The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

O'Brien, Tim (1990). The Things They Carried. Boston: Mariner Books.

Vietnam was a time that men had to carry many things - physical and emotional. This slightly scattered account tells stories of a group of men weighed down with physical and emotional burdens during the Vietnam War.

The Things They Carried was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger.

The Things They Carried is a work of fiction by Tim O’Brien about “his” experiences as a soldier in Vietnam. This book can become somewhat confusing at times as the author jumps around chronologically while telling a story about one of the soldiers he served with (or his own stories) while also intermixing his own ideas from the “present” (1990 - when the book was written). However, this fact is what makes The Things They Carried so intriguing. The scattered organization of the book seems like a metaphor for war and how the men would have been telling stories waiting to go on an ambush or after coming under fire.

O’Brien goes through his experiences of the war retelling the time when he was drafted and almost fled to Canada; stories of Mary Anne - a woman who came to visit her boyfriend and never left Vietnam; a fellow soldier dying in the village latrine they camped in for one night; his own experiences of being shot twice; and many other little stories throughout. O’Brien takes a lot of time explaining how to tell a proper war story, because the true stories are so outrageous no one believes them. Therefore, white lies are included to make the story seem more realistic or to help the listener (or reader) understand what the soldier had been experiencing. This is not a book of facts on the Vietnam War, but is instead a book about one group of men and the awful situations they had to live through. Whether the stories are true or not may never be known, but that is not the point of this book. The point is to try and help the reader to feel what those soldiers may have felt camping in the countryside of Vietnam.