Books: Need For Faces

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

by Tim O'Brien; Houghton Mifflin 273 pages; $19.95

Tim O'Brien once said he would never have become a writer had it not been for his combat experiences in Viet Nam. Maybe so. For better or worse, he is fated to write about what he knows: the foot soldier's intimacy with fear and death. He did it well in If I Die in a Combat Zone (1973), and even better in Going After Cacciato (1978).

The Things They Carried returns O'Brien to Viet Nam through a series of sketches and stories that can be loosely read as an impressionistic novel about a man's need to attach human faces to his grief. The narrator, like the author, is a 43-year-old writer named Tim. O'Brien camouflages autobiography with fiction but is not shy about personalizing his intentions. "I want you to feel what I felt," he tells the reader. "I want you to know why a story- truth is truer sometimes than a happening-truth."

The gear that he and his platoon carried are precisely itemized: a 26-lb. radio, an 8.2-lb. fully loaded M-16, a 20-lb. pack of necessities, including canteens of water. There are heavier burdens. The chapter "On the Rainy River" finds the narrator considering a dodge from the draft. It is set mainly at a fishing camp in Minnesota where young Tim can practically cast a line across to Canada. The scenery and tone suggest early Hemingway; the difference is that O'Brien's uncertain youth must still go to war before he can join a lost generation.

Once in country, O'Brien succeeds as well as any writer in conveying the free-fall sensation of fear and the surrealism of combat. Sometimes he succumbs to stagy symbolism, such as a scene of a literal burying of a hatchet. But when one character defines death as "like being inside a book that nobody's reading," O'Brien's notion of story-truth goes off like a successful trip-flare, and we suddenly see why he had to become a writer.