Transcript The Things They Carried

Tim O’Brien’s
Presented by Dr. Judy Logan
1.
Is never moral.
2.
What happened can’t be separated
from what seemed to happen.
3.
Often can’t be believed.
4.
If there is a moral, can’t tease it out.
5.
Makes the stomach believe.
6.
Is a paradox; truth contradictory.
7.
Nothing is ever absolutely true.
8.
There’s no point—or if there is one,
it hits you 20 years later.
9.
Absolute occurrence is irrelevant.
10.
You can tell it’s a real war story
if you just keep telling it.
11.
A true war story is never about war.
The Baby Water Buffalo
Curt Lemon’s Death
& Dave Jensen’s Song
that awakens
“Tim O’Brien”
20 years later
“The Greenies”
The United States
Army Special Forces,
also known as the
Green Berets because
of their distinctive
service headgear,
are a special operations
force tasked with six
primary missions:
unconventional warfare,
foreign internal defense,
special reconnaissance,
direct action, hostage
rescue, and counterterrorism.
“She wasn’t dumb,” he’d snap.
“Young, that’s all I said. Like you and me. A girl, that’s
the only difference, and I’ll tell you something: it didn’t
amount to jack. I mean, when we first got here—all of
us—we were real young and innocent, full of romantic
bullshit, but we learned pretty damn quick. And so did
Mary Anne.”
“You don’t believe it? You don’t know human nature.
You don’t know Nam.”
(93)
“When she came in through the wire that night, I saw those
eyes of hers, I saw how she wasn’t even the same person no
more. What’s so impossible about that? She was a girl, that’s
all. I mean, if it was a guy, everybody’d say, Hey, no big deal,
he got caught up in the Nam shit, he got seduced by the
Greenies. See what I mean? You got these blinders on about
women. How gentle and peaceful they are. All that crap about
how if we had a pussy for president there wouldn’t be no
more wars. Pure garbage. You got to get rid of that sexist
attitude.”
“The girl joined the zoo. One more animal—end of story.”
(102)
“What happened to her, Rat said, was what
happened to all of them. You come over clean
and you get dirty and then afterward it’s never
the same. A question of degree. Some make it
intact, some don’t make it at all.”
“She was lost inside herself.”
(109-10)