We wrote songs and then I found that people liked them so we recorded them. So Nick and I and Pete all put our pens to paper separately and as collaborators. So that was the idea and Pete Wernick had done it and I figured maybe I could too. And then when Hot Rize started, everybody said it’s a good value if you write your own songs. I’d already been dabbling in it and never thought much about it. RB: At what point did you go from learning 200-plus songs to songwriting? So I think on my own, starting a couple of years before that, I was like, yeah, if could get $45 a week or something I could not have to ask my parents for money and I could keep playing music and I might get better at it. I remember when Hot Rize started, $100 would keep us going – $100 a week, per member. I probably said if I could make $25 I could live for the week. That’s her quote but I probably said something pretty much to that effect. I know 200 songs now and I figure if I keep learning more, I should be all right.” Is that true? RB: According to lore, you wrote a note to your mom when you dropped out of college and it said something like: “I’m heading west. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. It was too good to leave sitting on my computer and the current pandemic allowed me some unexpected time to transcribe it. Tim O’Brien is a great hero of mine, and a friend, and he imparted some wonderful stories and wisdom in our conversation. It was meant to be the first episode of a new radio show focused on the craft of songwriting that never panned out. It is an ultimate, indelible image of war in our time, and in time to come.This interview was conducted in February 2018. This absurd cargo of purposes they carry through a land and a war from which they are utterly divorced, and through which they move in a state between dream and nightmare. These soldiers are not so much warriors as carriers of war, pack mules on which firepower is placed and among which a terrible mortality is inflicted. Yet all the purposes add up to a grotesque purposelessness. Each item has its purpose: for killing, protecting, preserving. They are as heavily equipped as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. And gradually, a haunting picture is assembled. They carry lucky charms and the thoughts they cling to. The soldiers carry love letters, photos, fungus, lice and each other when wounded. O’Brien goes on and on, gradually extending the verb “to carry.” And then a host of individual choices: foot powder, canned peaches, comic books, condoms, dope, a Bible, a slingshot, brass knuckles. Knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, salt tablets, packets of Koolade, C-rations, water and so on-15 to 20 pounds. It is a list of everything that the members of a platoon carry, and the weight of each item. “What They Carried” begins as nothing but a list, it seems. The most extraordinary piece in the collection is the first, which bears its title.
That night, one of the soldiers does an obscene burlesque of her movements. Only a 14-year-old girl is left, dancing crazily outside the house where her dead parents lie. The platoon goes through a village where an air strike has silenced everything. There is beastliness, and there are odd, invented moralities. To these farm and city boys, all explanations of why they are there are no less imaginary than the hills talking. It is irrational and utterly rational at the same time. They radio for air strikes all night long, the empty hill is hit with napalm, incendiaries, fragmentation bombs. The trees talk politics, the monkeys talk religion. And the fog too, and the grass and the goddamn mongooses. One of the patrol describes it to the narrator: And they begin to hear music: string quartets, choirs, the tinkling glasses and chatter of a cocktail party. It is foggy up there listen is all they can do. All this is told, in fact, in two successive stories, the first called “Enemies,” the second “Friends.” The two, in this unhinging light, are synonymous.Ī patrol goes up to a highland to stay a week and listen for enemy activity. “Swear you won’t kill me.” Jensen swears. Strunk’s leg is blown off Jensen comes over to comfort him. They sign a contract that if either is so badly wounded as to become a wheelchair case, the other will kill him. Not only are they even, but they are buddies. He breaks his own nose with his pistol butt now they’re even. When Strunk returns a few days later, Jensen begins to worry that he may use one of innumerable opportunities to kill him. Jensen and Strunk get into a fight over a jackknife Jensen smashes Strunk’s nose so badly he needs to be hospitalized. These 19- and 20-year-olds, plucked from their ordinary lives and hijacked into a nightmare, have to invent themselves as well as their stories.
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