PEACE IS A SHY THING

Comprehensive life of author Tim O’Brien, one of the great laureates of the Vietnam War.

“All you bastards are going to die in World War III.” So promised a drill sergeant when O’Brien, having lost a student deferment, was called up to Army boot camp. He could have chosen another service branch—enlisting, say, in the Navy, which offered safer odds—or defected to Canada, as, according to biographer and fellow vet (of the Iraq War) Vernon, O’Brien contemplated doing. Yet he complied, a mediocre soldier at first who “performed his tasks without enthusiasm but also without grumbling.” A kid from small-town Minnesota with an unhappy childhood, O’Brien did a lot of growing up in “the tropical killer-dreamscape,” as he later called Vietnam. As Vernon notes, O’Brien returned with a lifetime’s worth of themes and stories to write about, and his work proves as much: The Things They Carried is standard reading in colleges around the country, far more so than any other contemporary book—and, Vernon writes, “at 9.3 ounces, The Things They Carried was one of the things some soldiers carried in Afghanistan and Iraq.” Similarly, Going After Cacciato, about the chase for a deserter in country, is hailed as a kind of Catch-22 for the Vietnam era, while In the Lake of the Woods brings aspects of the war back home. For all that, somewhat mysteriously, “O’Brien resents being known as a war writer,” even though he warned Vernon that he is not quite first-tier enough otherwise to merit such a study, which might be dismissed as “of minor importance.” Though Vernon does not lift O’Brien out of the category of interpreters of the Vietnam War, he does do solid service in recounting O’Brien’s life and broader work.

A well-considered work of literary biography of a writer ranked among Hemingway and Crane as a chronicler of combat.