“They Just Lit Those Mountains Up”: Nightmares & Dreamscapes In ‘Nam

Francis Ford Coppola once said of his Vietnam masterpiece, Apocalypse Now, that he did not want to create a Vietnam movie, that rather, he created Vietnam. The reason I bring this up is because one cannot help but find parallels between the surreal imagery and nightmarish events portrayed in the film with those in the short stories “Friends”, “Enemies”, and “How To Tell A True War Story” in O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

What may strike the reader as the most disturbing of these stories is the story-within-a-story about Lee Strunk and Dave Jensen getting into a fight over a stolen jacknife ending with Jensen breaking Strunk’s nose. What the disturbing part is that Jensen begins to panic to the point where he thinks Strunk is out to get him and ultimately takes the butt of his pistol and smashes his own nose to tell Strunk he’s “square”.

The story takes an even darker turn when it comes to the section where O’Brien describes the death of Curt Lemon; he and Rat Kiley are messing around a tree with smoke grenades when Lemon steps on a rigged 105mm round and is ripped to pieces and thrown into the tree. Later, Anderson and O’Brien are ordered up to clean all of Lemon’s body parts and as he’s throwing Lemon’s body parts down, Anderson decides to sing “the Lemon Tree”. This bizarre happening only adds to the nightmare that had become Vietnam for these young men who then turn to immature outlets to deal with their emotions; this is proven when Rat Kiley then tortures a baby water buffalo by repeatedy shooting it without killing it to release his emotions, thus making the section a bizarre, nightmarish love story.

However, quite possibly the strangest story within this section is the one told by Mitchell Anderson about a recon team that is sent up into the mountains (the most eerie place in Vietnam) and is told to hold their position for seven days with no contact whatsoever. However, on their seventh day in the mountains, they begin to hear strange music coming from all around them. It continues for a day when suddenly the sounds of a cocktail party and music from a chamber orchestra and opera are thrown in. The men begin to panic and call in a massive air and artillery strike on the mountains, “lighting them up”. When the strike is over, the men still hear the music and cannot offer an explanation to the commanding officer.

It was the passages in this section of the story that were the more interesting and bizarre of what has been read so far, due to the fact that they destroyed the common conception of Vietnam. When one thinks about that war instantly images of lush jungle, men in black pajamas, and the Vietnamese stereotype (including the one from Full Metal Jacket). Rarely does one think about how that war became a dream/nightmare in the aesthetic sense, fueled by rock and roll, drugs, men in body paint toting M-16s, and burning mountains.