War in Literature

Summary

Velshi Banned Book Club: "War in Literature" Episode Summary

Release Date: September 26, 2024
Host: Ali Velshi
Guest: Tim O’Brien, Author of "The Things They Carried"
Producer and Literary Editor: Hannah Holland

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Introduction to Wartime Literature

In the "War in Literature" episode of MSNBC’s "Velshi Banned Book Club," host Ali Velshi delves into the rich tradition of wartime literature, highlighting its role in reflecting and shaping societal understandings of war. Velshi introduces the episode by tracing the lineage of war-inspired narratives, from ancient epics like "The Iliad" and "Beowulf" to modern classics such as Ernest Hemingway’s "A Farewell to Arms" and the darkly comedic MASH series by Richard Hooker. These works, Velshi emphasizes, not only immortalize the experiences of soldiers but also explore the profound societal changes wrought by war.

Focus on "The Things They Carried"

The episode centers on Tim O’Brien’s acclaimed novel, "The Things They Carried," a pivotal work in contemporary war literature. Originally published in 1990 and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the novel serves as a cornerstone in American education and has frequently been both celebrated and challenged in schools across the nation.

Key Themes Explored:

1. Guilt and Shame:

   • Velshi references a poignant passage where O’Brien illustrates the pervasive sense of guilt and blame felt by soldiers:

     “You could blame the war. You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going into it. ... You could blame God.” ([08:32])

   • Tim O’Brien elaborates on how these emotions are universal among soldiers, often leading to introspection and self-blame for survival hesitations or for the deaths of comrades.

2. The Power of Storytelling:

   • O’Brien discusses storytelling as both a cathartic and communicative act:

     “Telling stories see a natural, inevitable process, like clearing the throat...” ([13:37])

   • Hannah Holland adds that stories bridge personal experiences with universal truths, allowing readers to empathetically engage with the horrors and emotional toll of war.

3. Fiction vs. Memoir:

   • O’Brien explains his choice to present his war experiences through fiction rather than a straightforward memoir:

     “In the story, you can write about what almost happened, but didn't.” ([16:19])

   • This narrative freedom allows for a more cohesive and emotionally resonant portrayal of his experiences, capturing the fragmented and chaotic nature of wartime memory.

4. Authenticity and Profanity:

   • The novel is noted for its raw language and unfiltered depiction of war, which has led to its frequent challenges in educational settings:

     “If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth.” ([07:44])

   • O’Brien defends his use of profanity as essential for conveying the authentic voices and experiences of soldiers.

Impact and Reception

The conversation highlights the book’s enduring relevance and its profound impact on both veterans and their families. O’Brien shares how "The Things They Carried" has provided insight to the families of veterans, helping them understand the silent struggles their loved ones endure post-war.

Notable Insights:

• Empathy and Understanding:

  “I know at least something of what's going on in my dad's head when he falls silent at the dinner table and stares into space.” ([20:29])

• Story as Memory Preservation:

  “Story lasts in a way that facts sometimes diminish over time.” ([32:19])

• Youth and War:

  “There was a curiously playful atmosphere... like a sporting event at some exotic reform school.” ([34:58])

Comparisons with Other War Literature

Velshi and Holland discuss how "The Things They Carried" compares to other war narratives, such as Stephen Crane’s "The Red Badge of Courage." While O’Brien praised Crane’s work for its authentic portrayal of the Civil War, he personally found "The Red Badge of Courage" less impactful until revisiting it years later.

Tim O’Brien’s Reflections:

“He owns it... he's so in control of his memory of the war and his experience.” ([28:07])

Modern Relevance and Educational Importance

The episode underscores the book’s critical role in education, advocating for its inclusion despite controversies. The discussion points out that just as literature like "The Things They Carried" facilitates understanding of historical and personal traumas, it remains essential for contemporary society to engage with such narratives to foster empathy and awareness.

Ali Velshi’s Observation:

“The drudgery... what happens in the in between times when you're alone with your mind, your stories and your buddies.” ([37:15])

Conclusion and Future Directions

As the episode wraps up, Velshi hints at upcoming discussions focusing on non-fiction memoirs like Roxane Gay’s "Hunger: A Memoir of My Body" and Jeannette Walls’ "The Glass Castle," emphasizing their roles as windows into diverse and profound personal experiences. The episode reinforces the notion that storytelling, whether fictionalized or factual, remains a powerful tool for understanding and resisting censorship and book banning.

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Key Quotes with Timestamps

• Tim O’Brien on Guilt and Blame:

  “You could blame the war. You could blame the idiots who made the war... You could blame God.” ([08:32])

• Ali Velshi on Storytelling:

  “Story lasts in a way that facts sometimes diminish over time.” ([32:19])

• Hannah Holland on Emotional Honesty:

  “War... you do have to be honest about yourself, your own experience and the fundamental evil of people killing other people.” ([13:37])

• Tim O’Brien on Fictionalizing War:

  “In the story, you can write about what almost happened, but didn't.” ([16:19])

• Reflection on Youth in War:

  “There was a curiously playful atmosphere... like a sporting event at some exotic reform school.” ([34:58])

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Final Thoughts

The "War in Literature" episode of "Velshi Banned Book Club" offers a deep and nuanced exploration of Tim O’Brien’s "The Things They Carried," situating it within the broader context of war literature and its societal implications. Through insightful dialogue and poignant reflections, the episode underscores the enduring power of storytelling in capturing the human experience of war and resisting the forces of censorship and misinformation.

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For those interested in exploring these themes further, subscribing to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts provides access to "Velshi Banned Book Club" episodes without ads, along with exclusive bonus content.

Transcript

[Ali Velshi]

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[Tim O'Brien]

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[Ali Velshi]

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[Hannah Holland]

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[Tim O'Brien]

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[Ali Velshi]

Best brands in the game starting at just $40. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rac foreign welcome to the Velshi Band Book Club. I'm MSNBC's Ali Velshi. War has always served as a dark sort of inspiration for writers from epic poems of antiquity like the Iliad and Beowulf, Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, set in World War I, to Richard Hooker's Korean War black comedy MASH. Soldiers confronted with their mortality and their morality on the battlefield, have been immortalized and explored in literature for thousands of years. On a larger scale, though, this tradition of wartime literature captures the societal changes that war leaves in its path. There has not been a country or a culture unaffected by the brutalities of war. This episode of the Welsh Band Book Club will feature one remarkable example of wartime literature. This novel stands at the forefront of the contemporary war literary canon. It achingly captures what it means to be a soldier, a young man, and an American in the midst of one of the most brutal wars in modern history. Vietnam. I'm talking about the Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien let's get into it taking turns. They carried the big PRC 77 scrambler radio, which weighed 30 pounds with its battery. They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese English dictionaries, insignia of rank, bronze stars and purple hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the code of Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and patty algae and various rots and molds they Carried, the land itself, Vietnam, the place, the soil, a powdery orange red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. End quote. And so begins Tim O'Brien's magnum opus, a contemporary classic in every sense of the phrase, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a staple in the American public education system, and today's Veli Band Book Club features the Things They Carried. Originally published in 1990, the things they Carried is a fictionalized account of Tim O'Brien's very real experience as a young soldier in the 23rd Infantry Division in the Vietnam War. At the center of the book are the men of the Alpha Company, Jimmy Cross, Kurt Lemmon, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Ted Lavender, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa and O'Brien, switching between the first and third person and moving back and forth through time. The Things They Carried is comprised of a series of interconnected short narratives. To call it just a war story, though, is to massively limit the novel. The Things They Carried explores the futility of war, the power of friendship, the motivating effect of death and of shame, morality, isolation and survival. From the very first story, also called the things they carried, O'Brien uses repetition, reflection and frank language to illustrate how inescapable and all encompassing trauma is. The result is suffocating and hugely effective. When you witness death, O'Brien tells us, the moment plays in your mind again and again and again. Only for the duration of the book does the reader have to endure the way Kurt Lemon's face looked tan in the sun before he stepped on a landmine. But for O'Brien, fictionalized and real, that story never ends. For a readership that is likely unfamiliar with the Vietnam War, the politics behind it, and the tenor of the country in 1969, the things they Carried has many of those answers, especially the emotional ones. The book is spent largely in flashbacks and memories. In one particularly stirring story, we watch As a young O'Brien contemplates making a run for the Canadian border after receiving his draft notice. But the most salient and vivid moments in this book take place in Vietnam, in the pages of the Things They Carried, the Vietnam War is equal parts hallucinatory and concrete, surreal and physical. O'Brien captures what the psyche and the spirit must do to protect itself from the horrors of war, but also the heart wrenching moments of friendship, of sacrifice, of beauty. From Iowa to New Jersey to Texas, the Things They Carried has become a fixture in high school English classes for incredibly obvious reasons. And from Iowa to New Jersey to Texas, the things they carried has been challenged and removed numerous times. The most common complaint? Vulgarity and profanity. O'Brien has an answer for them. Quote, you can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth. If you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty. End quote. But what is really at the core of removing an American book by an American author about an American war from American children's schools and libraries? If powerful literature is a mirror to yourself and a window into other worlds, perhaps a commentary so salient about the hell that was Vietnam and the American war machine is a place many don't want to take a glimpse of at all.

[Tim O'Brien]

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[Ali Velshi]

Tremphyaradio.Com Politics Nation on MSNBC is now available as a podcast every Saturday and Sunday. Host Reverend Al Sharpton approaches the biggest news of the week through the lens of equality and justice. Driven by his years of work in the civil rights arena, I've spent my career advocating for those unjustly killed. Search for Politics Nation wherever you're listening and follow. And for ad free listening to this show and other MSNBC podcasts, subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple podcasts the first 100 days bills are passed, executive orders are signed and presidencies are defined. And for Donald Trump's first 100 days, Rachel Maddow is on MSNBC five nights a week.

[Tim O'Brien]

Now is the time, so we're gonna do it.

[Ali Velshi]

Providing her unique insight and analysis during this critical time, how do we strategically.

[Tim O'Brien]

Align ourselves to this moment of information, this moment of transition in our country?

[Ali Velshi]

The Rachel Maddows show weeknights at 9pm Eastern on MSNBC. I'm joined now by the literary legend and the Author of today's Velshi Band Book Club features the things they carried. Tim O'Brien, thank you for having me on. I want to start with two of the themes that recur throughout the book. Guilt and shame. These emotions come up literally for every character. Here's one instance of it. When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war. You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going into it. You could blame the rain, you could blame the river. You could blame the field. You could blame the mud, the climate. You could blame the enemy. You could blame the mortar rounds. You could blame people who were too lazy to read a newspaper, who were bored by the daily body counts, who switched channels at the mention of politics. You could blame whole nations. You could blame God, end quote. Talk to me about this guilt and shame, how it figures into this book and how it exists more broadly in war.

[Hannah Holland]

Well, killing is a nasty thing. When one is immersed in the crank case evil of war, you take it personally. The issues aren't of politics stopping communism. Rather, you're embroiled in a second by second experience. That's terrific. And at the end of that experience, when the shooting stops and it's time to turn in for the night, you find yourself rehearsing what you've gone through that day, going through it again and again in your head. And in the end, many of us assigned guilt and shame to ourselves. We weren't quite brave enough. We weren't quite macho enough. We hesitated at times. We were terrified. And you can blame yourself for all those things, being terrified. And you can also blame yourself for the deaths of your friends. I wasn't at his side. I didn't respond quickly enough. You carry all kinds of emotions from the war. Great love for your fellow soldiers, great love for life itself. You appreciate things you had never appreciated before. Good McDonald's hamburger and fresh air and the peace that surrounds you in civilian life in a way you'd never appreciated it before. So all these emotions congeal into an experience that I tried to at least do my best to replicate in the pages of the Things They Carried. It's an emotional book. I think it's an honest book. It's a way of checking out, of telling lies, which apparently MAGA America has now fallen in love with ideological fairy tales. And some of those ideological fairy tales are about war itself. American soldiers. Yep. And they're always behaving righteously. They don't cuss, they don't use Profanity. But as a writer, it feels that's my obligation in the pages of a work of fiction, to do my best to be forthright and honest. You can't have a soldier badly wounded saying, gee willikers, I've been shot. Soldiers just don't talk that way. But a portion of America wants that fairytale.

[Ali Velshi]

I think it's interesting because what I read in the introduction about how you, within the book addressed how people should deal with their profanity in it, and in this quote that I just read to you about blaming people who are too lazy to read a newspaper, who are bored by the daily body counts, who switch channels at the mention of politics that still exists today. I mean, we could be discussing today the idea that we don't realize the consequences of death, of war, of soldiering. People do say it's too much for me. I don't want to pay attention to it.

[Hannah Holland]

I think you're absolutely right. It's with us today. In fact, I think it's compounded big time. These fairy tales I mentioned about the world are all around us now. And part of the job of a writer is to be an iconoclast, to fight back against what seemed to be, seems to be dishonesty. And the chief obligation of any writer, no matter what your subject, whether it's war, politics, whatever it might be, love affairs, your obligation is to try, to the best of your ability, to be honest and forthright. Sometimes the world is a nasty place. Oftentimes it's a joyful, great place. But when you're writing about war, you do have to be honest about yourself, your own experience and the fundamental evil of people killing other people.

[Ali Velshi]

So against that, you also write about the idea of healing through storytelling. I'm going to read from your book. Telling stories see a natural, inevitable process, like clearing the throat. Partly catharsis, partly communication. It was a way of grabbing people by the shirt and explaining exactly what had happened to me, how I'd allowed myself to get dragged into a wrong war, all the mistakes I'd made, all the terrible things I'd seen and done. Talk to me about the power of stories, not just for healing, as you refer to it here, but as warning.

[Hannah Holland]

Well, story is one of the most powerful human experiences. Both in making a story and reading a story. It takes you out of yourself and puts you in the shoes of other human beings. You can go down the river with Huckleberry Finn, or you can go to sea with Joseph Conrad's Typhoon or Heart of Darkness. And story Lasts in a way that facts sometimes diminish over time. They're forgotten. They blur into other facts. But a story puts you in a situation. War. Killing becomes not an abstract thing. Even the word war seems to me abstract. It doesn't encompass the mosquitoes and the mud and the filth of it. Not bathing for days, walking through the jungles and up into the mountains and down back to the jungles. Just a daily physical pain of it all. And then later, on top of that, killing people. That's your job in a war. And to try to stay alive while you're doing the killing, it takes a toll on the human soul. And you come back from an experience like that into a world of civility and decency and human concord and polite conversations on street corners. But part of your head is back in the filth of the war. And it's not going to go away any more than a woman could forget coming down with breast cancer. You're not going to relieve yourself of the memory of that. It stays with you forever. And story is a way of bringing that back alive for others, for high school, college kids, and for future generations. One of the best books ever written about war is the Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane. I read it back in my early high school years and have reread it a couple of times since. And it brings me back to something I didn't experience. The Civil War, what that was like. So story matters.

[Ali Velshi]

Tim, the Things They Carried is fictional, but it's very clear from talking to you and in reading the book, it is perhaps more than semi autobiographical or why did you write it as fiction?

[Hannah Holland]

Well, my own story was so standard, it's got to be a new story. It was getting drafted, posing a war, contemplating going to Canada. All of these elements found their way into the things they carried. But in a story, you have to organize things in such a way that the reader feels you're part of a stream that begins and you're in the middle of it. And then it comes to an end. And my life doesn't feel like a stream. It feels like full of discreet things that happened occasionally that happened. And then I go back to childhood and then I'll go forward to talking to my father about his war. So in my own personal experience, I'm jumping around too much to tell a seamless flowing story. So I decided early on I'm going to try fiction. I'd written a memoir earlier called if I Die in a Combat Zone, which is his straightforward memoir, the Truth, what Actually Happened. But in the story, you can write about what almost happened, but didn't. I almost went to Canada, but I didn't. I almost was really brave in that war, but not quite brave enough. I was afraid constantly, as I think almost all of my fellow soldiers were. So a story through fiction, through making up characters and. And trying to present this unified whole felt the right way to try to tell the truth about the war. Telling the truth through making things up kind of in a contradiction, I suppose, but all novelists do it.

[Ali Velshi]

There are moments in the book the Things They Carried that made me think about America today. You've also written a new book called America Fantastica, which grapples with modern American culture. Do you. And I think I know the answer to this, but do you feel similar levels of division and unrest now that you did in 1969? Because that's the comparison a lot of people make. Well, it is.

[Hannah Holland]

I mean, it's still with us. The fundamentals of telling the truth, no matter how unpalatable it is, no matter how disturbing the truth might be, is essential to being a human being and not a gopher or a coyote. That we're trying to be honest about the world that we're living in. And there are different kinds of truth. There's story truth on the one hand, Huckleberry Finn never literally happened, but it's based on the truths of being a 12 year old kid trying to escape small town America. That's the essential problem that I see is this kind of ideological fairy tale that half of our country seems to be living in, substituting kind of the mythology that they have about what America is with replacing the truth with that mythology. I'm not sure if it's exactly lying. They may actually believe these. Trump won the election. Probably they do believe it, despite facts. The same was true back in the era of Vietnam. The domino effect, all the ideology things that put us into that war, containing communism and so on. There were elements of truth to all that, but it wasn't the entire truth at all. So as a story in a story, you try to leave the political world as much as you can and enter the human world. What it feels like to be trapped. Kind of a matrix of unending untruths.

[Ali Velshi]

The book is lauded by literary critics, by casual readers and by military veterans. And I want to ask you about that and a lot of books about war, and some of them are more truthful and some of them more fanciful. Did acceptance from your peers factor into this book, how you wrote it and what you thought about it afterward.

[Hannah Holland]

Well, very much so. Even more than my fellow veterans, I've heard probably 90% of my mail comes from the wives of veterans or the grandchildren of Vietnam veterans or the children. And they'll say pretty much the same thing, that my father is quiet, won't talk about the war. But having read the things they carried, I know at least something of what's going on in my dad's head when he falls silent at the dinner table and stares into space. And it's those letters that really matter the most to me. Veterans know what they went through. They don't need me to tell them. But the children of veterans and the wives and the mothers and the fathers have written to say that the book helped them understand what their son or father went through. That matters a lot to me.

[Ali Velshi]

25 years after you left Vietnam, you returned on assignment for the New York Times Magazine. Talk to me about how that had an impact on your own. I don't want to call it healing. I don't want to judge what it was, but on your own progress and development about how you thought about Vietnam and your experiences there.

[Hannah Holland]

My own development was. I was a College student in 1968, just graduated from Calistar College in St. Paul. I was going to head for Harvard on a fellowship to go to graduate school. And I received a letter one day in my hometown of Worthington, Minnesota, from the government, a draft notice, having just played a round of golf. And I took that notice into the kitchen where my mom and dad were having lunch, and I dropped it on the table, and I didn't say anything. They didn't say anything for, I don't know, five, ten minutes went by. And finally my dad said, what are you going to do? And I didn't know the answer to that question. I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to not go to kill people and not get killed, especially in a war that I thought was at best was uncertainty, ambiguity, fox at the throats of doves. Diplomats couldn't make their minds up about the righteousness of the war. Congress was divided, the country was divided. There was no consensus, and I didn't want to die or kill in that war. That was the long answer I didn't articulate to my mom and dad that day. I ended up going to the war through default or forfeiture. The day came to get on a bus to go get inducted, and I kind of slug walked my way onto that bus and into the army through basic training and advanced infantry training, thinking, this is kind of a dream, it's not really happening or it'll. And something will happen to end this nightmare. And eventually I slept, walked my way through a year in Vietnam, a little over a year doing what I mentioned earlier, walking through rice paddies and up into mountains and through jungle, getting shot at, watching men die in my area of operations, dying from landmines. Just step on it, you're dead. Or you've lost a leg or an arm. So it was leg after leg, arm after arm, death after death for about nine months, in my case, that I was out in the field. When you return from an experience like that, you're not even quite sure that you were there. This really happened to me. The guy who hated rifles and guns. I hated Cub Scouts. I hated Boy Scouts. I didn't like bugs and mosquitoes and sleeping in the rain. It all felt unreal. So writing the things he carried was a way of dealing with that personal experience.

[Ali Velshi]

As I was reading the book, this poem by the Iraq war veteran Brian Turner, here, Bullet kept coming up for me. And since this is the book club, I'm going to read it aloud to you. Here, Bullet, if a body is what you want, then here is bone and gristle and flesh. Here is the clavicle snapped wish the aorta's opened valves the leap thought makes at the synaptic gap. Here is the adrenaline rush you crave, that inexorable flight, that insane puncture into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish what you've started. Because here, Bullet, here is where I complete the word you bring hissing through the air. Here is where I moan the barrel's cold esophagus triggering my tongue's explosives for the rifling I have inside of me. Each twist of the round spun deeper. Because here, Bullet, here is where the world ends every time. The things they carried. As part of a robust canon of American literature that grappled with war. Does that mean.

[Hannah Holland]

Brian is a fantastic poet, probably among the very best poets to come out of any war. And that poem in particular just gives me chills up and down my spine. It has a ring of utter and absolute authenticity to it. Pure bullet.

[Ali Velshi]

Thank you to the legendary Tim O'Brien, author of the Things They Carried. MSNBC Films presents an NBC News Studios production. The story of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes. Leading up to his recent release from prison.

[Hannah Holland]

The government's evidence showed that defendant Stuart Rhodes began planning to oppose by force the peaceful transfer of power as told.

[Ali Velshi]

Through the lens of his estranged family. I bet everything on him being locked away forever king of the Apocalypse. Sunday, February 2nd at 9pm Eastern on MSNBC. Donald Trump is heading back to the White House. Together we can truly make America great again. We are in for an unpredictable but.

[Tim O'Brien]

Fascinating four years, and we're going to.

[Ali Velshi]

Be following every twist and turn for the first 100 days. We'll be bringing you the latest updates and analysis first thing every morning. So join me, James Matthews, me, Martha Calneck, and me, Mark Stone for Trump 100 every weekday at 6:00am, wherever you get your podcast. Hey, everyone, it's Chris Hayes. This week on my podcast, why Is this Happening?

[Hannah Holland]

New York Times tech reporter Kate Conger.

[Tim O'Brien]

On Elon Musk in the Trump 2.0 era. I think a lot of other tech.

[Hannah Holland]

Leadership is looking now at what Musk.

[Tim O'Brien]

Has been able to accomplish by aligning himself so closely with Trump and wanting to follow suit.

[Hannah Holland]

And it is this very kind of transparent favor trading that's going on throughout.

[Tim O'Brien]

The industry right now where people are feeling like, okay, I can cozy up to the president, and that's going to have a beneficial impact for my business.

[Ali Velshi]

That's this week on why Is this Happening?

[Hannah Holland]

Search for why Is this Happening? Wherever you're listening right now, and follow.

[Ali Velshi]

All right. Time now to bring in our producer and literary editor, Hannah Holland. Hannah, these books are all so meaningful to me when we talk to these authors, but there's something about this one that just stands out. There's something about O'Brien's maturity, his actual experience in war, and the fact that he doesn't really care what you think about this. It almost felt therapeutic. He was writing this book for himself to tell the story that he, and perhaps universally everyone who goes to war needs to tell.

[Tim O'Brien]

I completely agree. And the conviction with which he speaks that you're talking about is just remarkable. This is a man that is so in control of his memory of the war and his experience, which I think was really interesting.

[Ali Velshi]

Well, he owns it, right?

[Tim O'Brien]

He owns it.

[Ali Velshi]

This is his reality and he's going to speak his reality using the language that he uses and that they used in war. There's no attempt to put flourishes on this.

[Tim O'Brien]

No, absolutely not. I was excited hearing this conversation between the two of you because it is written in such a specific way. There are these long sentences and he's so descriptive and his use of repetition and he speaks in the exact same way. I read this in school and bowled me over. I couldn't believe this book. And I was reflecting on it, right? Having him come on, like, why did this book that was so far from my reality is, you know, this suburban girl in this Democrat centered town. And I think it's the emotion behind it. And I mean to say, it made me feel empathy and sympathy is just another level.

[Ali Velshi]

It's the idea that war is drudgery. War is horror.

[Tim O'Brien]

Drudgery, yes.

[Ali Velshi]

The soldier goes out there and performs, maybe lives, maybe dies through drudgery, and then comes back and holds all of that baggage. One of the things that O'Brien talks about is the book the Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane as a war novel that really resonated with him.

[Tim O'Brien]

And that's a classic book. It's funny, I read the Red Badge of Courage and did not like it. Maybe I was too young, maybe I have to revisit it. But I will say, since reading the Things They Carried in high school for the first time, I will pick up a war book. You know, and I've said in past episodes that, like, I don't generally enjoy books that have male protagonists, but I think this is an exception. There's this book, Cherry, by Nico Walker, which if you haven't read, you should pick it up. It's another kind of fictionalized memoir. And he wrote it from jail, came back from Iraq, and right into the opioid epidemic. Nico Walker in that book is a medic. So his experience there was just dealing with dying and death the entire time. And I had a similar feeling reading it. You know, this is a story that is so far from who I am, but to feel what it was like to be there. So it's interesting.

[Ali Velshi]

Why am I remembering correctly that you were not here the day I interviewed Tim?

[Tim O'Brien]

Yes, yes.

[Ali Velshi]

So I do whatever you tell me. And you had told me to read him here Bullet by Brian Turner, and I did so because I trust you, having no idea what the reaction would be. I didn't know whether he knew the poem, had liked the poem. I subsequently realized he was very intimately connected to the poem. I have to say, I had trouble keeping it together, reading the poem, and he had trouble keeping it together, having the poem read to him.

[Tim O'Brien]

Yeah, that is one of those works where you're like, whoa.

[Ali Velshi]

But this is one of those places where we delved into poetry for a good piece of that interview, which is not typical of what we do. And it meant something to him. This is one of those answers for people who don't follow poetry very well or don't indulge in it. And I'm one of them. That sometimes poetry can tell you something that pros can't and in so few words.

[Tim O'Brien]

That's always what strikes me. You read that it can only be, what, 12 lines?

[Ali Velshi]

It's a conversation with a bullet that's going to kill you. It really is remarkable. We discussed synthesizing fiction with fact, and one of the things Tim said was, story lasts in a way that sometimes facts diminish over time, which I thought was a very powerful thing to say. I don't think his story is embellished, but it's this concept of creating narrative out of the fact that we live every day. And I think that's a really interesting concept. You and I have talked about it many times. Where many of these books are written by people who just live lives like all of us live, we don't think of them as a narrative or a story. And yet every one of our lives, every hour of every day, is a narrative. Yeah, it's part of a story.

[Tim O'Brien]

And I think for him, I don't know, of course, but writing this book as fiction allowed him the space to extrapolate upon what he was really feeling.

[Ali Velshi]

Right.

[Tim O'Brien]

I wonder sometimes if you're beholden to a memoir or something that's nonfiction, to allow yourself to really think, like, where did my mind go? And, like, is that even the truth when you're in war? Like, what is the reality? And then later, he said to you something along the lines of, I contemplated crossing the border in Canada. I didn't do it, so it isn't part of my story. But that whole interworking push and pull, should I do it, should I not? Is just better explored through fiction. Towards the end of the interview, he talked to you about how family members of veterans write in to say that they understand their grandparent, or, a few years ago, their parents. This idea that you would go through something so terrible like Vietnam and not be able to talk about it, even with your family, even with your grandkids.

[Ali Velshi]

This is a concept we've come across with a lot of banned books, and that is people telling stories about things that have happened, either their own personal experience, their own traumatic experiences, whether it's war or sexual assault or coming out or slavery. And there's a sense that someone is in a position to tell a story honestly.

[Tim O'Brien]

Right.

[Ali Velshi]

And what Tim was saying was that others had told him that while their spouses or parents or grandparents couldn't talk about the war, they understood them through this. And that is a theme that we've come across book after book after book. There are many people, for instance, enslaved people, who did not want to burden their grandchildren, with what they went through. They wanted their grandchildren to be the best that they could be without having to think about what they had gone through. But those people are curious. Those kids become curious and they want to hear those stories. And then people fictionalize them or people write memoirs and that that truth allows people to understand the story of their forebears. So I think this is such an interesting but universal point that he wrote a book that was a fictionalized story of him and his band of brothers. But in fact, it serves a much bigger purpose in being able to put meat on the bones of stories about our ancestors, our parents, our grandparents who went to war, whose stories we don't know. Maybe they passed before we could learn them, or maybe they didn't want to talk about them.

[Tim O'Brien]

And this too gives credence to the idea that fiction can do sometimes a better job than fact. It doesn't matter that your grandparent wasn't part of this exact platoon. The feelings around it, that exhaustive waiting, the wondering if you're going to make it another day like that, is just a reality of war that people experience. And I totally agree with you.

[Ali Velshi]

Something that always strikes me in this book and in stories of war, because when we hear stories of war, we hear them generally from mature people or older people. War is a. Is a young person's thing. Yeah, I'll read one quote. The average age in our platoon, I'd guess, was 19 or 20. And as a consequence, things often took on a curiously playful atmosphere, like a sporting event at some exotic reform school. The competition could be lethal, yet there was a childlike exuberance to it all. Lots of pranks and horseplay, end quote.

[Tim O'Brien]

He does such a good job of juxtaposing these very adult, very serious life and death instances with the age of the members of his platoon. And yet another reason why it's so important to read this in high school, right? Like if you're 16, 19 isn't that far off.

[Ali Velshi]

That's right.

[Tim O'Brien]

You know, I mean, if, if people really do feel this is too inappropriate for a high schooler to read, right?

[Ali Velshi]

There's a lot of people. There was a time, until recently, unfortunately, you couldn't rent a car if you weren't 25 because they thought your brain wasn't fully developed. But we'll send 19 year olds and 18 year olds to war and now we are having them make life and death decisions and then they come back and they've had to grow up really fast. So that discussion of youth, I think, is really Important when we think about war.

[Tim O'Brien]

Also, I mentioned this to you. There is a village band book club on Reddit that has popped up.

[Ali Velshi]

Right.

[Tim O'Brien]

So it's this group of people who probably from all over the country who are now going on Reddit, reading the books and doing their own kind of book club, which I'm obsessed with. And their first book was the Things They Carried.

[Ali Velshi]

This might be my way onto Reddit. I've not managed to find a way onto Reddit all these years, so this might be it.

[Tim O'Brien]

I'm pulling it up now on my phone. We can see if they did anything fun on there. I just love the idea that this book resonates with people still.

[Ali Velshi]

Yeah.

[Tim O'Brien]

It wasn't like the Handmaid's Tale where people kept asking like, we want that, we want that. But then when we did do promotional material for it, I agree with you.

[Ali Velshi]

There was response that we got. You're right. Everybody said, oh, obviously you're gonna do the Handmaid's Tale. But the response we got to this book was so great from people who, I think, for some reason, I'm not sure they carried it with them to use the title of the book, but when they remembered it.

[Tim O'Brien]

It's visceral.

[Ali Velshi]

It's visceral. Yeah, that's exactly right.

[Tim O'Brien]

Yeah. So someone posted it on Reddit in 2014. I was assigned a self contained class and they read the book and they say, I was surprised that our very conservative parents approved of such a raw, profane set of Vietnam war stories. It's interesting because I don't see it that way. I see it as such an amazing exploration about what war looks like. And for me, I close the book and I, like I said, I'm more empathetic towards soldiers. I'm more interested in learning about that part of America. I don't know. That doesn't make sense to me.

[Ali Velshi]

So this is an interesting thing because when you think about war movies as a genre, particularly as film has become more technically advanced, the horrors of war are portrayed more accurately through the fact that you can actually see the terrible things that happen to people. It doesn't get you deeper into their emotions and their feelings and the drudgery and the boring things that happen between people getting killed. The book still does that better, so it's a more complete view. And look, there are amazing war movies out there. None of it gets you to what it is to fight a war. It's cool, there's music, it's inspirational in some ways, but none of it gets you to this which is the life of a soldier, the drudgery of a soldier, literally, the things they carry. I know it's not comparable, but when we work in the field, one of the things we think about the most is how much stuff we're carrying, how we're carrying. Because when we cross in and out of Ukraine, when we crossed into Israel after October 7, you carried stuff across borders. It's not automatic. It's not like a border crossing between Canada and the United States. We just go through. So the concept of the things you carry, that's not the story anybody asks you when they ask you about war or they ask you of coverage of a war, that's not the stuff they ask you. The drudgery. What do you do in the in between times when you're not on TV or you're waiting for that hurricane to hit? What happens in the in between times? And and he's been able to talk not just about the obvious things that happen in war, but the in between times when you are alone with your mind, your stories and your buddies. Well, that's one I'm not going to forget easily. The next episode of the Velshi Band Book Club will continue to examine literature based on lived experiences. Except these novels are told without the veil of fiction. They are memoirs. Hunger, A Memoir of My Body by Roxane Gay and the Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls are windows into two vastly different worlds, but they're both master classes in the age old tradition of storytelling, as a warning, as a lesson, and as a means to understand oneself. Thanks for joining us. Be sure to subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts. When you do, you'll be able to listen to the Belshi Band Book Club podcast ad free, along with other MSNBC originals like Prosecuting Donald Trump, how to win 2024 and why is this happening with Chris Hayes without ads. Plus, you'll get episodes of season two of the Velshi Band Book Club one week early, as well as exclusive bonus content from this and other podcasts. Sign up now on Apple Podcasts. I'm the host of the Velshi Band Book Club, Ali Velshi. Our producer and literary editor is Hannah Holland. Our executive producer is Rebecca Dryden, alongside our senior producers Jared Blake and Dina Moss, with production support from Associate producer Nicole McReynolds. Our coordinating producer is Lily Corvo. The executive producer of MSNBC Audio is Aisha Turner. The head of Audio production is Bryson Barnes, alongside our audio engineers Katherine Anderson, Katie Lau and Bob Mallory. Stay up to date on the biggest issues of the day with the MSNBC Daily Newsletter. Each morning you'll get analysis by experts you trust, video highlights from your favorite shows.

[Tim O'Brien]

I do think it's worth being very clear eyed, very realistic about what's going on here.

[Ali Velshi]

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