1) No, I don’t believe O’Brien’s story has heroes. And it’s interesting too, considering how the USA’s perception of the Vietnam war was one where, now, it wasn’t enough being a patriotic “boy off to war” fighting for Democracy and all the bunkum. The public was enraged at the war, the war was never a fight worth fighting, and, of course, it is burned into our textbooks as the war we lost. The story is bereft of heroes in the traditional sense.
O’Brien says “I was a coward, I went to war,” and I think that sets the tone perfectly. These people are stuck in this country, and fighting. Needing to perform a any action (Strunk drawing the number to be “tunnel rat” for instance) isn’t portrayed as heroic or courageous, it’s unlucky. Strunk has been screwed and now has to snuff out Vietcong, risking his life to prevent being killed anyways.
More honest, realistic narratives of war, as expected, typically tell a far more vicious account of events romanticized, publicized, gazed through a patriotic gaze. We (hopefully) know how awful the World Wars were, the Korean, but due to the societal drive pushing the soldiers to distant shores, those wars have an inescapable aura of heroism. The Vietnam war was the one that had it’s magic run out quickly, it’s visage already soured in the public’s eyes before O’Brien published. O’Brien writes, dismantling the idea that war can ever support a hero; this is a squalor, a miserable world of mud and blood, broken dreams, quiet whispers of hope.
There’s a quote from a classic Doctor Who serial that always sticks with me: “War, a game played by politicians.” Seeing the simple, flawed, imperfect actions of the small humans in The Things They Carried makes the reader feel like there is always someone controlling what the soldiers do. Someone forcing them to march on through the unlucky, “heroic” acts.
O’Brien also does something frightening with his female characters, which even further dismantles the idea of male heroism. Mary Anne, for example, goes from a sweet seventeen-year old to a green beret, a murderous soldier. The women are the superior warriors, the ones who adapt and actually become these (I personally think monstrous) examples of the romanticized image of a war hero. None of the male characters approach that evolution, breaking the expectations of patriarchal heroism and courage.
However, regardless of how well the ladies mesh with the stereotypical image, and how poorly the men live up to it, I still don’t think any transformations in this context is anything but dark, horrifying, brutal. War is not the birthplace of heroes. It’s a world of men and women, people, pulled from their homes, stuck in battles and waiting and remembering, hoping they’re not the unlucky ones in a number pulling.
O’Brien’s writing is clean cut, sharp, brutal. Nothing is romanticized, everything is bare, exposed, and honest. We don’t see heroes, we see people. O’Brien’s writing is human, first and foremost. And that’s what makes it painful.