SOURCE: "Doing the Popular Thing," in The New York Times Book Review, October 9, 1994, p. 33.

Below, Elsen relates O'Brien's personal reasons for writing fiction about the Vietnam War, specifically In the Lake of the Woods.

Like the protagonist of his new novel, In the Lake of the Woods, Tim O'Brien has been driven to do what be considers terrible things because of his need for love.

For Mr. O'Brien, the commission of sin began in earnest in 1969, when he decided to go to Vietnam instead of to Canada after he was drafted into the Army, he said in a recent telephone interview from his home in Cambridge, Mass. He believed the war was wrong—he had even protested it—but he served anyway. "I went to the war purely to be loved, not to be rejected by my hometown and family and friends, not to be thought of as...