Life after wartime
TO DISAPPEAR FROM THE WORLD AS YOU KNOW it and escape to something else—Who hasn’t heard that siren call? It’s long been a theme in the work of The Things They Carried author Tim O’Brien, reluctant bard of the Vietnam War and soldier-poet of the baby boomers. He disappeared himself a while back, stopped publishing and became a father of two boys, finding a fulfilling existence as a teacher in the quiet Texas suburbs.
Those separate lives now converge in O’Brien’s his first in 17 years and a stirring blend of memoir, letters to his and Kurt Vonnegut’s Like those, dwells on the state of America and American life. He takes absolutism to task, finds qualifications for his own pacifism and considers the paradox of a moral society that allows for forever war.
