The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried really hit me on a deep level. Tim O’Brien’s storytelling is raw and honest, blending fact and fiction in a way that makes you feel like you’re right there with the soldiers. The way he writes about the emotional weight—both physical and psychological—that the characters carry is haunting and unforgettable.Each story stands on its own but also ties together beautifully, giving a complex view of the Vietnam War and its lasting impact. It’s not just a war book; it’s about memory, trauma, and what it means to be human.If you want something that’s moving, beautifully written, and stays with you long after you finish, this book is it.

Tim O'Brien is a national treasure. Thank you, Mr. O'Brian, for your work.Four things I would like to focus on in my review of this seminal Vietnam War novel:1. O'Brien addresses head on the paradox of fiction being more true than factually accurate history in conveying an experience. A detail that did not occur, can actually convey the reality of an experience more strongly than the strictly accurate account ever could. I find this true and I find it amazing. I think in the experience of living an event, especially a stressful or traumatic event, one becomes hyper-aware of small details--even your own heartbeat. Later, when recounting the experience, the facts often don't adequately capture the intensity of the moment. The story-teller, to then give an accurate representation of the lived moment, to get the reader/hearer to feel what was felt, must add some details. To accurately convey the feeling is the art, the job of the story-teller. Factual accuracy is the domain of the academic historian. Those in the trenches, telling their lived experience, should strive for emotional accuracy--a different, but no less important, truth that must also be preserved. O'Brien does that perfectly here, if occasionally with blushed cheeks as he tells on himself for doing so.2. Death has always been personally present in the wars of the past (in the drone and hacking wars of the future death will be largely remote). Death looms large in O'Brien's Vietnamese jungle. I found the way the soldiers dealt with death to be odd and moving and disturbing. They prop up a dead old villager and shake and high-five his remaining hand. They take turns voicing their dead battle-buddy's signature mellow tone as his dead body waits for evac choppers to arrive. Death is too terrible to face head on--it must be mocked and laughed at to be borne. The main incident when it is faced head-on haunts the narrator for the rest of his life.3. Which brings us to PTSD. One of the soldiers kills himself after not being able to adjust to civilian life after the war. The narrator returns with his daughter to the field where his friend died looking to find closure and finds little peace. The soldiers are forever changed, their innocence lost. I served in the Army, I never saw death up close and personal, and I still had mild PTSD after getting out. I can't imagine the hell in the minds of soldiers who fought in close combat in the wars of the 20th century. I mourn with them and empathize and promise to try to do more to help vets returning from combat zones.4. Finally, a note about the writing. It is masterful. Beautiful. Real without being trite. O'Brien's style here is as much poetry as prose. Every writer should read O'Brien and learn from a master. It was a true pleasure to read. Which seems strange to say about a book about such difficult and dark topics.

This is a brilliant and sensitive book about Vietnam. Although I wasn’t there, I served in the military during that period, safely stateside, and was glad to not go to a war that was so difficult to explain and justify. Nevertheless, I felt a sense of guilt for no other reason than that my peers were fighting and dying there. I have talked to others who stayed out of harm’s way while otherwise serving, and the same feeling was at least lurking in their psyche. Perhaps as a result, and having lived through a time when the country was torn apart by this distant conflict, I avoided the books and films that came out soon after the conflict ended. But as time passed, it became easier and appropriate to examine the experiences of those who were actually engaged in this misguided war.A couple of years ago I read “The Matterhorn”. Like this book, it is a novel, but one obviously based on the experience of the author who served in Vietnam. I found The Matterhorn quite compelling, and the recollection that sticks in my mind was of the terrible physical hardship, and the complete exhaustion of the troops. There was much more to the book, but that is what stayed with me. I found quite a different viewpoint in The Things They Carried.The book begins reciting the physical things that the troops carried- guns and boots and ponchos and rations and a myriad of supplies that necessarily weighted them down on their days and nights in the field. But it quickly became obvious that the title did not really refer to these tangible objects but instead to the emotional burdens that were much more weighty.For the author, dealing with such emotional burdens begins as he grapples with a decision to obey the draft or go to Canada. There is a wonderful chapter about his stay in a cabin near the Canadian border where, along with the aged proprietor, he contemplates his decision. He decides against leaving the country, but not out of an internal patriotism, but instead from a sense of shame if he failed to report. He did not want to disappoint his family and friends, and this fear of shame was much more compelling than the fear of war. Indeed, he would go to war and kill and maybe die, because he was embarrassed not to.This sense of shame, or embarrassment, also transferred to the battlefield. In fact, of all the things the soldiers carried, the most compelling was the fear of blushing. Men killed and died because they were embarrassed not to. Their acts of bravery were not a product of courage or valor, but from the fact that they were too frightened to be thought of as cowards. They also battled with the desire to be a good man in the midst of all the evil, to find justice amidst the dying. But war, whatever it is, is never moral-it does not instruct nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing what they have always done. War is hell, but it is also terror and adventure and courage and discovery. The author also notes that war is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling, war is drudgery. War makes you a man, war makes you dead. It can also be a rush, one may never feel more alive than when he’s almost dead.Amidst all the emotions, the book must also recount the grisly details of that combat, but it always seemed to me a story of emotion. And just as these men–actually boys– carried the shame of a judgmental society as their propulsion to fight and die, they acquired and returned with great burdens of guilt. This guilt was the thing they carried home, along with memories that they could not put out of their minds. These are probably the same memories that soldiers have always brought back, but those returning from Vietnam were perhaps the first to gradually discuss and try to deal with this emotional burden.The book tells a difficult and instructive story. It again raises questions and issue that were discussed at the time but have faded with other memories of those times. The author’s thoughts are timelessly pertinent:That you don’t make war without knowing why. That Vietnam seemed wrong to him because certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons. And that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause, because you can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.Simple expectations when young lives are at stake.