Alex Vernon (photo by Melisa Pierce)
Alex Vernon’s intimate biography of the esteemed Vietnam War writer demonstrates an insider’s understanding of combat and the moral complexity of what soldiers are asked to do
Some of the best writers to be found are the ones we’ve nearly lost, particularly the writers who have returned from war and navigated trauma, despair and a failing social safety net to somehow emerge and create lasting works of literature. Prairie Village-born Alex Vernon’s 11th book, “Peace Is a Shy Thing: The Life and Art of Tim O’Brien,” helps establish O’Brien not only as one of America’s great war writers, but also as one whose ill-fated drafting into the Vietnam War means we’re fortunate to have his work all the more: It easily could have been otherwise.
One of the challenges of biography is often where to begin, especially if the writer wants to avoid the most obvious and easiest start with the subject’s birth. Vernon chose to begin telling the story of Tim O’Brien not at his birth in Austin, Minnesota, but at the very crossroads that sent him to war and put him on his unique literary path.
Early on Vernon writes that O’Brien “resents being known as a war writer.” O’Brien was a good student, a high school and college debater, a reader of philosophy, and from an early age dreamed of becoming a writer. In true Midwestern fashion, Vernon tells us, O’Brien “never spoke of his ambition because it seemed so remote a possibility.” And yet through his high school and college years he did his best to put his life on a path of scholarship and writing. He could’ve avoided becoming a war writer if only he could have avoided going to war.
Vernon’s interest in the life of Tim O’Brien has much to do with his own experience in combat during the first war in Iraq; he went on to teach literature at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. Vernon is not rare among college teachers who assign Tim O’Brien’s 1990 “The Things They Carried,” a short story collection inspired by his experiences in Vietnam. In fact, Vernon says, “The Things They Carried” appears on “more college and university course reading lists globally than any other U.S. novel.” Yet what makes Vernon uniquely qualified to write this book is his intimate knowledge of military service paired with his deep affinity for O’Brien’s approach to writing about war and the lives of veterans. This intimacy and affection come through in Vernon’s devotion to offering a depth of understanding and nuance that honors O’Brien’s own commitment to the complexities of life and the inner conflicts that are the prerequisite for driving forward any story worthy of our attention.
For instance, the book dramatizes O’Brien’s conflicted feelings about the Vietnam war — O’Brien loved his country and valued service yet saw the war as “morally repugnant.” O’Brien and his peers in 1968 were rightfully outraged that the draft was sending 18-year-olds to die in a war yet would not allow them the right to vote. While he awaited his draft number to be called, O’Brien would drive around Lake Okabena yelling the things he would like to say to his local draft board: “What the fuck are you doing choosing other people’s kids to fight a war you’re unwilling to fight yourself?” Tim O’Brien’s summer of 1968, Vernon writes, is when “right-minded principles and instincts locked horns.”
It is this very dramatization of the conflict between two opposing ideals that Vernon argues is O’Brien’s key belief system as a writer, as well as one of his best contributions to contemporary literature. Following the war O’Brien would spend the next several decades trying to tell his own story as well as the stories of his fellow veterans in ways that honored the complexity of what they were asked to do in Vietnam. His approach continued to evolve as he first wrote a first-person memoir followed by short stories and novels, only to find that neither nonfiction nor fiction gave him the approach he sought to write the book he was truly after. He was dissatisfied with the limitations of genre — short stories followed too neat a formula, whereas journalistic nonfiction limited its descriptions to what could be fact-checked. Vernon shows us that what O’Brien was ultimately after — and that he successfully achieved in “The Things They Carry” — was not merely factual truth nor dramatized fiction but writing that contained the emotive force of the inner conflict itself.
Had O’Brien graduated college either one year earlier or one year later, Vernon argues, he likely would have avoided the draft and not gone to war. Given the significant casualties of American troops in those few years, it was also a likely possibility that O’Brien would have returned home only to be buried. Instead, he returned and became a reluctant war writer whose main focus has been “exploring individual lives caught in the swirling onrush of events.”
Vernon’s biography successfully mirrors O’Brien’s approach by exploring O’Brien’s life among the swirling onrush and revealing the slow and quiet choices along the way that shape living — be it taking that first reluctant step onto the Army bus, or revising a sentence over and over again until the words themselves carry the heavy rhythm of a human heart carrying a rifle through a jungle far from home.
