Entertainment

How one veteran’s Vietnam horrors inspired ‘This Is Us’

Last season’s “This Is Us” featured a few scenes of Jack Pearson’s (Milo Ventimiglia) 1971 tour of duty in Vietnam.

Tuesday night’s episode will focus entirely on Jack’s time in Southeast Asia.

Entitled “Vietnam,” the episode is based on the experiences of novelist Tim O’Brien, whose 1990 story collection “The Things They Carried” chronicled his days as a soldier in the 23rd Infantry Division and has sold more than 2 million copies. He is a consultant on the NBC drama this season.

O’Brien, who co-wrote the episode with show creator Dan Fogelman, spent five days in May brainstorming with the show’s large writing staff, in sessions presided over by Fogelman. “Dan had a pretty good idea of how he wanted things to connect,” O’Brien says. “He wasn’t telling us the story exactly. My job was share anecdotes about the setting, what it looked like. Things I’d witnessed. Five or six of these ended up in the episode.”





“I would say, ‘Tim, we need this story go get from A to B,’ and he would come in the next day andƒ paint a story,’ ” Fogelman says. “A little moment, like a hand on the face, that stays with you for decades. It’s very much how our story has evolved.”

Tuesday night’s episode will feature the US draft lottery where young American men learned if they were going to war by watching television. Jack enlists for a special reason. “We have a brother in the war. We have another brother who’s come to find him,” O’Brien says.

That brother is Nicky Pearson (Michael Angarano), a character viewers have only glimpsed in early childhood. The brothers will see combat, as O’Brien did, in the Quang Ngai province of Vietnam, which the vet describes as a “heavily Vietconged” place where land mines were prevalent. “Eighty percent of the casualties came from men having their feet and legs blown off,” O’Brien says.





The most private moments of O’Brien’s experience found their way into the script. “If you misbehaved, you were made to burn s–t. They had these big tanks beneath the outhouses and you would pour kerosene on them and burn them,” he says. “I said this in passing and Dan’s eyes lit up. It’s not gross, but it is sad. It has the effect of reality. It’s a human moment. Two brothers looking at each other over this burning waste.”

Tuesday’s episode will usher in a new Jack storyline that will require Ventimiglia to film scenes in Vietnam. (He’s heading there Tuesday. All the Vietnam scenes have, thus far, been filmed in LA.)

O’Brien likes what he’s seen so far from the actor. “I think Milo nails the essence of what it’s like to care for one’s men in the way I remember it,” he says. “It was love without the romance part. The great sorrow you feel when someone is hurt or dies. You may hate the war yourself. When you’re in it, you’re not thinking about politics or capitalism.





“You’re thinking about staying alive.”





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