When you watch a war movie you expect war. War is gunfire, blood, and chaos in camoflouge. Characters are directly related to the war, like the sharpshooter whose hand is steadied by God, or the school teacher who is the natural born leader of the platoon, or the reserved lunatic who loves being at war. O'Brien recognizes and focuses on the human condition of the people who are at war.
O'brien refers back to him being a writer in Twist, and forth to what he "remembers" of the war as a character in his own story with a sort of effortless stream of consciousness. You are often reminded that you are reading about people at war. Twist is a war story about war stories, with a twist. While most "war-genre-fanatics" look for the general's strategy and machine-gun action, O'Brien tells us about "elephant grass weighted with wind, bowing under the stir of a helicopter's blades... bending low, but then rising straight again when the chopper went away." These are the things that O'Brien chooses to share with us. This is what he considers to be important.
The Man I Killed gives some gory detail, jaws in throats, upper lips and teeth gone, and a star-shaped hole for an eye. But, at no moment is the description pornographic, it's written with intent. Tim is staring at the body, particularly what had been the face, of the man he killed. The entire exercise is concerned with thought. He's thinking about something - himself, war, the boy he killed, whys, whens, and hows - and so am I, both while reading and after. Tim doesn't speak once in the story. Make a popular summer blockbuster movie out of that. To me, there is so much more in the image of a young asian man with a star-shaped hole where his eye used to be, three strips of flesh ripped from his cheek, and a butterfly crawling on his forehead, killed at war by an American, than some genre conscious war film could ever generate.
I may not have seen enough war movies to name all the conventions of the genre, but I can certainly recognize how different O'Brien's stories are.
I have to be honest, I was fooled. I thought that O'Brien had actually seen and been and done all the things he referred to throughout Twist and The Man I Killed. I don't know if my opinion matters or if it even belongs here, but I can't explained how incredible I think those three stories were. I was blown away. I'm jealous and want to go back and read them again, in order, for the first time.
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"The Man I Killed gives some gory detail...But, at no moment is the description pornographic."
The writer brings up an important distinction between the depiction of violence in O'Brien's work and its depiction in typical war stories. O'Brien's The Things They Carried is more lyrical than it is dramatic. It lacks the action scenes that typically portray violence. O'Brien gives us the aftermath of the action and presents us with its emotional toll on the soldiers. In blockbuster war movies, violence is the main attraction and entertainment, and it is usually intended to portray the toll of the overall war. O'Brien's work does not attempt to memorialize Vietnam. Rather, it shows how frighteningly easy it can be for us to lose our humanity when pressed to, and yet it also offers the hope that we can always gain it back.
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