What goes through a person’s mind when they are knee-deep in death? How does a person wrap their brain around constant carnage without a moment of notice? Both Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Sean Huze’s The Sandstorm are filled with stories that bear witness to these questions. In between the joking, the anger, and overtly aggressive responses for coping mechanisms both works also show how the brain has the ability to detach from the harsh reality and then will focus on something a bit more obscure in order to deal with the situation at hand.
Throughout Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story,” taken from his book The Things They Carried, several tales are told. Inevitably because of the nature, the reader is shown how the characters cope with their own realities. In a particular paragraph the author focuses on himself and his memory. One obviously so harsh that he states, “This one wakes me up.” (O’Brien 82) It isn’t really his quick remembrance of seeing Curt Lemmon being blown into a tree that troubles his sleep but instead it is an action/re-action of another army buddy Dave Jenson:
“The parts were just hanging there, so Dave Jenson and I were ordered to shinny up and peel him off. I remember the white bone of an arm. I remember pieces of skin and something wet and yellow that must’ve been the intestines. The gore was horrible, and stays with me. But what wakes me up twenty years later is Dave Jenson singing “Lemon Tree” as we threw down parts.” (O’Brien)How interesting that it is the song that plagues his dreams to the point of waking from sleep and not the horrific image of seeing his friend blown to bits. To imagine climbing up a tree to throw down what is left of someone that was just there moments before and not have those be the images that would wake him in the middle of the night doesn’t seem really possible. And although the author does admit that the scene was awful and a memory that sticks with him still, it seems that the predominant memory is the song that was sang. This is how his brain copes with the trauma of witnessing his friends’ death. And with that song, a disconnection to his friend Curt Lemmon occurs, where he is then no longer referred to as such but instead just as “parts.” (O’Brien 83) The whole scene is obscure and surreal unto itself, but this story shows how the author’s brain holds on to the most obscure scene in order to cope with the reality and also one way that he bears witness to it.
In The Sandstorm, author Sean Huze writes a monologue in which PFC Weems retells an account of what he calls “Just another shit-hole town we shot up” (Huze 13) which also bears witness to the atrocities of war. It also shows how the brain copes with the horrific moments by latching onto the most obscure things: “My ankle rolled and I almost fell into a pile of dead hajjis. I caught my balance and looked down to see what had tripped me. It was a foot. A fucking foot. I picked it up and stared at it. I couldn’t get past it. I was stuck on this foot. There I was, bodies were scattered throughout the streets and it didn’t faze me, but this foot for some reason really fucked me up.” (Huze 13)
PFC Weems proceeds to tell of how he searched for the leg. How he felt compelled to find the owner. As if that would right all of the wrongs he has had to do. Again, with this story, how interesting it is that the speaker openly says that it is not the carnage that he is surrounded by that is so overwhelming but a random appendage, a foot attached to nothing that messed with his head so much. PFC Weems, in order to cope with it all decides that if he can find that person/body that is missing the foot, he can then make it right. Instead of coping with a mass amount of dead bodies and the reality of that, Weems focuses on something so obscure and unreal in order to continue on. Here Sean Huze is showing how one, when faced with the brutal realities of war, can detach themselves in order to have some sort of handle on what lay ahead of them. To look at the moments that the two stories describe is unimaginable. Again, how is it possible to move on and conduct oneself with some sort of normalcy after experiencing times that are so brutal and horrific? One would only hope that there would be a way to detach from the actualities of the moment. How else would you get through it with any sort of sanity? Both excerpts, though told by different authors, set in two different time periods in two different wars effectively show how the brain can place importance on the obscurities of the situation instead of the gruesome actualities that have been placed before them in order to cope with the events at hand. The similarities of the two stories portray one of the many ways men in war got through those moments in time when they were faced with the harshest of situations; and how they possibly saved a bit of their own sanity through the brains natural ability to detach itself from the awful carnage of war that they were participating in.
Works Cited
Huze, Sean. The Sandstorm: Stories from the Front. New York: Susan Schulman Literary Agency, 2004, Print.
O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried: How To Tell a True War Story. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2009. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment