto the typewritten page. He believes it was this experience that sowed the seeds for his later writing career: “I went to my room in the basement and started pounding the typewriter. I did it all summer. My conscience kept telling me not to go, but my whole upbringing told me I had to.”
O’Brien hated the war and thought it was wrong, and he often thought about fleeing to Canada. Unlike his fictional alter ego, however, he did not attempt it. Instead, O’Brien yielded to what he has described as a pressure from his community to let go of his convictions against the war and to participate—not only because he had to but also because it was his patriotic duty, a sentiment that he had learned from his community and parents who met in the Navy during World War II. “It’s not Worthington I object to, it’s the kind of place it is,” O’Brien told an interviewer. “The not knowing anything and not tolerating any dissent, that’s what gets to me. These people sent me to Vietnam, and they didn’t know the first thing about it.”
O’Brien ultimately answered the call of the draft on August 14, 1968 and was sent to Army basic training at Fort Lewis, Washington. He was later assigned to advanced individual training and soon found himself in Vietnam, assigned to Firebase LZ Gator, south of Chu Lai. (The appendix of this book includes a map of Vietnam, including areas referred to in the novel.) O’Brien served a 13-month tour in-country from 1969 to 1970 with Alpha Company, the Fifth Battalion of the 46th Infantry, 198th Infantry Brigade, Americal Division. He was a regular foot soldier, or, as commonly referred to in veterans’ slang, a “grunt,” serving in such roles as rifleman and radio telephone operator (RTO). He was wounded twice while in service and was relatively safe during the final months of his tour when he was assigned to jobs in the rear. O’Brien ultimately rose to the rank of sergeant.
After returning from his tour in March 1970, O’Brien resumed his schooling and began graduate work in government and political science at Harvard University, where he stayed for nearly five years but did not complete a dissertation.
