Tim O'Brien in Vietnam, October 1969.

War stories relayed by the voice of the American soldier have been, and always will be, the true voice of the military. Their experiences, emotions, and descriptions bring the realities of combat to life in a way that makes it tangible for those who have never been in the line of fire. It also makes it difficult to pursue an unjust war. In a democracy, a war cannot be won without the support of the people. An effective way of keeping the morale of the country high is to insulate the collective psyche from the horrors of combat. On April 19, 2007 the U.S. Army, in a move that openly ignores the Constitution and actively works to silence the most important voices in the war, implemented Army Regulation 530-1: Operations Security (OPSEC).

530-1 was executed in response to the relatively new blog culture that is quickly establishing itself as a cornerstone in the world of journalism. Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have been blogging since the beginning, sharing their accounts of battles and their opinions of the larger picture of the conflict. 530-1 requires any soldier posting a blog to clear the material with a superior before posting. The regulation goes further by applying the same restriction to personal emails, resumes, and letters home. The scope of 530-1 covers the public sector as well; contractors, civilian Army employees, and the family of soldiers are also bound by the mandate.The climate created by such extreme measures casts doubt on the chances of a voice like Tim O’Brien’s emerging from the current conflict.

KNOCK talked with Mr. O’Brien on his feelings about 530-1 and other issues entangled in the mess that is the Iraq War.

Tim O’Brien: It’s just one more way that the Bush administration is trying to conceal the horrors of what transpires in a war. It’s the same thing as not showing us photographs of the caskets. It strikes me as anti-American. It’s unconstitutional. It’s not fair censorship. Censorship is supposed to be imposed on the condition that vital secrets are being compromised. That’s one thing, but to talk about what happened during the day, and who was hurt and who wasn’t,that’s not in any way related to national security. Someone ought to challenge it in court. I’m just disgusted by it.
The Army will say “we can’t let secrets out because it will aid the enemy,” but the sort of things the soldiers are writing aren’t broadcasting secrets. The enemy knows perfectly well where our troops are going. That’s how they kill them. They know where they are. Soldiers by and large at the grunt level don’t have access to any great secrets anyway. They don’t even know where the hell they are. They’re just walking around nowhere getting blown up. Not to be able to write about that stuff is totally ridiculous.

KNOCK: You wrote much of the material that went into your first book, If I Die In A Combat Zone, Box Me Up And Send Me Home, while serving your tour in Vietnam. Was there a climate of censorship surrounding your ability to write about Vietnam?

Tim O’Brien: I never felt any sense of censorship while I was serving, but something like 530-1 certainly would have affected my writing. Writing is a vent or an outlet for human emotion and human experience, human understanding of the world, it’s always been that way. Human beings are able to speak and to write. It’s a way of transmitting information to other people, getting it out of you and to other people. “This happened today, I’m going to tell you about it. You may not want to listen to it but I’m going to tell you anyway.” People have the option of listening or not listening but if the government is saying you can’t do it no one has the option of listening or not listening. It’s imposed silence.

KNOCK: The Army’s stated motivations for implementing 530-1 do in fact center on threats to security and the leaking of sensitive information, but to the critical eye, the motivations seem much more in keeping with the tenants of fascism, not the freedom and democracy that our soldiers are supposedly fighting for. What does the Bush Administration fear?

Tim O’Brien: I think they fear personal testimony, and they rightfully fear it. They put blinders over a country’s view of what’s occurring in a war. To remove those blinders can’t help them any, it can only hurt them. Guys write about the horrors of IED’s, the horrors of not knowing where the enemy is, and who the enemy is, and how do you separate them, detainees, and whipping them, the maltreatment of so-called detainees. To prevent guys writing about all this is just a way of trying to control the flow of information and the testimony of soldiers and human beings who are caught up in a conflict.
And it’s not going to work, on top of it. You can’t stop millions of human beings from sending letters to their girlfriends, and their fathers and mothers, talking about it when they get home. It can’t work. It just makes me so angry that there’s even an effort to try and make it work. I’m almost speechless. It’s fascist. It reeks of information control and I don’t like it. I hate to engage in that kind of hyperbole, but if it ever applied, it sure as hell applies now.

KNOCK: 530-1 is not the first instance of the United States government going to great lengths to limit the flow of information coming out of Iraq, but it only furthers the perception held by many that this war was started on false pretenses. It also begs the question: do they think they can get away with it?

Tim O’Brien: I don’t know if they can get away with it. They’re so stupid, they’ll do anything they can. They should’ve known that Curveball was unreliable. I just read in galley form a book called Curveball, that’s why I mentioned it. He was the source that we cited for weapons of mass destruction, the sole source that Colin Powell and Bush used in his State of the Union Address. The book is coming out from Random House, and written by a Los Angeles Times reporter named Bob Drogin. Curveball was a chemical engineering guy that graduated bottom of his class in Iraq and went to work in a seed factory. He left Iraq and ended up in Germany, debriefed by the Germans—by the DMD, their CIA! Even the Germans said “I don’t know if weshould trust this guy. Some of the things aren’t adding up.” It turns out he was fabricating virtually everything, and it turns out on top of that that we more or less knew that he was fabricating most stuff.

They should have imagined the war wouldn’t work in the long run, but they didn’t. This is a self-righteous, complacent, ‘we’re right and you’re wrong’, black and white, absolutist view of the world and they’ll do anything to control it. It’s part of an over-arcing syndrome of behavior that I find just so un-American and so in violation of the first ten amendments to our Constitution and I find it unbelievable that Americans tolerate this sort of thing. We just tolerate it. I can’t find language anymore, I’m so sick of it all after years and years of this. I’ve been dreading this interview because I’m so angry about it all. 530-1 is like the straw that broke the camel’s back and hits home because it’s so personal. It has to do with what I went through and what guys are going through right now. They’re saying ‘let’s run a war but not let anybody write about it or talk about it. Lets just go do it, but we won’t show any pictures on TV of the horror, no close ups of the guts trickling out of people’s bellies on both sides, none of that.’ It’s easy to support a war if you don’t have to stare at the bloodshed.

KNOCK: The alarming thing about the censorship of this war is the fact that little is written about the tactics used by the government. 530-1 itself has received very limited coverage in the mainstream media with some major outlets choosing to ignore it completely. Do you have any plans to tackle the issue in your work?

Tim O’Brien:Yes, if I can make myself comprehensible. You can hear the anger in my voice. I have to let time go by to find speech that will catch up, let my tongue catch up with the fury inside my soul. That’s going to take some time. It took time after Vietnam to write The Things They Carried—it took years and years, decades. I have to calm down so that the words coming out of my mouth are not just rhetoric or hyperbole. I feel like just stoning the Pentagon. I know how revolutions start now and how anger starts now. It starts with the tongue not being able to catch up with the emotions in the body. I can’t find words beyond ‘fascists,’ and ‘un-American,’ and ‘violation of our constitution.’ It seems so fundamental of a thing that it should be transparently obvious to us all that the government shouldn’t be doing this sort of thing. Even during WWII when letters actually were censored—I have letters from my dad to my mom saying, ‘what a horrendous thing, we got attacked yesterday and I watched this guy die and that guy die. Here’s how I felt.’ Nobody was censoring that stuff, but they were censoring locations and things like that, they weren’t censoring the testimony of soldiers about the horrors of the war.

KNOCK: You talk about the level of anger that has to be handled to write something coherent. Is there work that you’ve read recently by other novelists where you’ve seen military censorship taken on and taken on well?

Tim O’Brien: I’ve seen aspects of it taken on, but not on this particular issue. The book Fiasco, by Thomas Ricks, took on the whole issue of the military and what’s going on in Iraq. Things like the treatment of detainees. It’s a systematic, level-headed, detailed, thick book that every American ought to read. There are slices of it that have been done. To render it in the terms of fiction I don’t know how the hell you’re going to do it. It’s beyond my capabilities. We’d need a Shakespeare or a Joyce.

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