A line from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is the very first sentence in my book:

“‘The only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity,’ writes Tim O’Brien in his Vietnam War classic, The Things They Carried. He could have been writing about Milliken’s Bend.”

I open with this in my preface because the story of Milliken’s Bend is a complicated one. The minute you think you “know” what happened – the entire thing shifts and changes. It’s like a Rubik’s cube.

When it came time to write the battle narrative in Milliken’s Bend, I had difficulty. How could I possibly know “what happened” – when the participants themselves gave often wildly conflicting, even accusatory, stories? And if their narratives were convoluted or confusing, even when written shortly after the battle – how could I, 150 years later, possibly pretend to know what happened? How could “truth” be discerned in any of it?

Tim O’Brien held the answer for me. The only thing I could be sure of, as a researcher and most of all as a writer, – was that everything was ambiguous. Instead of attempting to arrive at some sort of objective “truth” about what happened, I embraced the ambiguity. I took the accounts at face value – and then tried to explain how some of the misunderstandings might have come about. I took seemingly unrelated events, and began to see connections between them – connections discernible only through the distance of time, and the ability to confer with numerous sources from a variety of participants – not just one report.

O’Brien’s chapter, “How to Tell a True War Story” became a guide. And I love the precious ambiguity of the title itself: does it mean “How to Narrate a True War Story”  – or – “How to Discern a True War Story”? It is, of course, both. And so it is with Milliken’s Bend.

Another line I find especially relevant: “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.” This, too, is the crux of Milliken’s Bend. Part of the heart of my story, as well as its still-unresolved mystery – is this tension between “what happened” versus “what seemed to happen.”

I remember when I was with a group of writing-friends, in what we called our Writing Circle. I remember I was struggling with how to impose order on the chaos of battle. The simple act of narration and putting-into-words, no matter how feeble the attempt, nevertheless was a way to begin to bring order to the chaos. How could I dare to do such a thing? Yet the story of the battle had to be told.

And then I realized – the answer was in the Circle. I had been trying to impose a linear, chronological, yes, even “orderly” narrative upon the battle scene. Like the soldiers marching forward in line of battle, before the first shots are fired, before literally all hell breaks loose. My answer was to narrate in a “circle” – a less-linear, more eyewitness-type of manner, and allowing the chaos to happen. What was happening in this particular area of the battle, where the opposing sides clashed like angry waves upon each other? Meanwhile, what was happening over here – in these farm buildings where the pickets had taken shelter during the initial attack?  And what about over here, where two Union companies stood their ground behind cotton bales – only to be pummeled by their own artillery from a gunboat? Using a more episodic approach to describing the battle helped, I think, to create a bit of narrative chaos that mimicked, if only in a very broad way, the chaos of the fight – while still being readable and coherent.

“There is no clarity,” O’Brien writes. But it is in precisely the ambiguity where the Truth dwells.