A fellow came into the library bookstore, glanced through the shelves of military books, then picked up Tim O’Brien’s remarkable Vietnam novel, The Things They Carried. He was my age, mid 60s, bit of a scraggly beard, dressed in army fatigues, jacket with some faded ribbons and a bandana on his shaved head. He appeared to be a vet still holding on to his time there, still agitating for recognition, still working to release POWs and perhaps release his own demons. This was nothing he said explicitly to me, but his clothing and demeanor conveyed louder words than he spoke.
I commented on the book and its justified fame, its powerful story about the ongoing legacy and burdens of that searing war. Those burdens and memories can enlarge and deepen over time. I was reminded of O’Brien’s remark in his book, “For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you’d find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.” I found myself doing such arithmetic as we talked.
He asked me if I had been in Nam, and I said no — I had both a medical disability and also a high lottery number — but I had close friends who had served there. We chatted a bit as he said many men claim to have served in Vietnam when they were not actually there. He went on to say that when men tell him they’ve been in Nam, he’ll ask them if they were assigned P-38.
If they reply affirmatively — “sure, I had that gun” or “damn right, I was on that base,” or “hell yeah, that was south of Da Nag” — he knows they’re liars, just pretending: A P-38 is military slang GIs have used since World War II, slang for a can opener used for field rations. So the P-38 was his truth-o-meter, his way of sizing up the bullshitters from the real soldier. I was glad I had answered honestly and told him to come back and tell me what he thought about the book after reading it. But I did not see him again.
So many Vietnam vets — dismissed, denigrated, diminished — spend the rest of their lives defending their honor and their time in country. Later I looked through the book again and came across O’Brien’s comment that seemed so apropos for this bookstore encounter: “Well, right now I’m not dead. But when I am, it’s like…I don’t know, I guess it’s like being inside a book that nobody’s reading. An old one. It’s up on a library shelf, so you’re safe and everything, but the book hasn’t been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody’ll pick it up and start reading.”
I was glad he had picked up this book and began reading Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.
Ben Wiley, one of our Creative Loafing film reviewers, is also an advocate for paper and print. Dead trees if you will. He volunteers at a local library bookstore and enjoys engaging with readers and their books. Our series BookStories will highlight some of these Ben, Book & Beyond encounters.
This article appears in Feb 1-8, 2018.
