The Things They Carried

I find Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried fascinating in part for its connection to the legends of my own family, and partly for its meditation on the nature (and morality) of such storytelling.

I can’t remember precisely when I became conscious of the Kent State shooting on May 4th, 1970, but it was certainly referenced and memorialized in our household so that it would have been difficult to avoid. The Vietnam War shadowed my family in strange ways. My father had grown up poor, and when his number came up in the draft, he knew that he couldn’t avoid service even though he was at college. Through chance and luck, he avoided serving. My mother, from a solid, middle-class suburb of Cleveland, was largely apolitical. It wasn’t that she didn’t see the point. She just wasn’t interested.

On May 4th, my mother and father were both at the morning protests—not together, as they hadn’t met yet. That afternoon, my mother went for a stroll with a friend of hers, a veteran of Vietnam, while my father lingered at the bell, milling around in the crowd that had gathered.

This is, of course, my parents’ story, but it became—in some small measure—mine as well, given the weighted meaning the day carried. When I think of Norman Bowker on his endless revolution around the lake, thinking of all the things he wanted to say but failed to find the words for, I think also of “Notes,” wherein our narrator Tim tries to parse the “Two different time periods, two different sets of issues” (153) in regards to the war story and the post-war story. I also think of the timeline I made, wherein I struggled to emphasize geography, and the ways in which it was consequential in particular ways during that era (as in all eras).

His endless revolution becomes a strange sort of turning back to envision my family and where they turned. Both my mother and father had several siblings—none of their siblings attended Kent State, none of them experienced what my parents did, and none of them became in any way political. Same upbringing, but none of their lives hinged on a day that opened a sense of elsewhere in quite the same way.