Tim O'Brien banned in Solon

The Des Moines Register reported today that the Solon (Iowa) school board has decided to remove one of my favorite books from the curriculum of their eighth grade students - Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. According to the article, the administrators felt that the material - short stories about the US occupation of Vietnam - wasn't appropriate for the students. It's a shame, because it's an incredible book that piqued my curiosity about a war - and an era - that I was never remotely curious about before. And I'm wracking my brain trying to think of what would be so objectionable about the book's content that any average eighth grade student hasn't seen in any typical Hollywood blockbuster. Oh, on second thought, I think I know: beauty and truth. Of course!

Perhaps this is what un-nerved the school board in Solon:

"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to oscenity and evil." (from "How To Tell A True War Story")

O'Brien was a soldier in Vietnam during 1969 and 1970, so he knows whereof he writes. But it's not simple reporting; O'Brien is a master storyteller. His stories, written in the first-person, blend truth and fiction, biography and fantasy, in a way not unlike Milan Kundera. Sometimes the story-truth, O'Brien writes, is more real than the happening-truth. You want to believe that everything he's written is true, but like a magician, he never reveals his hand.

The Things They Carried is a testament to what art can attain: transcendence. "But this too is true: stories can save us," O'Brien writes in "The Lives of the Dead." And when I finished that story, I believed. That is the highest compliment I can pay this, or any, writer. What a shame that the eighth grade students at Solon won't discover that as well.