Conrad had the open sea. Faulkner had the South and fictional Yoknapatawpha. Tim O'Brien has the Vietnam War.

"Ultimately, it's in every book I write. Maybe not directly and overtly, but it is there," said O'Brien, who served in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970. "The themes are always with me — the loss of the person you used to be, the wish that you could get back what you've lost, moral and emotional lessons. It will always be a source of inspiration.

"It might seem limiting," he said. "But you can also expand on it and see the world in new ways, ways that others can't."

The author of such acclaimed Vietnam novels as "Going After Cacciato" and "The Things They Carried," O'Brien is in Honolulu this week for a series of appearances at "Thirty Years After: Literature and Film of the Vietnam War," the University of Hawai'i's Fall Festival of Writers.

O'Brien will give the keynote address at 4 p.m. today at the East-West Center's Imin Conference Facility. Retired Gen. Eric Shinseki, the former chief of staff of the U.S. Army and a Vietnam veteran, lectures at 7 tonight at the UH Campus Center.

Festival organizer Mark Heberle, a UH professor of English and a Vietnam veteran, has left the topics of the numerous presentations and panel discussions open to participants, suggesting only that they consider two questions: What are the differences in American and Vietnamese literary and artistic handlings of the Vietnam War, and in what way is Vietnam still a compelling subject for writers?

"One constant criticism of American writing on the war is that it doesn't fully handle, or handles stereotypically, attitudes of the Vietnamese people," Heberle said. "What will be compelling is how the Vietnamese writers' standpoint is represented. There are many people who left Vietnam and now live in America who are finding their voices and telling their stories."

The field is immensely broad and often problematic, encompassing canonical works like Michael Herr's "Dispatches" and Francis Ford Coppola's Conrad-inspired "Apocalypse Now" to the odd run of Reagan-era redemption films built on POW rescue fantasies.

In O'Brien's case, the decades have provided a useful distance. Time has allowed for recollections of the war to be put into a broader perspective and expressed in ways that transcend the literal reality of those battlefield moments.

"In general, we've gone from the pretty God-awful, melodramatic, touch-all-the-bases, flag-waving, gung-ho, World War II feel to those early books and movies, to writing and film that is more ambiguous, a little less strictly realistic," said O'Brien, 59. "We've gone to what I would view as artistic, not just holding up a mirror to events."

O'Brien said the first major American film to address the war — "The Green Berets" starring John Wayne — suffered from an inability to grasp what was then a new and confounding experience for Americans. Without a current way of talking and thinking about the war to draw on, works like "The Green Berets" reached back to heroic conventions of World War II cinema.

"It had all the hallmarks of cliche," O'Brien said. "It didn't seem very faithful to what I saw, the mood and the ambiguity of it all."

"Vietnam ran counter to our national mythology of us as potent, victorious, efficacious, and powerful in the world," O'Brien said. "We now had to think of ourselves as less than ideal. My Lai was emblematic of this. Napalm. Huge civilian casualties that didn't get us anywhere, that didn't get us close to winning. All this ran counter to our expectations."

O'Brien had just completed a degree in government and politics at Macalester College in his native Minnesota when he received his draft notice. Though he had been accepted to graduate school at Harvard, he opted not to ask for a deferral and entered the Army in 1969. He served a 13-month tour of duty in Vietnam, assigned to Firebase LZ Gator, south of Chu Lai.

O'Brien said his own early efforts to write about the war — including his well-received first book "If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Send Me Home" — faltered because they focused on recreating the experience at the expense of a broader vision.

"The only virtues I see in my first book were reality and honesty," he said. "Only later did I realize that I hadn't succeeded in making it go beyond that war and that place into something that would resonate."

What little O'Brien has seen and read of new works based on the war in Iraq seems to fall in the same trap.

"They seem very similar to the early accounts of Vietnam — the standards of the heroic baptism-under-fire stories," he said. "They could have come out in 1944. I found them as dull and predictable as my first tries.

"It could be that the experience is just too fresh," he said. "It takes time for things to take hold. Like, what does it mean to win in Iraq? The complications and difficulties have to take hold in the imagination. What about duplicity? If you are lied to or fed false claims, you kind of swallow it until the bitterness takes effect and you just sort of wake up. I cut my country a break for a long time."

In fact, O'Brien sees much in common between Vietnam and the current conflict.

"Plenty," he said. "To the point of being eerie. Civilian casualties. Guerrilla warfare. Who do you shoot back at? There is no front and no rear. The enemy is everywhere and nowhere. Guys feeling the same constellation of emotions.

"When you can't lash out at an enemy it sort of plays on your emotions. You get frustrated and angry and you might take it out on whatever comes along."

When today's generation of soldiers return home, some of them will also take up the lifelong project of creating art from their experiences and in so doing find their own way to connect to the world around them.

"There is still a role for stories," O'Brien said. "They go beyond the spectrum of CNN and Fox News. They allow you to feel something of what someone else feels."

In addition to O'Brien, the festival features several distinguished writers and scholars who specialize in Vietnam. Among them: Philip Beidler, a professor of English at the University of Alabama and the author of the seminal book "American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam"; Andrew Lam, a writer and editor with Pacific News Service and author of the new book "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora"; and Wayne Karlin, a professor of language and literature at the College of Southern Maryland. Karlin is a prolific author, and the editor of numerous volumes of Vietnamese fiction and poetry.

In connection with the writers festival, the Academy of Arts has been running a series of free Vietnam War-related films, with presentations from local and national writers and scholars.

EXCERPT FROM TIM O’BRIEN’S ‘THE THINGS THEY CARRIED’

“They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They die so as not to die of embarrassment.”

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@honoluluadvertiser.com.