The Viet Nam Era

In 1968, after graduating, Tim O’Brien was drafted into the Army to fight in the Vietnam war. He served in the Army’s Fifth Battalion, Forty-Six Infantry (the America Division), Third Platoon, A Company to March of 1970. Although he did not participate in the massacre at My Lai, his platoon had been stationed there one year afterwards, in a place he still considers to be evil, stating he felt "the wickedness that soaks into your blood and heats up and starts to sizzle" in an article published in The New York Times Magazine in 1994, months after publishing In the Lake of the Woods, his sixth book.

When Tim O’Brien returned from Vietnam, he carried with him a Purple Heart for his contributions in Vietnam. He later entered into the Ph.D. program in government at Harvard University, where he spent two years writing for the Washington Post. During this time, O’Brien wrote his memoirs, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973). Two years later, Tim O’Brien’s first novel, Northern Lights (1975) was also published. Tim O’Brien left Harvard in 1976 without obtaining his doctoral degree, choosing instead to write.