War Stories

the book they carrY: Frank Corcoran (left) and John Grant were "thrilled" with the One Book choice. "Frank's been carrying around a dog-eared copy of that book for 10 years," says Grant. Photo By: Mike Mergen

How The Things They Carried has touched many local veterans.

by Trey Popp

Over the past two months, the city of Philadelphia has tried everything short of a judicial decree to get its denizens to read a 15-year-old book. This year's "One Book, One Philadelphia" program, a joint endeavor of the mayor's office and the Free Library, is centered on Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, a novel about the Vietnam War that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1990.

There's been a special-edition print run of 5,000 paperbacks, most of which have been given away, a calendar of over a hundred promotional events from panel discussions to theatrical interpretations to free screenings of The Fog of War and Platoon, and next week, O'Brien will be in town to headline three literary happenings.

Philadelphia isn't the first burg to get behind The Things They Carried. Chicago chose the novel for its own program two years ago, and smaller towns including Richmond, Va., and Valparaiso, Ind., have tapped it as well.

For John Grant and Frank Corcoran, members of the Philadelphia chapter of Veterans for Peace who have been sharing their Vietnam experiences with high school classrooms for a decade, the selection was a godsend. "We were thrilled when we found out about it," Grant said. "Frank's been carrying around a dog-eared copy of that book for 10 years."

There is something uncanny about the way the book facilitates conversation, and not only among Vietnam vets. Some of the most interesting speakers have been men who fought in World War II, a generation notorious for its reticence.

"When I started reading this book, I asked myself, "What am I doing reading another war story?'" said John Alexander, an infantryman in the European theater, at a recent panel. "I guess I'm like most men. We try to put everything out of our minds. We want to forget it. But the stories this man writes, they trigger memories for me. And war is hell, but it's not enough to say that. Sometimes it's also a shambles."

Speaking from his home in Austin, Texas, O'Brien recalled his father, a Navy veteran of the Pacific theater, having a similar reaction to the book. "He said something to the effect that that's how it felt. No matter the circumstance of a war — how unpopular it is or isn't — you don't think about politics and so on. You're just thinking about your own mortality, the lives of your friends, and how did God get me into this fix?" said O'Brien. "I remember him saying that some things just don't change. There's this perception that Vietnam was so radically different from other American wars. And his reaction was pretty right on, that yeah, there were differences, but not many for the person on the ground, fighting. Orphans and widows and dead children and dead friends. All that."

It's no coincidence that O'Brien's book is enjoying another wave of attention at the same moment a vast new generation of war veterans is being created in Iraq. Marie Field, chairwoman of the One Book program, says the selection committee set its sights on war literature from the get-go. Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird was shelved for another year while the committee debated over books that could speak to Philadelphia's large and growing population of veterans. With the biggest National Guard contingent of any state in the union, Pennsylvania is disproportionately bearing the consequences of an administration whose appetite for war exceeds the Army's capacity to wage it.

"Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front was considered," Field says. "Which is also a wonderful book. But the reason we thought The Things They Carried was so important is because Philadelphia has so many veterans and people who were affected by that war. Soldiers who were there, families who lost people, whose lives were very much impacted by that war. And of course what's going on today."

The crux of O'Brien's book is contained in his advice on how to tell a true war story, in a chapter of the same name:

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.

Tim O'Brien will lecture and sign books Mon., March 14, 7:30 p.m., $7-$15, Haverford High School, 200 Mill Rd., Havertown, 610-446-3082, www.haverfordlibrary.org., and Tue., March 15, 7 p.m., free, Central Branch, Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-7710. He will read Tue., March 15, 1 p.m., free, after a performance of Jennifer Higdon's Zones, inspired by the book, and followed by a post-performance Q&A with Higdon, Kimmel Center, 300 S. Broad St., 215-790-5800, www.kimmelcenter.org. For a full list of events, visit www.library.phila.gov.