‘Peace is a Shy Thing’: A Brilliant New Biography of Tim O’Brien

BY MARC LEEPSON

One of the many admirable things about Alex Vernon’s new literary biography, Peace Is a Shy Thing: The Life and Art of Tim O’Brien (St. Martin’s, 560 pp. $37, hardcover; $19.99, Kindle), is that it contains one of the most fully realized accounts of an infantryman’s tour of duty in the Vietnam War I’ve read in decades.

The long section on Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam War experience is an evocative, almost day-by-day recounting of a smart, small-town guy from the Midwest coming of age as a newly minted infantryman at the height of the Vietnam War. In addition to that, it’s filled with flashbacks to O’Brien’s childhood and adolescence and flashforwards to the world-class literary work he would produce beginning in the early 1970s.

O’Brien was drafted into the Army in late July 1968 at 23, two months after graduating from Macalester College. Just before his induction, and again during Infantry AIT at Fort Lewis in Washington, he came within an inch of fleeing to Canada. He arrived in-country on February 4, 1969, was shipped to Chu Lai, and two weeks later joined Alpha Company in the Americal Division’s 5th Battalion, 46th Light Infantry Regiment.

O’Brien started out as an RTO and saw plenty of combat and more than his share of the horrors of war during the first six months of his 13-month tour of duty (he extended to get an early out). In his excellent evocation of O’Brien’s time in Vietnam, Vernon makes good use of a cache of letters O’Brien wrote to his basic training buddy Erik Hansen, who found and shared them not long before Vernon started the book. The in-country section of the book is also based on Vernon’s dive into Army unit records in the National Archives, as well as lengthy interviews with O’Brien and analyses of what he later wrote about his tour in his fiction and nonfiction.

Vernon—a U.S. Military Academy graduate who commanded a tank platoon in the first Persian Gulf War and who teaches English at Hendrix College in Arkansas—goes on to analyze all of O’Brien’s literary output in this remarkable book, blessedly with just a sniff of academese here and there. He appropriately pays special attention to the three works that deal directly with the Vietnam War and O’Brien’s life-shaping experiences there:

If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, his elegantly crafted war memoir (1973); the National Book Award-winning dreamscape novel, Going After Cacciato (1978); and The Things They Carried (1990), the book of linked in-country short stories centering on an infantryman named Tim O’Brien that very likely is the most-celebrated, most-read, and most-studied work of fiction about the American war in Vietnam.

Before Vernon takes the recent college grad to Vietnam in 1969, he offers up an intimate portrait of O’Brien’s life growing up in small-town Minnesota. In many respects, O’Brien’s middle-class upbringing parallelled that of most Baby Boomers. But he and his two siblings also faced not-insignificant emotional tumult because of their parents’ sometimes severe emotional problems. In many ways, Tim O’Brien had to overcome that trauma to excel academically in high school and during his four years at Macalester.

The book’s last 300-plus pages take us through a literary and personal tour of Tim O’Brien’s life to the present day. We follow him to graduate school at Harvard where he began working on a Ph.D. in political science in the fall of 1970; his internship during that time at The Washington Post, which led to abandoning the Harvard program after Combat Zone came out; his job in Washington as a full-time Post reporter; and in 1980, chucking it all to write and teach full time.

VVA gets a mention in the book, as Vernon includes a brief, but revealing look at Tim O’Brien’s role at the 1987 National Convention, where he was one of the 13 Vietnam War veterans who received our first Excellence in the Arts awards. That includes interactions between O’Brien and Oliver Stone, both of whom gave memorable acceptance speeches at the event.

Alex Vernon proves himself just about the perfect person to write Tim O’Brien’s bio. The only member of his West Point class to major in literature, he’s a war veteran in the combat arms, a well-regarded college literature professor and author, and a man who met Tim O’Brien in the early aughts and has kept in contact with him ever since.

Perhaps Vernon’s greatest achievement is making a convincing book-length case on how and why Tim O’Brien became such a great writer. The fact that he did, Vernon writes, “seems a foregone conclusion. He was a bookish kid who dreamed of writing and loved public performance,” including doing magic shows and “starring” on his high school and college debate teams.

From childhood on, he “understood that performance required focused attention and preparation accomplished by virtue of hours upon hours in his own company for an imagined audience.” He “demanded perfection while absorbing the art of impromptu, inventive storytelling, where fact and fiction mix and mingle and dance.”

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Ted Mataxis, Jr., arrived in Vietnam in November 1969, and spent more than two years in-country. Most of that time he was a platoon commander in the 101st Airborne Division’s 187th Infantry Regiment and an ARVN Airborne adviser. Mataxis, a VVA life member, served in-country during the same time (1971) that his father, Army Brig. Gen. Theodore Mataxis, was there during his second Vietnam War tour, when he was the 101st’s Acting Division Commander.

In Ted Jr.’s new book, Ride to the Sound of the Guns: The Life of a Cold War Warrior, Brig. Gen. (Ret.) Theodore C. Mataxis (Casemate, 288 pp. $34.95), he delivers a fact-filled, straightforward biography of his father, focusing on the general’s long, distinguished three-war Army career.

The book is told mostly in Mataxis, Sr.’s words, as it’s based on a memoir he began writing in 2006, the year he died. This admiring biography begins by focusing on his military career, which began when he joined the Army after World War II broke out in 1939, and which continued in earnest on active duty after graduating from the University of Washington the following year. He went on to serve with distinction with the 276th Infantry Regiment in France. During his time in the Korean War, Gen. Mataxis served with the 17th Infantry Division, and, among other engagements, commanded troops at Pork Chop Hill.

Gen. Mataxis retired after his second Vietnam War tour in 1972. He went on to become one of the world’s experts on guerrilla war, wrote widely about it, and taught at the American Military University.

During an extended trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1980s as a civilian adviser during Afghanistan’s war with the Soviet Union, Gen. Mataxis, a self-described “adrenaline junky,” became known among the Afghan fighters as “the Old American General who brought [the Mujahideen] Stinger Missiles.”

Ride to the Sound of Guns is a worthy tribute to a notable and memorable American soldier and scholar.

Ted Jr.’s website is legacyofduty.com.

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