The Things They Carried

by Tim O'Brien

The million-copy bestseller, which is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.

‘The Things They Carried’ is, on its surface, a sequence of award-winning stories about the madness of the Vietnam War; at the same time it has the cumulative power and unity of a novel, with recurring characters and interwoven strands of plot and theme.

But while Vietnam is central to ‘The Things They Carried’, it is not simply a book about war. It is also a book about the human heart – about the terrible weight of those things we carry through our lives.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Classics, War, Short Stories, School, Historical

273 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 28, 1990

About the author

Tim O'Brien is an American novelist who served as a soldier in the Vietnam War. Much of his writing is about wartime Vietnam, and his work later in life often explores the postwar lives of its veterans.
O'Brien is perhaps best known for his book The Things They Carried (1990), a collection of linked semi-autobiographical stories inspired by his wartime experiences. In 2010, The New York Times described it as "a classic of contemporary war fiction." O'Brien wrote the war novel, Going After Cacciato (1978), which was awarded the National Book Award.
O'Brien taught creative writing, holding the endowed chair at the MFA program of Texas State University–San Marcos every other academic year from 2003 to 2012.

Reviews

[Lyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was in the spring of 2006 and I was on patrol in Kirkuk Iraq with a unit in the 101st Airborne. I had my full “battle rattle” on: helmet, body armor, vest with extra magazines, M4. We were in the Kurdish part of the city and it was a beautiful day in the bazaar.

I came to love the Kurdish people, they were hardworking and resilient. Many people don’t know this but a percentage of Kurdish folks are red headed. No kidding, fair skin like me and RED hair. It was the kind of day where in the back of our mind we were maybe more vigilant than necessary because the threat of anything bad seemed so far away – so therefore we needed to be more on the guard. But for the most part, it was a quiet day and people were out shopping and enjoying the day.

I was on the sidewalk and looking at the goods on display. Huge bags of nuts and seeds, fabric, plastic toys, a little bit of everything. A mother was walking with her little boy, he looked about 2 or 3, with a cute brown outfit that was tailored to fit him, perhaps homemade. I noticed her looking at some goods and he saw something across the street and like little boys the world over, took off past me and headed into the street.

I am a father of three boys and at that time they were 16, 13 and 6 and I thought about them everyday if not hourly. My wife and I had been chasing healthy and happy, mischievous boys for years and if I was hyper vigilant for bad guys, I was even more sensitive to children getting loose.

As natural as if I were on the sidewalk in Middle Tennessee, I reached down and caught him, said something incomprehensible to him like “whoa little man, don’t loose momma” and I smiled at his mother and she smiled at me and then in that moment, I was not an armed soldier occupying her city and we spoke the same language and we were neighbors keeping a little boy out of the street.

That was years ago and so much happened over there, but I will always remember that moment because it was an instance of unconditional and timeless humanity during wartime. The reality was and is that labels like "soldier" and "enemy" and "foreign national" do little to assuage the inherent and complicated humanity that we all bring with us and share between us.

What Tim O’Brien accomplished in The Things They Carried, his 1990 collection of short stories and essays about his experiences in Vietnam two decades earlier, is to demonstrate that even in the middle of a horrific war experience, that the soldiers and residents of that country were fundamentally and undeniably all human and capable of experiencing the wide scope of human emotion amidst wartime, and further that the very lethal nature of war made the emotions more vivid and alive.

Whereas all of my brothers in arms and I volunteered, O’Brien and his fellow soldiers were mainly drafted and were thus accidental warriors because of conscription. Here were young men who did not want to be there, for the most part, but O’Brien takes an expansionist and objective stance and reveals that some people did find their place there and learned things about themselves they would not have otherwise discovered but for that martial experience.

Poignant, touching, endearing, heartbreaking, terrifying, saddening, maddening, O’Brien has succinctly stated what so many have before tried to and failed. He has formed a voice from this wilderness of human experience and has documented for us all a glimpse into moments of humanity during wartime.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first bought The Things They Carried at the Bruised Apple, a used bookstore and coffee shop in downtown Peekskill, New York, back in 1991 when I was fifteen years old. By the time I graduated from high school a few years later I'd read it so often that the pages, already brittle, were nearly worn through, entire sections underlined in pencil. Loaned out and lost to a college crush years ago, a dear friend bought me a replacement copy awhile back signed to me by Tim O'Brien himself. This new copy is not quite as loveworn, but still it is cherished.

The beauty of this book lies not necessarily in the war stories at its center, but rather in the undulating, overlapping entanglements that are people's lives, in the act of using storytelling as a means of recapturing our histories, bringing the many facets of our so often fragmented selves forward into the present day. The lyrical poetry of O'Brien's writing combined with the brutality of Vietnam imagery is truly a shock, traumatizing yet powerfully beautiful in its way, and the force of language itself is a revelation.

As O'Brien writes, "The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head."

[Jim Fonseca · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Edited for typos and spoilers 2/7/22]

About 20 connected short stories from an author who has become the main literary spokesperson for the story of Americans in the Vietnam War. The book is highly rated on GR (4.1 with almost a quarter-million ratings). How often do you see the front pages with 40 blurbs praising the work from every recognized source you can think of: from the NT Times (which listed it as a Book of the Century) and The Wall Street Journal to Booklist and Publishers Weekly.



The author warns us that he is an unreliable narrator. He frequently talks to the reader and writes that this or that story may or may not be true. It’s as if we are in the war zone and guys are telling us stories of “things they heard.” The time frame ranges from before the war to twenty years after. Several stories are only two or three pages.

The title story, first in the book, tells us how much we can tell about the personalities of the men in the field by the extra items they carry with them at all times: love letters; a Bible; dope; condoms; a dried human thumb; a slingshot (a weapon of last resort); a rabbit’s foot; vitamins; tanning lotion; a girlfriend’s pantyhose around the neck.

In "How to Tell a True War Story," the author sets the tone: “If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue.”

“I should forget it. But the thing about remembering is that you don’t forget.”

In “On the Rainy River,” the author spends a week at a deserted summer camp in far northern Minnesota. He works for an elderly man, trying to work up the courage to flee to Canada to avoid the draft. "I was a coward. I went to the war.”



Of a medic who worked on a base where wounded were flown in by helicopter to be stabilized before being flown again to a real hospital: “It was gory work, Rat said, but predictable. Amputations, mostly – legs and feet….For a medic, though, it was ideal duty, and Rat counted himself lucky.”

“Notes” looks at the toll on men after they returned home. One man lives with his parents and drives the several miles around a lake in his hometown for hours every night. “ 'The thing is’ he wrote, ‘there’s no place to go. Not just in this lousy little town. In general. My life, I mean. It’s almost like I got killed over in Nam.’ ”

A young man’s mother writes to the author telling him of his friend’s suicide (her son). “He’d been playing pick-up basketball at the Y; after two hours he went off for a drink of water; he used a jump rope; his friends found him hanging from a water pipe. There was no suicide note, no message of any kind. ‘Norman was a quiet boy, his mother wrote, ‘and I don’t suppose he wanted to bother anybody.’ "



Powerful writing. The author is also famous for his other books about the Vietnam War, including Going After Cacciato, which was made into a movie. Many of the stories in Carried were made into episodes of a TV series ‘This is Us.’

I recently read and reviewed a counterpart to this novel - the view of the war from a troop of North Vietnamese soldiers. It is Novel Without a Name by Duong Thu Huong. In it, an old woman picks up bodies of soldiers from battlefields, buries them, and recounts the personal items she save from them - a lot like 'the things they carried.'

Top photo from Britannica.com
A Vietnam landscape in Cao Bang province from dailymail.co.uk
The author from pmcdeadline2.files.wordpress.com

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

“It’s time to be blunt. I’m forty-three years old, true, and I’m a writer now, and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier. Almost everything else is invented…I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening truth.”
- Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried has sat on my bookshelf for years. Maybe since high school, meaning that it has sat on various shelves, in various rooms, in various states, for almost twenty years. I have no excuse for this. No good excuse, anyway. The other day, one of my (grossly overloaded) bookcases collapsed. While sifting through the debris, I found a copy of the novelization of the movie Independence Day. Yes, that movie. The one with Randy Quaid “acting” crazy. Not only did I have it, but I remembered reading it.

But not The Things They Carried.

Until now.

Spurred on by Ken Burns’ The Vietnam War, which features O’Brien as a contributor, I finally tore through this thin volume. I’m glad I did.

***

The Things They Carried is one of the most well-known – if not the most well-known – war novel in the English language. In case you’re like me, though, and you haven't gotten around to this yet, it is an interlocking series of short stories. Many of the stories appeared at different times and in different venues, but they are meant to go together, flowing one from the next. Each story informs, amplifies, and sometimes even critiques the others.

All the stories revolve around the men of Alpha Company. This is a fictional unit, but O’Brien toys with the idea of truth and fiction a great deal. This begins before the book even starts, when O’Brien dedicates The Things They Carried to Alpha. That might be the most surprising thing to me. I expected a hardcore look at Vietnam. Instead, it is a powerful piece of metafiction that happens to be set in Vietnam.

***

The Things They Carried started off pretty much as expected, opening with the famous eponymous tale detailing what the men of Alpha Company carried into war, from firearms and claymores to love letters and charms. It is good stuff, yet not entirely unique. Growing up in the shadow of Vietnam, I used to read a good deal of Vietnam war fiction, many of the titles borrowed from the bookshelves of veterans. Most of these books – from the great to the good to the pulpy to the terrible – are oriented at the platoon or company level, following small groups of disparate men in the jungle. For a while, I recognized O'Brien's novel as a familiar species, even if its sensitivity was different.

Soon enough, it starts to separate itself from the pack.

***
The next two paragraphs may – or may not – constitute spoilers. Out of an abundance of caution, you may want to skip them.

Partway through the The Things They Carried, O’Brien moves in an unexpected direction. He begins interjecting more of himself into his writing. He caps this off by telling two stories in succession, the latter story explaining that the former had been fictionalized, that names had been changed, that events had been elided.

At first, O’Brien’s manipulation of the artificiality of the novel as a form took me out of things. Good fiction forces you to suspend your disbelief. But when you point out literary tropes, it’s no longer possible to harbor that suspension. Eventually, though, O'Brien's technique started to pay off. It hit me that his musings on his own inventions and story-making decisions gave his tales an unexpected authenticity. I began to believe, wholeheartedly, in an underlying realness, despite the fact that everything – including O’Brien’s meta-commentary – is make believe.

***

Of course, none of the literary experimentation found here would mean a thing if it lacked substance. The Things They Carried packs a lot of memorable moments into less than 250 paperback pages. There is a darkly hilarious sequence in which a soldier at a thinly-regulated medical detachment invites his girlfriend in from stateside to spend time with him in-country. The premise is gonzo, and only gets better as the girlfriend rapidly transforms into Colonel Kurtz. She starts visiting nearby villages, hangs out with the Green Berets, and eventually participates in patrols and ambushes.

Another section, haunting and mournful, sees the O’Brien character deciding whether to run to Canada in order to avoid Vietnam. He drives up to the Rainy River, where he spends a week with an old man at an otherwise-empty resort. The old man takes him fishing, right next to the international border:

I remember staring at the old man, then at my hands, then at Canada. The shoreline was dense with brush and timber. I could see tiny red berries in the bushes. I could see a squirrel up on one of the birch trees, a big crow looking at me from a boulder along the river. That close – twenty yards – and I could see the delicate latticework of the leaves, the texture of the soil, the browned needles beneath the pines, the configurations of geology and human history. Twenty yards. I could’ve done it. I could’ve jumped and started swimming for my life. Inside me, in my chest, I felt a terrible squeezing pressure. Even now, as I write this, I can still feel the tightness. And I want you to feel it – the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You’re at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You’re twenty-one years old, you’re scared, and there’s a hard squeezing pressure in your chest.

The Things They Carried is filled with such moments of beauty, sadness, perceptiveness, and power. It should be said, though, that it is a very narrow viewpoint into the Vietnam experience. The fictionalized O’Brien writes from the perspective of a well-educated young white man, which makes him a familiar Virgil of Vietnam. There is not much separating the O’Brien-narrator from Charlie Sheen’s Taylor in Platoon, or Matthew Modine’s Joker in Full Metal Jacket. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. It is – after all – the distillation of his experiences. He’s not going for the final, comprehensive word on decades of fighting in Southeast Asia. I mention this only because limits the novel’s breadth. Topics you might expect, such as politics or race, are barely mentioned, if at all.

***

Really, there’s not much for me to add, only repeat. The Things They Carried is as good as advertised. The biggest surprise is that it had as much to say about writing and story structure as it did about the most controversial war in American history.

[Emily May · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Things They Carried reads like a confession, which, I suppose, in many ways it is. War is a theme in so many books, be they historical fiction, memoirs, alternate histories... and I've certainly read my fair share of them. But stretching my mind back over the years right now, I struggle to recall one that has affected me quite so much. Perhaps I would put it on equal footing with Drakulic's "S" - a heartbreakng novel about the treatment of women in the female war camps during the Bosnian war. But the main difference between the two is that this one is autobiographical. However, unlike a lot of non-fiction I've read, it is also written beautifully, lyrically and powerfully. Telling the horrors, the friendship, the fear and the shame of the Vietnam war with brutal honesty. This is one read that I may never have found without the 1001 book list and it is one I believe fully deserves its place on the list.

The book is split into what some may call short stories but are really all episodes of the same story. A sad story that encompasses the many different aspects of soldier life during the Vietnam war. But it's also about the befores and the afters. How did a young, blood-quesy liberal, who had taken a stand against the war while at university become a soldier who carried out brutal orders and killed without thinking? There is an awfully bleak sadness to this tale that lingers in the very existence of the novel - the fact that O'Brien still finds himself writing war stories long after the war is over. That there are memories and confessions tied up inside him, begging to be told. Despite the stunning prose and vivid re-imagining of these stories, reading The Things They Carried is a little bit like watching someone break down. The author talks at one point how embarrassing confessions are for the people who have to hear them and yet he admits his stories must be told, anyway.

But this also isn't a difficult book. You might expect it to take some effort but O'Brien knows exactly what he's doing as a writer. It's easy to get caught up in the frightening world he is sharing and realise you've read half the book when you only sat down to read a chapter. The stories seemed to fly by in an array of horrifying colour, I was utterly mesmerised from start to finish. And I want to stress something about that: this is not a gratuitous torturefest. Which is perhaps why this story feels so real and powerful. If O'Brien merely wanted to inflict upon us a book that was like a car crash, he could have painted more gory pictures of disemboweled soldiers but the real battle for O'Brien has always been a psychological one. And the things they really carried weren't the ammunition, the pictures and letters from loved ones, or lucky talismans, it was the fear, the guilt and the tremendous loss of innocence.

When it comes to the Vietnam war, things like blame and pity and accusation are thrown all over the place in a million pointing fingers. One minute it's the evil Vietcong setting booby traps to slice up teenage American boys, the next it's evil American soldiers massacring villages and pouring napalm on screaming children. This book is about neither of those. O'Brien sees both US soldiers and Vietcong as young men thrown into something they didn't understand, both victims of a war that was out of control. If anyone gets the blame, it's the highers ups, the politicians and state leaders, people who sit in an office and order teen boys to go out to fight and die. The citizens who shake their heads at the cowardice of a young man who refuses to fight for his country, even when they have no idea why he's fighting.

A surprisingly powerful book that will stay with me for a long time.

[Jaline · Rating 5 out of 5]

These connected stories are about young men in their late teens and early twenties doing their best to carry the weight of a brutal war on their shoulders, along with dozens of pounds of field kit and weaponry. They carry so much weight it is hard to even imagine how they could walk the miles they did, crossing rivers, muddy streams, up hills and down into valleys, somehow placing one foot in front of the other while their eyes and ears scan for danger.

The equipment is not all they carry. Some carry guilt, some carry cowardice, some carry aggression, some carry courage, some carry fear, some carry righteousness, some carry hatred, and some carry doubt. Of all the feelings they carry, the weight of futility has to be the hardest to bear. Maybe futility isn’t the right word. They carry with them the knowledge that where they are and what they are doing is all the choice they have. Short of doing damage to themselves to be airlifted out of there, they all carry the weight of being stuck.

These stories don’t stop with the horror and macabre humour of being part of a platoon of young men in war. There is also a story about what one of them experienced after the war. His need to talk about it and his inability to do so. His recognition that he needs purposeful work versus his doubt that any such thing exists any more.

Tim O’Brien’s writing is exceptional. With one sentence he can cut to the heart of an event. Occasionally he uses repetition of a scene or sequence that made me feel I was there, living it, then re-living the shock of it, trying to find the sense in it.

This book does not go into the politics of war and does not mention the hawks sitting behind huge desks with lovely scenery outside their windows, busy directing traffic regardless of what the cost in human lives may be. So, I won’t go into it, either.

This book is about being in the thick of the traffic – driving blind in a night so dark there is no difference between eyes-open and eyes-closed. It is about not knowing – if you have enough gas, if a tire will blow, if the vehicle will overheat, if it will be blown up into the trees or bogged down and sunk in a field of sewage. It is about being one of many little vehicles with two legs and heavy burdens to carry and not knowing if you will ever see home again.

This was a Traveling Sisters Group read with Brenda, Diane, JanB, Marialyce, and Nikki. This was a great choice for a Group read and discussion and I enjoyed it a lot. For more reviews of this book as well as many others, visit the Sisters blog at https://twogirlslostinacouleereading....

[Adina ( not enough time ) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Audiobook narrated by Bryan Carson

I've never thought I would give 5* to a collection of stories about War even if it deals with the Vietnam conflict, the one that interests me the most. However, here I am, lost for words in front of this masterpiece.

The book is a collection of related short stories about the author's time as a soldier in Vietnam. It is a memoir of sorts, definitely antiwar. The author informs us from the beginning that he is unreliable, that the events in the stories might of might not have happened. I learned from many other books that memory is unreliable so I always read books inspired from real life with that aspect in mind. All the stories are powerful and well written, heart wrenching, mostly sad, some angry, some melancholic.

The narrator is the famous actor, Bryan Carson. He has a similar voice to Titus Welliver, the actor from Bosch. I listened to Titus reading the 1st volume of the series where there are quite a few flashbacks from Bosch's time in Vietnam. For me it was a bit surreal, the too books melted into one due to the similar voices, it was an interesting experience.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awestruck may be the best way to describe how I felt upon reading this book the first time. So how did I feel upon reading it the second time? I just want to bow at Tim O'Brien's feet while muttering a Wayne's World style "I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy."

Using non-linear narrative and stringing together seemingly unrelated stories into one ultimately cohesive work, O'Brien achieves something that traditional narrative never could: his work reflects the emotional truth of what it was like to be a soldier in Vietnam and to be a veteran still living with memories that, when triggered, seem as real and visceral as if they were happening in the present. This is memoir, metafiction, magical realism, and a whole grab bag of other literary genres rolled into one. O'Brien himself admits that we as readers may not know which of the stories are "happening-truth" (what objectively happened) and which of the stories are "story-truth" (stories that may not have happened but because they strike the right emotional chord are more valid than what really happened). However, the reader should not feel manipulated by this storytelling technique as it seeks to forge a connection between those who were there and those who were not; it does not seek to tell what happened, but to make you feel what it was like to be there. The book is nothing short of a masterpiece.

Cross posted at This Insignificant Cinder

[Kemper · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’d be a bad idea to challenge Tim O’Brien to a round of Truth-Or-Dare because he’d find a way to pick Truth, launch into a story, recant it, then make you think he really chose Dare, but in the end, you’ll be pretty sure he actually told you the Truth after all. Maybe…

That’s kind of the point about this account of his time Vietnam as an infantry soldier that warns us that war stories are tricky. The ones that sound true are probably lies and the ones that seem outlandish probably have a healthy dose of truth in them. By telling us some fact and some fiction, then revealing which is which (Allegedly.), O’Brien shows that sometimes a well told lie based on fact has more power than a real story accurately told.

Taken together, O’Brien’s stories make it clear that he spent the decades after the war mulling over the various things he took away from it. This isn’t the memoir of a guy who obtained some kind of closure by writing it, it’s the story of the fear, doubt and confusion he still wrestled with decades later. In order to convey that experience, he had to tell the reader some war stories and let us decide just how true they were.

[J.L. Sutton · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head."



I've admired Tim O’Brien’s writing since I first read Going after Cacciato several years ago; that book has long been one of my favorites. The Things They Carried is a different kind of book, but it shares with Going after Cacciato a powerful sense of how it feels for a soldier to be at war. O’Brien doesn’t debate the merits of the Vietnam War, but thoughtfully speaks about the burdens, hopes and fears the soldiers in Alpha Company bore (thus the title of the book). In many cases, these burdens didn’t end when soldiers returned. Writes O’Brien, “You don’t have to be in Nam to be in Nam.”

There are no pitched battles described, but O’Brien still makes you feel the connection to his fellow soldiers and their unenviable situation. Tough to describe, but there is something about how O’Brien writes and thinks which makes you know that there is a person with a conscience writing this book. I had the opportunity to meet O’Brien at a conference in July and got the same feeling from him. The Things They Carried is a book I recommend! 4.5 stars

[Orsodimondo · Rating 5 out of 5]

IL GIARDINO DEL MALE


”Casualties of War-Vittime di guerra”, di Brian De Palma, 1989.

Adesso ho quarantatre anni e faccio lo scrittore, e la guerra è finita da un pezzo. In gran parte è difficile ricordare. Siedo a questa macchina da scrivere e fisso oltre le mie parole e guardo…

Se non avessi letto “Dispacci” di Michael Herr, direi che questo è il più bel libro che ho letto sulla guerra del Vietnam. Siccome ho letto “Dispacci” di Michael Herr, non posso dire che questo sia il più bel libro che ho letto sulla guerra del Vietnam. Ma ci va vicino. Molto vicino.
Questa è una raccolta di racconti, “Dispacci” era una raccolta di reportage. Allora, posso dire che questo è il più bel libro di racconti sulla guerra del vietnam che abbia mai letto.
“Dispacci” era per così dire in presa diretta. Questi racconti sono scritti vent’anni dopo i fatti. E nel frattempo O’Brien è diventato uno scrittore di professione, riconosciuto (vincitore del National Book Award nel 1979 col romanzo “Inseguendo Cacciato”, generalmente considerato il più bel romanzo sella guerra del Vietnam).


”Hamburger Hill”, di John Irvin, 1987.

Qualche volta mi sento in colpa. Quarantatre anni e ancora scrivo racconti di guerra. Mia figlia Kathleen dice che è un’ossessione… In un certo senso penso che abbia ragione: dovrei dimenticare. Ma il problema di ricordare è che non si dimentica. Prendi il materiale dove lo trovi, cioè nella tua vita, all’intersezione tra passato e presente… Quarantatre anni, e la guerra è accaduta una mezza vita fa, eppure il ricordare la rende presente. E qualche volta ricordare porta a una storia, e questo la rende eterna. Ecco a cosa servono le storie. Le storie servono a unire il passato al futuro…Le storie servono per l’eternità, quando ogni memoria è cancellata, quando non c’è più niente da ricordare tranne la storia.

La compagnia Alfa è composta da una ventina uomini che ritornano più o meno in tutti i racconti, che infatti si susseguono come fossero i capitoli di una specie di romanzo.
Forse era composta da più uomini, ma O’Brien ne seleziona una ventina circa, e di questi scrive e racconta. Sempre gli stessi, a volte semplici spettatori, comparse, a volte interpreti, protagonisti. A volte vivi, a volte morti. Ma anche da morti ritornano nel racconto di Tim O’Brien, nella sua memoria sono presenti, ancora vivi.


”Platoon”, di Oliver Stone, 1986.

Nonostante tutto il suo orrore, non si può fare a meno di restare a bocca aperta di fronte alla tremenda maestà del combattimento. Fissi i proiettili traccianti che si snodano nell'oscurità come nastri rosso brillante. Ti acquatti per l'imboscata mentre una luna fredda e impassibile si leva nel cielo notturno sopra le risaie. Ammiri la fluida simmetria delle truppe in movimento, le armonie di suono, forma e proporzione, i torrenti di fuoco e metallo che grondano da un elicottero da combattimento, i proiettili illuminanti, il fosforo bianco, il bagliore porpora del napalm, la luce accecante dei razzi. Non si può propriamente chiamare bello. È stupefacente. Riempie lo sguardo. Si impossessa di te. Tu lo trovi orribile, ma i tuoi occhi no.


”Tigerland”, di Joel Schumacher, 2000.

Potrebbe essere la sceneggiatura di uno dei film più belli sul Vietnam, lo script di quel capolavoro intitolato “Apocalypse Now”.
Pagine indimenticabili, che raccontano quella guerra (forse non la guerra in assoluto, ma quella del Vietnam) davvero in tutte le sue sfaccettature, nell’orrore e nel male, così come nello stupore e nel suo fascino perverso.

La guerra è indecente; la guerra è divertente. La guerra è emozionante; la guerra è una sfacchinata. La guerra ti rende uomo; la guerra ti rende morto.


Il soldato di fanteria Tim O’Brien.

[Georgia Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I'll carry that," I hear every day. My husband carries the things I can't. Things too heavy for me. He's good that way. Good at carrying things. Two wars and he hasn't forgotten. Like Tim O'Brien, he can tell you what he packed, what it weighed, and what extra he took with him. There are other things, too, memories that don't go away. Some good. Some terrible. How much any soldier says can depend on the listener as much as the war.

The vignette form works perfectly here. Piece by piece, each is a fragment of a larger picture which gives a human face to soldiering. Darkly humorous at times. Jarring. The Things They Carried is based on O'Brien's experience of the Vietnam War. But, much of it has relevance beyond its time.

For me, this book is a reminder to say "Thanks" to a husband not just for carrying those groceries into the house.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read reviews of this seen this book pass me by at the library, but for some reason was always reluctant to read. Why? Maybe just hits a little to close to home, knew many of my friends brothers who served, some lived, some of course did not. My own husband was in the Air Force at this time, not sent to Vietnam, and not yet my husband, still just a friend. He did though unload the bodies of returning soldiers who did not make it through their service. It was thankfully near the end of the war.

Years have passed, and the Sisters group decided to read and discuss this, so I decided now was the time, it was now or never. We had a great discussion, for some reason I was under the misapprehension that this was non fiction. It is not though it is written as if it was, which caused a bit of confusion as to how we perceived what we were reading. Was what we were reading true or not? In fact the author discussed this in one of the stories, if it is not true but could have been true how does that change how one feels about the book. That did bother me a bit.

In the end I decided it didn't really matter because these stories in all their grimness, terrible situations, and yes occasionally humor, were an unfortunate and very unfair set of circumstances that these extremely young men found themselves shouldering. It made their experiences personal, gave these soldiers names, and detailed all the guilt they felt when they survived, or made a wrong decision that cost lives. A beyond terrible situation for me in their late teens or early twenties to have to handle. All wars are terrible but the way these soldiers were treated when they returned was surely criminal. At least as a nation, if we have learned nothing else, we have learned to treat our returning soldiers with the respect they deserve, and as the heroes they surely are.

[Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

See But wait … way down below

… and sometimes I can see Timmy skating with Linda under the yellow floodlights. I’m young and happy. I’ll never die. I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story.

That’s the last 71 words of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Timmy is Tim O'Brien (or maybe "Tim O'Brien", or maybe both or neither). Linda is a girl who he was in love with when he was nine years old - maybe, unless she's made up. But even if so, the story, the last one in the book, could be "true". Linda died of cancer a few months after Timmy fell in love with her. How much of this story is true? Does it matter? Read on.

I bet a ton of papers and reports have been written for high school and college English courses on this book. It’s so different from anything I’ve read before. I was not able to underline in the book as I read, because I read my daughter’s copy of the book. She probably read it in college. She read it in college. That’s my story. Whether it’s true I don’t know, but it should be.

So, since I couldn’t underline, I have nothing to base an analysis of the book on. So that’s a story I don’t have to write.


Asides, almost

O’Brien has become not only the premier writer on the American Vietnam experience, he has become something of a meta-writer on the concept of truth in “fiction”. The fact that this book has that stuff in it is why, against all my habits, after starting to read the book last night after dinner, I finished it before going to bed (at 4:30 am). There are only two other writers who generally lift me away from all other books I am reading and won’t let me back to them until they put me down – George Pelecanos and Patrick O’Brian (hmm – O’Brian, O’Brien).

In case you don’t know, this is not a novel. It’s a collection of short stories. It’s novel-like because most of the stories take place in Vietnam, within a platoon of men fighting there in the late 60s, and the same characters slide from one story to the next. But the stories aren’t in any particular time-order, though the later stories in the book generally happen later than the earlier ones. And some of the stories are less connected to the others.

Who is “Tim O’Brien”?

There are really two Tim O’Briens here, a character and a writer, and they aren’t the same.

I didn’t realize for a long time that the book’s narrator, “Tim O’Brien”, who is telling these stories is a fictional character. He shares a lot of unlikely details with Tim O’Brien the writer, who wrote the stories. But they aren’t the same!

Or at least we can’t be sure where they are the same, and where they’re distinct. (Actually, “Tim O’Brien” sometimes talks about writing some of the stories – but maybe that’s the other Tim O’Brien, the writer. You do understand where all those English assignments come from, don’t you?) Both the Tim O’Briens grew up in Worthington Minnesota. They both graduated from Macalester College in 1968. They both got drafted soon after college, they both served in Vietnam in 1969-70, they both were involved in combat for about a year. They both came home and became writers. But, did I mention that they aren’t the same?

Get your hands around that.

How O’Brien dances with the truth.

This ambiguity about the O’Briens is part of a larger ambiguity that O’Brien (let’s just use the same name for both of them from now on) writes/talks about throughout the novel – an ambiguity about what is true and what isn’t. There’s even a story in the book about this: “How to Tell a True War Story”.

O’Brien says that if someone tells you a war story, “You’d feel cheated if it never happened … Yet even if it did happen – and maybe it did, anything’s possible – even then you know it can’t be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” What he’s implying is that a story about something that never happened can affect the listener, can impart to him a truth about an overall situation, “reality”, that is not imparted by a mere recounting of what actually happened. O’Brien is reported as once answering the question “Can someone who’s been in war teach us anything about war?”, by saying “No. All he can do is tell us stories about war.”

Fiction and reality can blur; and in war they can’t not blur.

The two stories that nailed Tim O’Brien.

There are two stories in the book which wend their way through multiple other stories, and ultimately illustrate the ambiguous nature of O’Brien’s reality.

The first one is the story of a Vietnamese he killed. Or at least he may have killed. The main description is in The Man I Killed. Other stories that deal with it in depth are Ambush and finally Good Form. But the episode is also mentioned in several other stores.

The second of these extended, and very ambiguous, tales is a story about the death of his closest friend in the platoon. See Speaking of Courage, Notes, In the Field, and finally Field Trip. These four stories could be analyzed from now to next Christmas without coming to a certain conclusion as to what actually happened, and what the two Tim O’Briens had to do with any of it.


The two stories that nailed me.

(2) Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong

The second of these stories was a mind-blowing story called Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong. Tim O’Brien the character plays no part in it, except to introduce it.
Vietnam was full of strange stories, some improbable, some well beyond that, but the stories that will last forever are those that swirl back and forth across the border between trivia and bedlam, the mad and the mundane. This one keeps returning to me. The actual story is told by one of the platoon characters, Rat; it’s about an assignment that Rat previously had on a remote mountain top near a village (“ville”). It was sort of a Mash-type assignment, where wounded would be brought in by local choppers for emergency and trauma care, then shipped out by chopper to rear areas. Mostly they played volleyball and sat around, probably smoking weed. No officers, no discipline. One day they’re shooting the shit, and someone says hey you know we could fly a broad in here. A few weeks later, a “tall, big-boned blond” steps out of the supply chopper one morning, and is introduced by their young medic as Mary Anne, his seventeen year old girlfriend from Cleveland Heights Senior High, by way of LA, Bangkok, and Saigon.

Well, skipping a whole lot of the story, the girl takes to ‘Nam like a bee to a flower. She starts dressing like the guys, learns how to fire a rifle, goes down into the ville to check out the locals, and finally starts going out on patrols with six Greenies (Berets) that have their own little station in an enclosed area near the medic place (thus sort of leaving her boy friend). Again I’m not going to go into the details, but the story takes a very strange twist, and we find this seventeen year old morphing into a female Apocalypse Now style Brando character, wearing a necklace made out of human tongues and hanging out with the Greenies in their hootch.

Across the room a dozen candles were burning on the floor near the open window. The place seemed to echo with a weird deep-wilderness sound – tribal music – bamboo flutes and drums and chimes. But what hit you first was … two kinds of smells. There was a topmost scent of joss sticks and incense, like the fumes of some exotic smokehouse, but beneath the smoke lay a deeper more powerful stench …Thick and numbing, like an animal’s den, a mix of blood and scorched hair and excrement and the sweet-sour odor of moldering flesh – the stink of the kill … On a post at the rear of the hooch was the decayed head of a large black leopard … Off in the gloom a few dim figures lounged in hammocks … The music came from a tape deck, but the high voice was Mary Anne’s … she stepped out of the shadows … barefoot. She wore her pink sweater and a white blouse and a cotton skirt.

And that necklace.

Well Rat draws the story out nicely, then finally ends it with
And then one morning, all alone, Mary Anne walked off into the mountains and did not come back.
… But the story did not end there. If you believed the Greenies, Rat said, Mary Anne was still somewhere out there in the dark. Odd movements, odd shapes. Late at night, when the Greenies were out on ambush, the whole rain forest seemed to stare in at them – a watched feeling – and a couple times they almost saw her sliding through the shadows. Not quite, but almost. She had crossed to the other side. She was part of the land. She was wearing her culottes, her pink sweater, and a necklace of human tongues. She was dangerous. She was ready for the kill. Worth the price of admission, that one.

(1) On the Rainy River

But the first of the stories that nailed me, maybe not as flamboyant, not as good a movie script, was On the Rainy River. I don’t need to really tell this story. Actually I do. But only one spoiler two spoilers. The introduction is simply “This is one story I’ve never told before.” It’s about “Tim’s” and/or Tim’s summer of ’68, after graduating from Macalester; after receiving within a couple weeks a draft notice; after working in a pig slaughterhouse in Worthington for several weeks; anguishing over what he should do about this war that he doesn’t believe in, that’s he’s being called to; finally leaving a note to his parents, taking off, driving north up through Duluth, International Falls, then to the west along the Rainy River. Just across from Canada. Where he stops at a run-down fishing resort called the Tip Top Lodge, and stays for a few days, the only customer of the eighty-one year old owner, Elroy Berdahl.

Elroy Berdahl: “The hero of my life … the man saved me. He offered exactly what I needed, without questions, without any words at all. He took me in. He was there at the critical time – a silent, watchful presence.”

Tim lays it all on the table, all the things that were urging him to flee to Canada, all the things that were holding him back. (He tells us the readers, that is, not Elroy. He and Elroy only make small talk, but as Tim realizes later, Elroy knows what's going on, yet never says anything.) The last day at the Lodge, Elroy takes him out fishing on a sunny, cold afternoon. He turns the boat north, guns the motor, and steers all the way across the river, cutting the motor to drift twenty feet off the Canadian shore. Baits his hook, says nothing, starts fishing. Tim sits in the bow, looking at the forest, looking at an invisible boundary that, if crossed, will change his life forever.

I think he meant to bring me up against the realities, to guide me across the river and to take me to the edge and to stand a kind of vigil as I chose a life for myself
… You’re twenty-one years old, you’re scared, and there’s a hard squeezing pressure in your chest.
What would you do?
Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you’re leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?

He can’t jump. “I did try. It just wasn’t possible.” I couldn’t risk the embarrassment.

He drives home.

The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.

This story affected me deeply. Of course I cried. You have to know that it’s early in the book, before I realized that “Tim” maybe wasn’t Tim, and that the story was probably not actually true. And although I now think its truth is not the truth of happening, it still is true, but its truth is the truth of story.

For it could have been my story. I was less than two years older than Tim. Both my future wife and I had graduated from college in ’66. (She had graduated from Macalester for godsakes.) And I had received my draft notice just a few weeks after graduating, had even driven to Ft. Holabird in Baltimore for my pre-induction physical that summer. I wasn’t working in a slaughterhouse, but at the Dept. of Health Education and Welfare (HEW) that summer, programming some primitive desk top computer with paper tape. And then out of the blue, I can’t even remember how it happened, I wound up going to a job interview at the Naval Research Laboratory, and was hired, and given a deferment.

That was the first really momentous occurrence in my life that taught me that I had no real control over my fate. Things just happen.


A couple years ago my wife and I went to our fiftieth HS reunion in the small town in Minnesota where we grew up. I met a classmate who I hadn’t known very well in school. He was from the country, didn’t go to my church, so we just didn’t know each other real well, despite being in a class of only about a hundred. He said that it was the first reunion he had come to. The reason was, he had skipped to Canada when he was drafted. But ever since, he had been too embarrassed to return to see his old classmates. I told him that I was really glad he had come. I’m also pretty sure I said something to him like “Joe, you were one of the brave ones”. At least I hope I did. I think Tim would have said that.

But wait ... an Epilogue

Here's where I've decided to override the end of my prior narrative.

It's 13 August 2016. Today my wife and I drove to International Falls MN, just a side trip on the way to visit family three hours farther west. Our motel turned out to be right on the south bank of the Rainy River. I talked about Tim's story with her. I took a camera, and we walked behind the motel and down a steep path to the river. Across the water, Canada. The river flowed from right to left, from Rainy Lake up to the northwest, 85 miles into Lake of the Woods - its waters flowing from there, into the Winnipeg River, through Lake Winnipeg, out the Nelson River, finally into Hudson Bay.

To the west the sun was glaring off the rippling water. Somewhere up that 85 miles was the fabled Tip Top Lodge, haunted by the ghosts of Elroy Berdahl and maybe Tim ("Tim"?) O'Brien. I took a picture, thinking that so much glare would ruin it. But no ...



not at all. It fact that bright sun, in the blue summer sky, seemed to lay down a white pathway on the river, somehow strangely getting wider as it moved into the distance ... perhaps widening more and more as it moved farther and farther, mile upon mile, winding through the Lake of the Woods, on and on into Hudson Bay … and somehow lighting all the possible twists and turns that a life could have taken from that moment when a young man sat in a boat twenty feet from Canada and cried.

Well, that’s what I’ve decided to say about this picture of the Rainy River. Glad I took it.

And guess what. Rereading the comments below, I discovered (#35) that Fionnuala had alrady written this Epilogue, lacking only the photo to illustrate it. Here I thought I'd written something clever.

[Julie G · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I was a junior in college, our English Dept opened up a new class: Literature of the Vietnam War. I needed an elective credit, and I knew next to nothing about the war, so I signed up for the class, which was held once a week, at night.

The class was half-full, and I was one of three females taking the course. I sat regularly next to a man who had actually served in Vietnam, and when he talked about his experiences, I felt puny, as though I didn't belong. I stared frequently at the top of my desk, worked quietly through our first book, some correspondences from a helicopter pilot. And then, we got to Tim O'Brien.

We read The Things They Carried and I fell hard. We read Going After Cacciato, and I fell harder. I read and I wrote and I lit up with the reading and the writing, and then, one night, the professor asked me to stay after class.

I was confused. Why did he want to speak to me? The class emptied out and I approached his desk, and he handed me back one of my papers and stared at me. He had actually written "A+" on the front of my essay, and I alternated between looking uncomfortably at my grade and at his unswerving stare at me.

Finally he said something about my paper being excellent, but that he was most interested in the passion I had for the subject. I looked at him again, wondering if he was yet another creepy male professor trying to ask me out for "coffee," but I could see by his eyes that he was not. He was the real deal, another nut job like me, who is in it for the stories.

It's been years, and I can't remember exactly what he said, but he ended up telling me that he had been reduced to begging the college for years to open this class, and that none of them had been sure of what to expect, but, after reading my paper on Tim O'Brien's books, he knew that it hadn't been a mistake to offer this as a subject.

He said something like, "I read your paper, and I could see that you GOT it. You totally GOT it, what the Vietnam War was and is for people."

And, again, it's been years, so I can't repeat what I answered back then, but I just re-read The Things They Carried this week, and I can say now. . . How can you read Tim O'Brien and not GET the Vietnam War?

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had a friend who went to war. Part of him did not come home. His shoulder and much of his upper body was metal plate, but that is not the part I am talking about. The part that was left there was a piece of his soul, an innocence and lightness that could never be recaptured. He talked about the war when he was in his cups, which he was too often. His best buddy in the war was killed in front of his eyes, and Sam was convinced (be it true or not) that the bullet he took was meant for Sam. He felt his friend had saved his life and that he was not worthy of that sacrifice. Knowing him made reading this book a harder experience for me, it made the stories more real, it reminded me how many Sams there were out there in the jungles of Vietnam.

This is, of course, a book about war, and as such, not surprisingly, a book about loss. It is also a book about death, even the deaths of those who live, for people die in stages sometimes, they die in bits and pieces that they bury and exhume and rebury.

I cannot imagine anyone reads this book without taking it personally. Certainly the men who fought this war must find something I can never touch inside its pages. What I found myself seeing were Sam’s eyes, the way they sparkled when he was free of war for a moment and the way they clouded and glazed when he tried to tell anyone about what he was feeling. I would sometimes catch him in a quiet moment at his desk, and I knew without a word that he was there. From the first page, I was walking with Sam, not with Tim, but then I realized Sam and Tim and Kiowa and Curt Lemon, are all the same person for one short moment in time.

I know why I have had this on my TBR for so long and procrastinated about opening it to read. No one really wants to go back to that war for even a second. I understand as little now about why we were there as I did then, and history usually gives a person more perspective, not less. I think about all the potential we lost, not only in the person of those who died, but in those who came back so changed and could find no way to move forward. Tim O’Brien is one of the lucky ones. He found a voice through his writing and purged some of his ghosts in that way. Some men just carried them to the grave, unpurged...and that must be the worst weight they were asked to carry.

[Jessaka · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was 1962. I was living in Vacaville, CA working at the A&W as a carhop when a young soldier from Travis Air Force Base got out of his car and began walking. He was carrying a bundle of letters which he placed in the garbage can behind the building. I found them when I took out the garbage that night and picked them up. I carried them into the building and hid them in my purse and then took them home. They were Dear John letters, but all I remember were these words: “I am going to join a convent.” I thought about them, wondering who they were. They weren’t just names on letters; they were people who were suffering. I still think about them from time to time. Did he die in Vietnam or is he happily married? How about her? Did she become a nun or was that just a line? I kept the letters for many years, wishing I could write to them to see how they were, to tell them that I had the letters, but then I thought it not proper. And then one day I carried them to my garbage can and threw them away. For many more years I saved the Lipton tea bag label that she had placed in one of her letters. Inscribed on it were the words: “To forgive is to forget.”

It was ’69, and I was hanging out in Berkeley, studying and going out dancing. Mac was in Vietnam carrying a rifle and maybe letters or photographs, I never asked.

I saw them on the streets of Berkeley, holding out their hands for spare change, talking in strange tongues, sleeping on the sidewalks in doorways, and in People’s Park. The sign on the door of the Vedanta Society across the street from People’s Park, said, “Do not sleep on the steps,” and I thought, “How charitable.” Years later at a Vietnamese Buddhist monastery an Australian monk gave my husband a book to read about a monk who had been in Vietnam. I read it instead of my husband, and then I wrote this poem in memory of what the monk in the book had seen in Vietnam:

LIVING IN BERKELEY BACK IN NAM

I saw you standing
in front of the market
on Telegraph Avenue
asking for spare change.

With fear
seeping through
the shadows
of your hallowed eyes,
you let me know that you
were back in Nam,
where you watched
your buddy
holding
a Vietnamese baby
in his protecting arms,
blow up
before those very eyes
that I am staring
into now.

In one breath
you told me that it
wasn’t real,
that it
never really happened;
in the next breath
you asked me “Why?”
And I had no answer
other than to offer you
a few coins.
And you walked into that store
to buy yourself another
bottle of wine.

I turned around, and
I was back in Berkeley.
The street vendors
were selling their wares:
puka shell necklaces,
quill earrings,
stone pottery,
and tie died shirts with
peace emblems—
reminding me
that Nam was
never far away.


I walked around the corner.
A flyer dangled from a
telephone pole.
Maharishi’s liquid eyes
stared back at mine
and promised peace,
if only we would
forget the world and
let go
of all the
thoughts
that kept pouring
into our minds,
during a time when
we only wanted to stop
that damn war in Vietnam.

I was apolitical
during those troubled times
and had my own war
going on deep inside.
So I spent my days
with friends
in the Renaissance Café
drinking cappuccinos
and eating chocolate croissants,
while talking about going to Aito’s
to dance to Greek music
on Friday nights.

--jessica slade magorian
july 11, 2005

I met Mac in ’88. Fun loving and as one friend of ours said to me, “He is the kindest man I have ever met.”

Mac’s buddy walked up to him one night when he was in the trenches. “Mac, can I change places with you tonight? I feel like it is my time. I am going to die tonight.” Mac changed places with his buddy, just to ease his mind. The next morning Mac was asked to pick up his buddy’s body parts and put them into a bag and carry them away. He has carried this with him all of these years, but he doesn’t talk about it to anyone. I heard it twice and just tried to remember the details.

Mac now carries an oxygen Pac with him wherever he goes and all because he had carried that orange dust around with him in Vietnam for way too long. Sometimes, he proudly wears his Marine baseball cap, and when men see it they say, “Thanks for your service.”

[Lorna · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is an unforgettable book, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1991. It has taken me many years to read this book because of the personal experience that I had with this war back in the volatile years of the 1960s and 1970s. This book is a beautiful but haunting collection of linked stories based on the personal experiences of novelist Tim O’Brien when he served in Vietnam. O’Brien describes it as a blurring of fiction and non-fiction as he sometimes is a protagonist in this book. It must be said that this is considered one of the finest books about the Vietnam War.

This is a profound narrative of war as often it has the feel of a fog or dreamlike state as we swirl around in an abyss of events, some imagined and some real. I found this such a difficult book to read because of the impact of war and what was the breaking point for so many, not only in that brutal war but so many others. I was so taken by what these soldiers carried into war to give them a sense of solace. I think of my own son deployed to Iraq on a Blackhawk helicopter crew insisting on a shamrock on his helmet. No worries that he was ordered to remove it, it would be back!

”They carried all they could bear and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”

“What they carried varied by mission.”

“The things they carried were determined to some extent by superstition.”

There was a lot of sorrow and truth that comes through in this semi-biographical collection of short stories focusing on the experiences in the Vietnam War. What I found most striking in this narrative was the honesty of Tim O’Brien as he not only tries to achieve a better understanding of war and human nature but the struggle to survive. This was a painful and sorrowful but powerful book.

[booklady · Rating 1 out of 5]

Technically speaking, The Things They Carried is extremely well-written. O'Brien is a good, tight writer who knows how to weave a story. But even while I admire his style and technique, I am put off by the emptiness and moral vacuum he leaves when his machine guns and grenades finish ripping open your insides. While I wasn't looking for Sunday school platitudes from a book about Vietnam, I was looking for some reason, some sense which he could bring to bear after twenty years of writing and reflecting on his experiences there. Instead what I found was a collection of disjointed stories full of nihilism, gore, G.I. trashy talk, suffering and torture.

There's no arguing about the ramifications of war, the terror, the destruction and the loss. And perhaps I should end there. That's what the book is about. Full stop. After twenty years, the author, who actually didn't have it nearly so badly as many who went to Vietnam, is still trying to come to grips with what he saw, felt and did. He writes that men killed and died because they were embarrassed not to, that telling/writing about his experiences heals him and helps him forgive himself. And yet, it seems clear that he still hasn’t healed and doesn't forgive himself. At one point he confesses that the bravest thing on earth sometimes is just to sit through the night and feel the cold in your bones. There are these isolated pockets – or nuggets – of wisdom to be found in this book. But still he credits the wrong source for his insights and continues along his own weary path. For O’Brien, story is the god at whose altar he worships, but so far at least, his god hasn’t lived up to expectation.

Maybe twenty years isn't enough. Maybe Vietnam wasn't enough. Maybe all the books he can ever write won’t be enough.

[Cassy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I took a short story writing class for kicks a while back. On the first day, the professor recommended two books: Mystery and Manners by Flannery O’Connor and this book by Tim O’Brien. I promptly bought both. Then I just as promptly set them aside to read something flashy.

I am glad I waited until after the class to read this one. Otherwise, I would have quit the class immediately and never written so much as a grocery list ever again. This book is genius. The story about the girl with a necklace of tongues blew my mind. It has been months, and I still think about it. And the guy drowning in a field of poop? It’s hard to forget as well.

Most of the book I wanted to take O’Brien by the shoulders and demand to know exactly what’s true and what’s fabricated. He is a sly fox though. I doubt he would answer if I had him chained upside down and tickled the soles of his feet for days. He addressed this in the book. I cannot remember precisely what he wrote except that it awed and frustrated me in equal amounts.

It was pure frustration yesterday as I reorganized my books. Remember during the Pixar movie, WALL-E, when he is holding the spork and looking left to right. Does it belong with the forks or the spoons? Forks? Spoons? Fiction? Non-fiction?

Darn you, O’Brien.

[Andrew Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve read any number of books where the Vietnam War has featured large in the context of the central narrative. I’ve read a few fictional books that have been largely or wholly about the war itself or the impacts of the war on the people caught up in it. I’ve even read one or two non-fiction books that have sought to explain why the war was fought. I do find this subject fascinating; partly, I think, because I can’t think of any military action the UK’s recent history that has caused such a kick-back against the conflict itself and – perhaps more importantly – those who fought in it. Ok, we’ve had our moments, but nothing approaching the debates and angst that have centred around this conflict.

When I read a review on this book by Ɗắɳ 2.☠ I knew it was one I needed to track down. I quickly ascertained that an audio version was available and narrated by non other than Breaking Bad’s Brian Cranston. Well, having spent a few months last year drowning myself in the adventures of Walter White and his crew, what could be better? And an inspired choice it turned out to be. Cranston’s reading was superb - his voice smooth and mellow but with a touch of gravel. Perfect.

It’s a hard book to categorise. The author has clearly delivered something here that is semi-biographical, but at the same time he points out that in recounting stories our imagination helps to form our memories – therefore the resulting vignettes are a mix of things that happened and things that might not have, but ‘felt’ like they did. The line between fact and fiction is blurred to the point it’s impossible to tell one from the other.

Tim O’Brien spent a year in Vietnam. He never really expected to, a newly graduated Minnesota College student he’d already been accepted for graduate school at Harvard when the draft notice dropped. By nature, he was mildly anti-war and even made a half-hearted attempt to make a run for it to Canada. But in the end, as he puts it, he was a coward: he went to Vietnam.

I hadn’t realised this Pulitzer Prize-winning book was written over twenty-five years ago. As a result, there’s sure to be a huge number of excellent reviews available to break down the details. So I’ll limit myself to some of my thoughts as I listened to this book in the course of a couple of days.

There is a distinct lack of actual war here. What I mean is that there are no battles. O’Brien’s platoon spent their time chasing the enemy, but they never caught them. What they did see was the flashes of gunfire from the foliage and bodies on the ground. They lost soldiers, and they did things that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. The prose is simple, the language often raw. But there’s humour too, in surprising quantities. The point is made that these weren’t hardened career soldiers. They were boys – and they often acted like it. The episodes are fractured but together comprise a cohesive account of the experiences of a single platoon of soldiers. It’s riveting stuff.

At the end of the book, there is also, on this audio version, a section where the author himself reads an essay he penned, titled The Vietnam in Me. It’s a rougher piece, but it’s intriguing to hear the author describe a trip he made to Vietnam some twenty years after the end of the conflict. It really did accentuate the mental anguish and ongoing struggles many ex-combatants experience.

Overall it’s one of the most powerful audiobooks I’ve ever listened to. I’m haunted by it. I can’t forget it.

[Helga Martiros · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

They all carried ghosts…

Is it fiction or a genuine memoir? Or maybe a mixture of both? However one perceives the content, the book’s interwoven stories inspire emotions of sorrow, despair, loss, guilt and anger.
As soon as one begins to read, one is immediately captivated by the vivid description of the Vietnam war; and of what the soldiers carried, both emotionally and physically.

War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of things they carried”.

“He wanted her to be a virgin and not a virgin, all at once. He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets. Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely—just alone—riding her bike across campus or sitting by herself in the cafeteria—even dancing, she danced alone—and it was the aloneness that filled him with love”.

Lieutenant Cross was just a kid, 24 years old, at war, in love with Martha. He couldn’t help it.

Some things they carried were superstition. Lieutenant Cross carried a good luck pebble.

“They carried the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often they carried each other, the wounded or weak”.

“They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various tots and molds. They carried the land itself—Vietnam, the place, the soul—powdery Orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces”.

They tried not to cry- or tremble—when a friend died—when digging a hole in the earth.

Feelings of shame.
“Lieutenant Cross hated himself. He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Ted Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war”.

“Men killed and died because they were embarrassed not to”.

Nothing positive. No dreams of glory or honor.

War is hell, nasty, fun, mysterious, terror, grotesque, adventurous, pity, despair, thrilling, beautiful, drudgery, longing, and love.

“War makes you dead”.

Devastating, haunting, lyrical, fiction, ( but real), powerful....
This book was first published in 2008. Reads like essays- memories- it’s extraordinary.
It takes only a few hours to read. I’m sorry I didn’t read it sooner.


Wishing this community a Merry Christmas- Happy Chanukah- a peaceful, healthy, happy holiday season.

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is one of those books that every semi-young male high school english teacher that everyone has a crush on, not because he's hot particularly but just because it's a desperate times / desperate measures scenario, is invariably obsessed with.

but in this case, that aging 6 with slightly too long hair is correct. because this book is so good.

i have been assigned this book in either 2 or 3 classes and definitely read it at least 1.5 of those times, which is saying a lot, since i ascribe to the belief that if i read a book once in school it stays permanently in my brain forever and i am a genius from then on, never needing to so much as think about it again.

this one actually is memorable to me, even though i read it 6 years ago when i was seventeen years old and waking up at 6 a.m. on a regular basis, a lifestyle i find unimaginable now.

anyway. this is both a standout in the War genre (not my favorite) and in the radical-and-somewhat-experimental-look-how-cool-literature-can-be genre (which i just made up and is my favorite).

long way of saying this is good stuff.

this is part of a project i am doing sometimes, as in three times every two years or so, where i review a book i read a long time ago. how fun for us all.

[Whitney Atkinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most important books I've read not only this year, but of all time. Absolutely captivating filled with quotes on EVERY page that make me stop and think. This isn't just a book about war, it's a book about writing about tragedy and coming to terms with loss and PTSD and losing friends and every single story was meaningful and symbolic and just shocked me with the sheer amount of truth and power. I know most people who say they've read this read it for a class, but if you haven't picked up this book, PLEASE do so. It will literally change the way you think about war, and it's so damn clever yet heart wrenching.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn't hit you until twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you get to the end you've forgotten the point again. And then for a long time you lie there watching the story in your head."

I don't know how much of this book is true. The title page says "The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction by Tim O'Brien." I'm willing to bet more is true than I would hope, and less is true than I would believe. O'Brien treats it like it's the truth, and then will tell you he's lying at different points. In the end, the point seems to be that it doesn't matter. What happened was chaos, it's the feeling the people are left with after which is the only fact to the individual, and as such he will give you the feeling that he remembers.

It often feels horrible. It often is funny. It's often exciting. He sums it up best: “War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.”

Much like a character he meets at one point, I do not typically like war stories. The only time I tend to truly enjoy such works is when they are in the Science Fiction or Fantasy genres, far away from reality. Again like the character he meets, I did like this. This book was fascinating, not just in terms of the stories he tells, but his very postmodern way of deconstructing narratives. He frequently has characters chime in to interrupt the story saying it shouldn't be told that way. He blurs reality as Tim O'Brien is himself a character in the book, but his history is admittedly different than the author's own. He flat out lies to you, then explains why this is better than the truth. It's chaos… it's kind of beautiful. It works.

Typically on books of short stories I try to do a mini-review for each story. I won't be doing that here. They are all so connected, that even if they could stand alone, they really are all one tale. I'll make note that my favorite was "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," but overall they all get the same rating. A solid 4/5 stars

“A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.”

[Tim Null · Rating 4 out of 5]

"[Death is] like being inside a book that nobody's reading."

This is a pretty damn good book, which got me thinking. I'm thinking if I read two or three books every month until my great granddaughter is born, there will still be hundreds of great books I haven't read. Now, I don't know if I should find that fact encouraging or discouraging. Don't get me wrong! I'm not expecting a great granddaughter anytime soon! No siree. If my current estimate is correct, I don't expect to get a great grandchild for a couple of decades. Now that there is a motivational thought! It motivates me to keep myself and my wife alive for a good while. In a couple of decades, we'll both be 95 years young. (95 going on a hundred.)

My wife has survived cancer, and I've survived a stroke, so I figure living to the age of 95 will be a piece of cake. (In my case, make it a slice of pumpkin pie.)

By now, you're probably wondering how do I know that my first great-grandchild will be a girl. I know because I've read that the past is prologue. (Remember I read Sparknotes for the Tempest here on Goodreads.) Shakespeare also said, "What must be shall be." (I think I remember Rita Moreno singing about that in West Side Story.) More to my point, Shakespeare said, "It is a wise [great grand] father that knows his own [great grand] child."

Now, I don't have any great wisdom, but I do know a little about my family genealogy. Specifically, I know quite a bit about the direct descendants of my great great grandfather Levi Null (1794-1875). I know quite a lot about Levi's descendants going from him all the way to my granddaughter. I know that in all those seven generations of Nulls, every single firstborn child has been a girl. (What are the odds?)

To be honest, there is one possible exception. My grandfather Thomas Levi Null (1863-1913) was a fraternal twin. (He's the Okie who had a farm near Roosevelt, OK who died a week after a mule kicked him in the head.) Anyway, one of his letters has survived. In his letter, Thomas Levi seemed to be a courteous sort of guy, so we have every reason to believe he let his sister, Lillian Mae, go first.

[carol. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is quite the book, and Cranston is quite the reader. Well suited with gravely voice, solemn tones, perfect diction and flow that draws me in. I'm left with a few thoughts:

Part One, carrying a burden

The first chapter, 'The Things They Carried' was one of the longer chapters, at 47 minutes. As read by Cranston, it is a moving and primitive ballad, the grown-up version of a repetitive narrative structure (think 'The Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly,' or more likely Gilgamesh or one of those tales) that builds a rhythm leading to a powerful end. It was one of the most moving things I've heard in a long time, a kind of spoken word poetry, a sermon from an endless hike, culminating in a too-familiar longing to fly.

"Because you could die so quickly, each man also carried at least one large compress bandage, usually in the helmet band for easy access.

"For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity. Now and then, however, there were times of panic, when they squealed or wanted to squeal but couldn't, when they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons blindly...

"At night, on guard, staring into the dark, they were carried away by jumbo jets. They felt the rush of takeoff. Gone! they yelled. And then velocity--wings and engines--a smiling stewardess--but it was more than a plane, it was a real bird, a big sleek silver bird with feathers and talons and high screeching. They were flying. The weights fell off; there was nothing to bear. They laughed and held on tight, feeling the cold slap of wind and altiude, soaring, thinking It's over, I'm gone!--they were naked, they were light and free--it was all lightness, bright and fast and buoyant, light as light..."

Part two: unreliable narrators

Tim O'Brien is fooling himself. There's no judgement attached to that statement; I'm not calling it good or bad or anything else. But if he thinks that he's left the war behind and that he's not one of 'those' vets with post-traumatic stress disorder, he is absolutely wrong.

Part three: truthiness

O'Brien takes time in many of his tales to talk about the value of tales, about the veracity of the stories he is telling, about how he might make something up so that it feels true to the reader. This is where I disagree with him both as a reader and as a writer. In 'How to Tell a True War Story,' he eventually expounds on this idea, but first he has some powerful thoughts about war stories in general.

"If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil." This feels sadly, honestly true; there is very little that is redeemable in war, in large scale violence, in the purposeful and anonymous killing of people to make a political or moral point, and any sort of stories that try to find it are like putting a Snoopy band-aid on a gunshot wound.

I adored his acknowledgement of the memory of moments, which made me think of nothing so much as Dali's Persistence of Memory, and relativism.


"In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed."

That is a perfect description of the non-linearity of memory, recalling that accident scene in the middle of the night in Deerfield so long ago: the kid in the cornfield, the white and red and blue flashing lights, the circle of light around us and the strange elongated shadows outside our perimeter as I knelt by the kid's head and held his spine straight. I remember it as a cubist painting and not a sequence of events.

All of that said, I believe that I disagree with him, that "story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth." I think a story can be absolutely true, and that with adequate craft, the writer will lead the reader to the conclusion, the sentiment--the moral, as Mitchell Sanders would claim. I believe that the occurrence itself is significant enough, and that with well-chosen words, the reader will be able to feel it, to understand the meaning of the event. But I could be wrong, and we're both deluding ourselves that the authors has control of the story.

Part four: an overview

All of that said, the collection itself is a mix. It's more about the experience of war than the actual war. It reminded me of when I was in high school and a plethora of Vietnam movies came out, including Platoon and the more lighthearted take, Good Morning Vietnam, and I suddenly found myself wanting to understand my dad's experience there.

I've heard that this is a book that some kids now read in high school. I don't know that this is a collection that can help someone unfamiliar with the Vietnam war understand; the darkness of the jungle, the tunnels, the antipathy of the public, the absence of soldiers' conviction in a 'good' war, the absolute isolation and the adolescent technology, all in contrast to the more modern 'conflicts' that soldiers have participated in since 2001.

Despite protestations to the contrary, there is much here that is not specific, and there is much that is too specific (the water buffalo, the girl dancing, the puppy, the sewage field) and much that is apocryphal (the water buffalo, the girl dancing, the puppy, the sewage field). This is where I find myself arguing with O'Brien again, that the specifics only matter for the feeling of truthiness. This book relies on concepts associated with war to fill in the details and the emotion, and thus the impact would likely be lessened for someone unfamiliar with the real details.

The rating? Cranston, a solid five stars. The titular story? A solid 42 stars. There was a lot of material to think about, and for a brief moment I wished I was in English class so that I could write a paper on it. The collection as a whole? Interesting, fraught, unhappy, deceiving, monotonous, provoking.

No doubt, much like war.

Three and a half platoons, rounding up.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Things They Carried is so full of microburst storytelling that its shortcomings as a fully formed narrative are overcome. Tim O'Brien first published many of these chapters as short stories: Speaking of Courage (1976) appeared in Massachusetts Review and won an O. Henry Award in 1978; The Ghost Soldiers (1981), The Things They Carried (1986), How To Tell a True War Story (1987), The Lives of the Dead (1987) and Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong (1989) appeared in Esquire; In the Field (1989) in Gentleman's Quarterly and On the Rainy River (1990) in Playboy.

The Vietnam War became heavily dramatized in the years leading up to the publication of The Things They Carried, in film (Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket being the standard bearers), on TV (Tour of Duty on CBS, China Beach on ABC and Vietnam War Story on HBO) and even a Top 40 pop tune ("19" by Paul Hardcastle) which used period newsreels as lyrics. The triumph of the book is the way O'Brien--sometimes using violence, sometimes not--is able to strike like lightning on a clear day, searing details across my imagination that I won't be able to get out anytime soon:

-- On ambush, or other night missions, they carried peculiar little odds and ends. Kiowa always took along his New Testament and a pair of moccasins for silence. Dave Jensen carried night-vision vitamins high in carotene. Lee Strunk carried his slingshot; ammo, he claimed, would never be a problem. Rat Kiley carried brandy and M&M's candy. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried the starlight scope, which weighed 6.3 pounds with its aluminum carrying case. Henry Dobbins carried his girlfriend's pantyhose wrapped around his neck as a comforter. They all carried ghosts. When dark came, they would move out single file across the meadows and paddies to their ambush coordinates, where they would quietly set up the Claymores and lie down and spend the night waiting.

-- If you weren't humping, you were waiting. I remember the monotony. Digging foxholes. Slapping mosquitoes. The sun and the heat and the endless paddies. Even in the deep bush, where you could die any number of ways, the war was nakedly and aggressively boring. But it was a strange boredom. It was boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom that caused stomach disorders. You'd be sitting at the top of a high hill, the flat paddies stretching out below, and the day would be calm and hot and utterly vacant, and you'd feel the boredom dripping inside you like a leaky faucet, except it wasn't water, it was a sort of acid, and with each little droplet you'd feel the stuff eating away at the important organs. You'd try to relax. You'd uncurl your fists and let your thoughts go. Well, you'd think, this isn't so bad. And right then you'd hear gunfire behind you and your nuts would fly up into your throat and you'd be squealing pig squeals. That kind of boredom.

-- Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn't hit you until twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you get to the end you've forgotten the point again. And then for a long time you lie there watching the story happen in your head. You listen to your wife's breathing. The war's over. You close your eyes. You take a feeble swipe at the dark and think, Christ, what's the point?

-- What happened to her, Rat said, was what happened to all of them. You come over clean and you get dirty and then afterward it's never the same. A question of degree. Some make it intact, some don't make it at all. For Mary Anne Bell, it seemed, Vietnam had the effect of a powerful drug: that mix of unnamed terror and unnamed pleasure that comes as the needle slips in and you know you're risking something. The endorphins start to flow, and the adrenaline, and you hold your breath and creep quietly through the moonlit nightscapes; you become intimate with danger; you're in touch with the far side of yourself, as though it's another hemisphere, and you want to string it out and go wherever the trip takes you and be host to all the possibilities inside yourself.

-- The countryside itself seemed spooky--shadows and tunnels and incense burning in the dark. The land was haunted. We were fighting forces that did not obey the laws of twentieth-century science. Late at night, on guard, it seemed that all of Vietnam was alive and shimmering--odd shapes swaying in the paddies, boogiemen in sandals, and Charlie Cong was the main ghost. The way he came out at night. How you never really saw him, just thought you did. Almost magical--appearing, disappearing. He could blend with the land, changing form, becoming trees and grass. He could fly. He could pass through barbed wire and melt away like ice and creep up on you without sound or footsteps. He was scary. In the daylight, maybe, you didn't believe in this stuff. You laughed it off. You made jokes. But at night you turned into a believer: no skeptics in foxholes.

O'Brien's command of prose, the marriage of the literary with the journalistic, is the chief reason to read The Things They Carried. The focus is not placed on battles or events or what happened in the war, but on how a wide variety of stimuli in Vietnam made O'Brien feel about the war. As he points out after an encounter with a dear little old lady leaving one of his book readings, this is not a war story, it's a love story. The approach seems righteous and much of the material is drawn from that well. And many of the stories he tells are unforgettable, playing with truth to the point the author has to address the subjective nature of truth at one point, but hard to put out of my mind.

As drunken as I was on O'Brien's command of prose and his storytelling, there are three reasons why The Things They Carried stopped short of total satisfaction for me. The first is that instead of one chapter leading into the next and so on, these are vignettes, some masterful, others pedestrian, each self-contained for the most part. Second, there's an anticlimactic quality in this jumping around that took me out of the novel, something that was not a problem as long as these vignettes were published in magazines or literary journals. Third, and also no fault of O'Brien's, I felt that so much of his material had been strip mined by film and television, by 2016, I'd seen a lot of it already.

It's difficult for me to imagine that Full Metal Jacket and other movies didn't draw inspiration from O'Brien or use him as a war correspondent--the adrenaline kick of combat mixed with the absolute terror of being killed being a recurring theme in the Stanley Kubrick film in particular. O'Brien addresses the ritualistic joking the grunts utilized to avoid dealing with death, the scripted nature of which became a criticism of Full Metal Jacket. Still, I can see why the book has become a staple of high school and college English curriculum. O'Brien used his experiences to mold a deeply felt and powerful document of a time that history might otherwise soon forget.

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read many descriptions of war - WWI. WWII, the Spanish Revolution, Viet Nam. No writer has ever taken me into the head of a soldier the way Tim O'Brien did. His writing is poignant, hauntingly powerful, and poetic. It is brilliant as only a gifted writer can convey.