I have an old Red Sox cap. By old, I mean from back when I was living in Cambridge, going to grad school, and working on my very first book. It’s blue and red and filthy. The dirtiest thing you’ve ever seen. I can’t even wear it anymore.
But it reminds me of a time in my life, a time of energy and possibilities, when things hadn’t narrowed. I didn’t know if I would be a successful writer or even a writer at all. It was only two or three months after I’d returned from Vietnam, and I was still shaky from the horror of being in combat all the time. I was in an academic program at Harvard that would have led to a job as a teacher or in the State Department, and I would spend from midnight to 2 a.m. working on my book If I Die in a Combat Zone. It wasn’t even a book then—I didn’t think of it as a book for the first year and a half. It was just memories.
During those days, the hat was my way of not being a regular citizen of America, a way of remembering the world I grew up in, a small turkey town of 9,000 people in southern Minnesota. I wore the hat to class and on weekends, all the time. I was 23 or 24, and I was kind of surprised at still being alive. I had expected I’d die over there. So when I look at the hat, it’s reminiscent of the feelings I had then, feelings of rebirth, I’m not dead and What am I going to do with this life that I didn’t expect to have?
~ Tim O’Brien, author, The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato; Austin, TX
