sionate about, and even when he was growing up on the prairie of Minnesota, he had always been intrigued by storytelling. “We hear stories everywhere and we tell stories to ourselves about our lives and where our lives might be headed,” he said. As a veteran who fought in Vietnam, the experience of which was the inspiration for The Things They Carried, he believes that stories have the ability to heal, console, encourage, embolden and help you see the world fresh. A good story will make us feel something we haven’t felt before. “Stories help us feel a little less alone in this terrifying universe we live in. They remind us that we’re all part of something universal and mysterious,” O’Brien said to a captivated audience. He read aloud a chapter from The Things They Carried, titled “Ambush.” During the reading, which was only about four pages long, the author had to pause and collect himself more than once. Many audience members themselves were deeply moved by his words, some using tissues and others swallowing heavy lumps in their throats. Even though The Things They Carried is a fictional story, there are elements of truth to it as well. “Fiction is made up, but it’s also true, the truest of the true,” O’Brien said. It was inspired by his own trauma and stated that it was an effort to collapse the terror, fear and violence from all the ambushes that occurred. “Anyone who suffers trauma, whether it be breast cancer, war or divorce, go inside themselves like a turtle shell and suffer quietly.” As someone who went through this following the horrors he witnessed in Vietnam, O’Brien continued by saying that this is more than a coping mechanism. When someone
suffers such trauma and actually wish to speak about it, they often worry about being polite, where to start, where to end and what to sanitize. O’Brien vowed that he would not go silent, that he would bear witness at the price of his own psyche, and writing helps him do just that. There were four things that O’Brien learned in Vietnam. First was that if you support a war, you should go. And if you don’t go but still claim to support it, then he himself would believe that you were a hypocrite. He encouraged anyone who felt this way to put their blood where their mouth is by saying that it’s much easier to let someone else or someone else’s child to go fight in a war than it is to go yourself. Second, he said that a bullet can kill the enemy, but it can also manufacture a new enemy. Military violence, as he insisted, can have exactly the opposite effect you intend. Third, he said that “there have never been a shortage of reasons to kill people” over the course of history. He presented an example by asking us to imagine if the President of France came to America and kidnapped Michelle Obama, as if she was Helen of Troy. And fourth, he learned that dead bodies are heavy and turn blue. After three days or so, they grow spongy as well. After a week, the flesh comes off in pieces that you start trying to count. He told us this because he also vowed that he would not sprinkle deodorant on the subject of war. He wouldn’t clean it up and make it sound, look or smell better than what it really was. O’Brien concluded by telling us this: “I look out at all of you and I don’t just see you. I see my friends from forty years ago.” He continued by saying that he sees 16
his younger self in the audience. For Tim O’Brien, wars don’t just end when you sign peace treaties. They go on and on and on until the widows, children and friends of those lost are all dead too and echo through history.
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...With AMC’s The Walking Dead’s popularity and Halloween around the corner, many attended the event and spoke quite highly of it with no negative reviews given as of yet. Many high-speed action events like The Walking Dead Escape seem to have taken over as a new form of entertainment akin to haunted houses but with much more speed and activity. One thing for sure is that The Walking Dead Escape NYC was described as one of the best, attendance wise and put a smile on everybody who went through the undead obstacle course.
26 October 2013