"Dumb Coozes" and Damaged Men: Female Stereotypes, Male Victimization, and Manipulative Narration in the Things They Carried and in the Lake of the Woods

"I have done bad things for love, bad things to stay loved. Kate is one case. Vietnam is another" (Tim O'Brien, "The Vietnam in Me")."It was the nature of love that John Wade went to the war. Not to hurt or be hurt, not to be a good citizen or a hero or a moral man. Only for love. Only to be loved" (O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods)."Did I choose this life of illusion? Don't be mad. My bed was made, I just lied in it" (John Wade, In the Lake of the Woods).Many critics of Vietnam War literature have long examined the variables of male bonding in a combat zone and the subsequent sexual perversion that resulted from losing one's identity in a group superficially connected by the more macabre aspects of war. However, very little interest has been garnered regarding the residual misogynistic impulses that carried over to American women after the vets returned home. Author of multiple essays, short stories, and prizewinning novels on the Vietnam War (including, most notably, Going After Cacciato, recipient of the National Book Award), Tim O'Brien has frequently been tagged as the voice of the Vietnam soldier. Obsessed with "truth," O'Brien has painstakingly crafted a unique type of storytelling, one that admittedly embellishes to convey the "realness" of his actual war experience - with the "realness" allegedly found specifically in the fabrication. During his career O'Brien has repeatedly defended the intermingling of fact and fiction that makes his works undoubtedly his. In his article, "Tim O'Brien's 'True Lies'"? Tobey C. Herzog uses the release of In the Lake of the Woods as an opportunity to once again examine the role of O'Brien's real life in his "fictional" texts. While he concedes that "all fiction writers are literary liars" because "deceit is funda mental to their art," he notes that O'Brien stands apart from his peers due to the fact that "unlike many writers, [he] draws an inordinate amount of attention to this authorial deceit in a very self-reflexive manner, and his deception is often personal" (895). After considering various possibilities, Herzog theorizes that maybe vanity drives O'Brien's need to plant himself into his fiction: "Is it conceivable that a writer would consciously deflect attention away from his work onto himself in order to massage the ego, attract reviewers' attention, or sell books?" (912).While "ego" goes a long way to explain how "Tim" finds his way into many short stories and novel chapters, it does not fully explain the very "true" ways O'Brien (the narrator and/or character) seems to resent the girls that Tim and his buddies pine for back home. Among all the Vietnam War writers, O'Brien's works most often emphasize soldiers' destructive feelings towards American, rather than Vietnamese, women, both during and after their combat tour. In fact, O'Brien's novels are curiously devoid of sexual assault, even when in a book as graphic as In the Lake of the Woods he records everything John Wade sees during the infamous My Lai massacre. Instead of showing his protagonist sodomizing village girls or VC soldiers, O'Brien reveals his cha ra cter 's over whel mi ng anxieties about his Amer ica n gir lfr iend, a nd suggests that not only are his insecurities valid and legitimate - rather than created or embellished - but that they also push the soldier to his breaking point rendering the woman who prompted his anguish liable for his actions: even for ones many years after his war.Indeed, with the release and subsequent adulation of Lake in 1994, O'Brien's treatment of his female characters - coupled with the knowledge that O'Brien writes himself int o his novels - deserves more attention than previously bestowed. Once regarded with scorn and obsessed over from afar by soldiers in his other novels, doubly reduced to a "dumb cooze" via a frustrated Rat Kiley and equally aggravated O'Brien (the "character") in The Things They Carried, the unsympathetic female in Lake is suddenly and brutally murdered by her traumatized veteran, with whom we are subtly yet distinctly encouraged to sympathize and render blameless. …