Transcript of Tim O'Brien

Tim O'Brien: When I talk about true stories making the stomach believe, I'm trying to write about the difference between fiction and nonfiction, that in general, not entirely but in general, nonfiction is aimed at the head through argumentation and what we’re taught in high school and college about writing essays, making a case, and then producing logical arguments on behalf of the case. And fiction operates not only on that level, it operates also on the level of making us feel. That is, eliciting laughter and eliciting fright and eliciting a whole -- the whole gamut of human emotion, where you feel as you’re reading. You’re in the rice paddy, or you’re in bed with that girl, or you’re having an argument with your father when he’s dead drunk. And you’re feeling, not just being argued to or at. And that’s what I’m getting at by “making the stomach believe." So the goal of The Things They Carried is to, in large part, is to make readers feel something of what I felt all those years ago, and after returning from the war, in a way that a 30-second clip on CNN can’t and doesn’t aspire to; the way a newspaper story is not going to make you feel what it is to be frustrated by never being able to find the enemy and man after man die and another man die and another man lose his legs and you can’t find anything to shoot back at. And you don’t believe in the war anyway. There’s a feeling of frustration and where’s God and why am I here? That goes beyond argumentation, it goes beyond nonfiction. It goes to our nightmares and both our human aspirations and our human fears. So that’s what the stomach business is about. The chapter that you’ve mentioned -- Notes, In the Field, and Speaking of Courage, which are at the heart of The Things They Carried, right in the middle of the book -- are meant to get at this sense I had as a soldier, a personal sense of being stirred in the muck of all wars and all horror; the wars that preceded me and the wars that followed my time in Vietnam.