He was later assigned to advanced individual training and soon found himself in Vietnam, assigned to Firebase LZ Gator, south of Chu Lai. O'Brien ultimately answered the call of the draft on Augand was sent to Army basic training at Fort Lewis, Washington. These people sent me to Vietnam, and they didn't know the first thing about it." "The not knowing anything and not tolerating any dissent, that's what gets to me. "It's not Worthington I object to, it's the kind of place it is," O'Brien told an interviewer. Instead, O'Brien yielded to what he has described as a pressure from his community to let go of his convictions against the war and to participate - not only because he had to but also because it was his patriotic duty, a sentiment that he had learned from his community and parents who met in the Navy during World War II. Unlike his fictional alter ego, however, he did not attempt it. O'Brien hated the war and thought it was wrong, and he often thought about fleeing to Canada. My conscience kept telling me not to go, but my whole upbringing told me I had to." He believes it was this experience that sowed the seeds for his later writing career: "I went to my room in the basement and started pounding the typewriter. Unlike his character, however, O'Brien passed his nights pouring out his anxiety and grief onto the typewritten page. Disappointed and worried, O'Brien - like his character "Tim O'Brien" - spent the summer after his graduation working in a meatpacking plant. Further, graduate school deferments, which exempted students from the draft, were beginning to be discontinued, though O'Brien did not seek out this recourse. In 1968, the war in Vietnam reached its bloodiest point in terms of American casualties, and the government relied on conscription to recruit more soldiers. During the course of his college career, O'Brien came to oppose the war, not as a radical activist but as a campaign supporter and volunteer of Eugene McCarthy, a candidate in the 1968 presidential election who was openly against the Vietnam War. An excellent student, O'Brien looked forward to attending graduate school and studying political science. He earned a bachelor's degree in government and politics. Paul, Minnesota, where he had enrolled in 1964. O'Brien was drafted for military service in 1968, two weeks after completing his undergraduate degree at Macalester College in St. Eventually, the national quiescence and contentment of the 1950s gave way to the political awareness and turbulence of the 1960s, and as the all-American baby boom generation reached the end of adolescence, they faced the reality of military engagement in Vietnam and a growing divisiveness over war at home. O'Brien's childhood is much like that of his characters - marked by an all-American kid-ness, summers spent on little league baseball teams and, later, on jobs and meeting girls. O'Brien's parents were reading enthusiasts, his father on the local library board and his mother a second grade teacher. And like his other main childhood interest, magic tricks, books were a form of bending reality and escaping it. Worthington had a large influence on O'Brien's imagination and early development as an author: O'Brien describes himself as an avid reader when he was a child. O'Brien's hometown is small-town, Midwestern America, a town that once billed itself as "the turkey capital of the world," exactly the sort of odd and telling detail that appears in O'Brien's work. The first of three children, O'Brien was born on October 1, 1946, at the beginning of the post-World War II baby boom era.His childhood was an American childhood. Like "O'Brien," Tim O'Brien, born William Timothy O'Brien, Jr., spent his early life first in Austin, Minnesota, and later in Worthington, Minnesota, a small, insulated community near the borders of Iowa and South Dakota. This distinction is key and central to understanding the novel. Readers should note and remember that although the actual and fictional O'Briens have some experiences in common, The Things They Carried is a work of fiction and not a non-fiction autobiography. O'Brien not only shares the same name as his protagonist but also a similar biographical background. The author Tim O'Brien is not unlike the character called "Tim" that he created for his novel, The Things They Carried, as both author and character carry the stories of similarly experienced lives.
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