Remembering The Nightmare Author Explores Depth Of Vietnam Experience

Even now Tim O’Brien knows the night sweats.

They may no longer bring with them ready memories of the Southeast Asia he once knew, the land of slow torture and quick death.

But to the acclaimed novelist, whose latest book is the Vietnam-themed “In the Lake of the Woods,” those occasional night phantoms recall familiar feelings.

And all of them involve fear.

“It’s like that line in the book, ‘You don’t have to be in Nam to be in Nam,’ ” he says. “You can be there in your personal life, waking up on guard at 2 in the morning again. Time is just dripping by, slower than hell. Full of despair and hopelessness and terror.”

It’s a measure of the power of those feelings that O’Brien is able to so readily talk about them in the light of day. Even over the phone from his brother’s Minnesota home. Even in those moments between saying goodbye to his parents and heading out to the golf course.

When you’re on a book tour, as O’Brien is for the paperback edition of “In the Lake of the Woods,” there’s always time for one more interview.

“We can get through it,” he says. “We’ll do it quick and make it efficient.”

O’Brien’s name may not be readily recognizable to the average reader. He isn’t as well known as, say, a Pete Dexter or an Anne Tyler, and he hasn’t come close to enjoying the popular success of a Tom Clancy or an Anne Rice (then again, who has?).

But his novels and stories, which include “Going After Cacciato” (which won the 1979 National Book Award), “The Nuclear Age” and the short-story collection “The Things They Carried,” are familiar to fans of Vietnam War literature.

In one way or another, O’Brien’s work helps define, and is defined by, his Vietnam experience. “Going After Cacciato” and “The Things They Carried” were set in the country itself, during wartime; “The Nuclear Age” was more of a document on the effects of the war on the United States itself.

“In the Lake of the Woods” is somewhere in between.

Its protagonist, a failed politician named John Wade, is a survivor of much the same kind of Vietnam War experience that O’Brien himself endured: seemingly endless patrols over mined paths and countryside open to sniper fire.

In O’Brien’s case, the experience resulted in a witnessing of death, recurring nightmares and several well-regarded works of fiction.

In the case of the protagonist of “In the Lake of the Woods,” though, the result was something known as the My Lai massacre.

The novel, which is told in a dreamy sort of flashback, entails the man’s attempts to both save his shaky marriage and cover up his involvement in the murderous affair that saw U.S. servicemen gun down hundreds of Vietnam villagers - most of whom were elderly men and women, young women and children.

But as is often the case, the coverup doesn’t work. And when the facts become public, My Lai and its legacy come visiting - right into Wade’s bedroom.

Clearly, O’Brien retains a special connection to Vietnam. That’s not surprising considering his tour of duty as a combat infantryman placed him in and around My Lai, although about a year after the killings.

About those killings, he would say that the buried memories that return to haunt his novel’s protagonist are part of a larger historical imperative. And, he would say, denial is as dangerous for countries as it is for individuals.

He notes, though it didn’t much surprise him, that little public mention was made of last year’s 25th anniversary of My Lai.

“Nothing much happened,” he says. “America has a lot of virtues as a country. I love America. But it also has a tendency to erase its flaws or forget them. Look what we did to the Indians, the old Jim Crow laws, slavery - and My Lai. We tend to pat ourselves on the back a little too much, I think, and erase the black marks off our national psyche.”

In the book, he says, “John Wade, the character, does pretty much the same thing with his own life - tries to erase his own history, his own flaws. It can have terrible consequences.”

O’Brien has made his own sojourn back to Vietnam, which he wrote about for The New York Times. In his article, though, he wrote both about the pain of going back and the pain of, months later, breaking up with the woman who had accompanied him there. The piece is a powerful evocation of how a person manages to go on living in the face of emotions that seem impossible to withstand.

It was while talking about that article that O’Brien mentioned the terrors of the dark and the compulsion to “wake up screaming obscenities in the middle of the night.”

Of course, such frankness about the lingering effects of their war experiences by O’Brien and others have won the veterans of his era the unpleasant sobriquet of “The Whiner Generation.”

But O’Brien, for one, doesn’t blink at the insult.

“I think we have something to whine about,” he says. “It’s a little like sticking a nail through your tongue and having someone ask you, ‘Why are you crying?’ Well, there was a nail through my tongue, that’s why.”

Like that intrusive nail, Vietnam, O’Brien says, was a event shrouded in ambiguity unlike anything in World War II.

“And if you’re on the ground fighting, you couldn’t tell who was your friend, who was your enemy,” he says. “There was no front line, no rear. And that’s not even taking into account the politics of it all, which also were ambiguous. And America is a country that doesn’t like ambiguity. It like things in sharp black and white. And Vietnam, as you know, was pretty gray.”

Which is just the kind of murky moral atmosphere that gives birth to a My Lai.

“That’s probably what the book is about,” O’Brien says. “That scene at My Lai was like a nightmare unfolding, and you’re taking part in the nightmare. And if you were in Vietnam, you know what nightmares are.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 Photos (1 color)

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: READING Tim O’Brien will read from his novel “In the Lake of the Woods,” at 7 p.m. Monday at Auntie’s Bookstore, Main and Washington.