This was the second time I read this extraordinary collection, and it moved me even more now. Poignant and powerful and so damn smart. Yes, it is about Vietnam, but it is also about stories -- and, quite literally, the way stories can save us. I loved every single word. Every. Single. Word.

Every year in November around Veterans Day, I try to read books about the military. This was my first time reading this thoughtful classic. Things They Carried is the perfectly titled collection of stories that is really a novel of stream of consciousness and memories of a reluctant soldier and his band of brothers during the Vietnam war.

Tim O'Brien, an Army veteran, is clearly not a fan of war, or more specifically the Vietnam War. Don't believe me? He wrote a book about it. A book that clearly blurs the line between fiction and fact. His is a collection of short stories and vignettes are strung together to form a novel rather than a short story collection. The stories are interconnected and though there is a little bit of time displacement, they are mostly in chronological order with one or two flashbacks/flashforwards. It's all a very clever testimonial to the trials of war and what it does to men, particularly men that are generically painted as decent human beings. O'Brien put you into the mind of the soldiers, their quirks, their dreams and their desires to maintain their humanity. The book is filled with poignant passages of mental and emotional struggle. One of the most poignant for me was in a story not about the war but about when O'Brien was drafted. He went on a trip not sure he was going to show up for the draft. Ultimately, he does but sees the act of showing up for basic training as cowardly. The war's first assault on his psyche was his own disappointment that he had failed to stand up for what he believed in. As the stories flow, we begin to see all types of psychological trauma from homesickness to the relentless rain to the tremendous boredom to the trauma of seeing your friends killed or even worse killing someone. There are so many flavors of guilt and so many coping mechanisms. There is also the human need to seek purpose where none is offered. There is a desire to maintain decency. And these are very young kids with an idealized sense of what is good, and moral or patriotic. Most of the soldiers were under 25 including the officers. All of this makes for a very cerebral novel.

There were some shortcomings. In O'Brien's idealized memories, all these young men were moral and honorable and asexual and mostly white. The atrocities were sanitized. There was very little talk about how they treated women in general. There was a fantasy element about one of the soldier's girlfriend who came to visit and basically turned into a Navy Seal. There is a tremendous allegorical nature to that story, but I confess I haven't fully processed it and am not sure of the entire meaning. Maybe an allegory of fear and how this soldier's gf was more capable of taking care of him. The loneliness and methods of coping. . There is not much mention of sex (consensual or otherwise) or the trauma that soldiers visited upon the indigenous population. Every one of the soldiers was decent and/or good-natured. There was little evidence of frictions between the soldiers. Everyone was likeable. Their environment seemed a little more ordered, structured, and purposeful than the chaos and ennui that likely engulfed them (based upon other testimonials of the Vietnam War). But despite these minor things, the book was definitely haunting.

The titular story was the most moving for me. The book is a stark reminder of what we commit the troops to when we send them off to war. With a diminishing percentage of vets, America becomes more detached from what is being done by our military abroad. Easy to be at war for almost 20 years somewhere yet most Americans don't know anyone in the military at all much less someone who fought in combat. Meanwhile young soldiers vacillate between boredom and terror, don't know why they are there and come home in psychological pieces. This book describes the conditions. Everyone should be haunted and horrified by the prospects of war…

4 Stars

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Tim O'Brien has written a work suffused with a passionate earnestness supplemented by a visceral pathos that only few non-war veteran writers can manage. There are some issues of unwieldy exposition and aesthetic asides, the occasional one, that could be derided as cliche; but these only serve to underscore O'Brien's admirable job of straddling the line between his own innocence destroyed, seemingly with much of America's, during and after the Vietnam War.

This isn't a perfect work. But works of brilliance saddled with adjectives like 'perfect' or 'beyond compare' are, to me, nonsensical. This isn't a perfect work but a profoundly human one detailing the human flaws of human memory and how something as relatively innocuous as setting things down as a narrative can act not only as a source of expatiation but of personal redemption as well.

I never served in any military though I do, in a roundabout way, come from a military family as all of my siblings served in the Israeli military. I attempted to enlist in my mid twenties but due to the genetic gift of Crohn's (an ironically Ashkenazic Jewish disease) I was sidelined. For a while before and after I idealized the life of a soldier. They were, to me, all warriors, poets, philosophers, in the vain of Amos Oz, Yoram Kaniuk, any of the characters in Terrence Malick's adaptation of Jones' seminal war novel The Thin Red Line. But these were the feverish daydreams of an immature and sheltered mind. Like many a child from suburban America I found solace in impossible fantasy.

But what this work does is ground soldiers as just that: human. O'Brien deftly weaves his narrative, modeling it wonderfully over a fiction/non-fiction divide in a way that acts almost as a somber and more meditative counterpart to Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. And it works despite and because of its few failings in dialogue and cliche, even elevating them in places through the grit and reality of the writer's obvious lived experiences.

It's a great work, even brilliant. It stands tall as war fiction and even taller as anti-war fiction. Having no need to openly declare that 'war is bad' it merely tells it like it was, like it still is, and galvanizes the angels of our better nature, one hopes, into not repeating history. Yes, I lifted the quote from Lincoln, a non-veteran who knew war in his own way as well as O'Brien.

“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.

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.

I don't think I can do justice to this novel with my review. My brain is ping-ponging with so many thoughts about it. I expected the atrocities of war and steel myself for some of those realities, but I can't help it that when I read about animals being abused, I feel sickened.
O'Brien's novel blends fact and fiction and it reads like a memoir of his time primarily as an infantryman in Vietnam through a series of vignettes describing his platoon members and their Vietnam experience. War is terrible and anyone who has been on the frontlines has to be forever changed; whether for better or worse. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. War is hell..(it) is also mystery, terror, adventure, courage, discovery, holiness, pity, despair, longing and love. War is thrilling, war is drudgery. War makes you a man, war makes you dead. . O'Brien captures all of this in spades in this powerful novel.
Many books have been written of the bonds that develop between combatants as they have to rely on one another for survival. O'Brien captures the uniqueness of each man in Alpha platoon and how they work together to put one foot in front of another supporting each other as they deal with their common experiences and unfortunately the loss of life within the group. It also touches on the lasting impact of war on the individual as they try to find a way to transition back into civilian life. The vignettes give the reader a better understanding of why so many of our Vietnam era vets continue to be haunted by what they saw and/or participated in. The bad stuff never stops happening, it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.
There are some really beautiful passages in this book, its hard to pick out just one or two.
To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. At its core, perhaps war is just another name for death, yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, the proximity to death brings with it a proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always an immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, soil - everything....the aliveness makes you tremble.
The first story carries the title of the book and I have to relate those "things" because I thought they were some of the most revelatory and emotionally weighted lines.
The things they carried :
-sometimes were determined by necessity.
-were partly a function of rank or field specialty
-varied by mission
-determined to some extent by superstition
-infection and diseases
-shameful memories
-secret cowardice
They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.
They carried each other, the wounded, or weak.
They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die.
They carried their reputations by & large they carried these things while maintaining masks of composure.

This book is provocative, heartbreaking, and smacks you over the head with the realities of war and I can't recommend it highly enough.

I would actually give five stars to Tom Stechschulte, who reads the book aloud. My star rating expresses my profound ambivalence about the novel, which is scathingly good in the beginning and episodically brilliant throughout but which increasingly destroyed my affection for the narrator by breaking the fourth wall. For me, this book belongs in the "Atonement" category, named for the first novel that made me rage against metafiction. I simply don't want a narrator to tell me a devastating story and then say, "Gotcha. Made it ALL UP!" In fact, Tim O'Brien takes the Atonement technique to another level of bitterness by essentially saying that the only way to tell a true war story is to tell it the way he does, and to say that the only truth is a nihilistic one. It pains me to think that this novel is ingrained in school curriculums where there isn't enough time to lay a solid foundation in other kinds of literature. To assign this book to high school students who haven't read widely and who might yet be inspired to believe in art and literature as redemptive rather than disillusioning endeavors is like sitting kids down and saying, "Everything is corrupt. Me, books, the world, everything. Good luck out there, though." I don't have the same qualms about college English majors or adults or for myself. They can presumably decide for themselves how seriously to take O'Brien's shtick.

Read this amazing little book and the first thing you’ll think is, “Whoa, so that’s what it was like.” The “it” was the Vietnam War, from a mud-level view. We learn about the things a humping GI carries both literally and figuratively. The storytelling is remarkable, without a single word wasted, written in a deft, deceptively simple style by a guy who was there. O’Brien is clearly smarter than the average bear, but he’s also the voice of the everyman: empathetic, observant, and linked in.

He puts you there in a very real way – before, after, and during the conflict. It reads like a memoir, which it sort of is, but it’s fictionalized in a way that I suspect tells the story in a truer way than the truth does. This is something he talks about in the book. You hear similar arguments all the time in support of good fiction, but you rarely see examples where it’s so clear. When the full story of Vietnam is divvied up instead among a handful of memorable characters and glued into a tight narrative, it can crystallize the experience in our own heads better than hearing a scattered set of factually accurate accounts ever could. I didn’t get the sense that he was manipulating us with sensationalized half-truths, either. Nor did he stretch credulity by glorifying himself or his fellow grunts. They were sent to do a terrible job, they were brave (not from lack of fear, but as a troop-wide coping mechanism), and they forged bonds where phrases like “I’ve got your back” would have real meaning. Most of us will never comprehend the magnitude of this, but The Things They Carried at least gives us a glimpse. War stories matter. Both to us and the teller.

The flawless audiobook presentation, read by none other than Bryan Cranston (of Malcolm in the Middle fame) was riveting. This is good storytelling, and a lesson on how to use repetition. It sheds light on nuanced emotions amid the chaos of wartime.

I've always disliked war stories in general. They're just not my thing. I found The Naked and the Dead difficult. I don't understand the level of cruelty in these tales. They accomplish the depiction of human strength, endurance, weakness and moral outrage. But how is it possible to justify a bombing, a mine, or the massacres that have occurred in every era of history? I'm always thinking, why is our civilization doing this? I'm no historian. I don't know a lot about Vietnam. But I believe I can appreciate some of the contradictions, the hypocrisy and the tragedy. Maybe Hollywood has ruined my perception. It is safe to assume that those who had a personal connection with the time and events will get slightly more out of the literature it produced.

Luckily, Tim O'Brien's book really comes off as authentic. Vietnam was another troubling time in history, and the author has a lot to say about war and the damage it has done on the psyches of the Americans involved. The author's account at the end added even more food for thought.

This is an affecting, powerful, immersive book. A well-written chronicle, limited in scope, but all the more memorable for the idiosyncratic characters and clear, crystalline voice.

This book does its job. It captures attention, widens understanding, it engages the heart and mind. I doubt I will find a more effective war story anytime soon.

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.

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.

This one is a powerful, essential, tour-de-force war story. Its visceral honesty and a complimenting imagination scares me, not of the war, but of my own fears and vulnerability in my bubble of safety and normalcy that the lottery of time and circumstances has sheltered me in. Based on US soldiers participating in Vietnam war of the 1970s, yeah it tells you about the horrors of the war, the atrocities and only-imaginable closeness to death and danger that fell in the misfortune of so many. But it goes to another level in talking about the all the emotional and psychological weight, all the memories and imagination that arose from the immense pressure and unforgiving physicality of the black-hole that any war is. But I must not dwell on abstraction - because of all the things that humans engage in, war is one of the farthest from philosophy.

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

"They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear."

"... for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry."

This book tells you that a war is not about honour. A glorifying living-room patriotism and an opportunity to serve their country is so far from those in contact of dead bodies and fatigue as are the policy makers who preach the importance and urgency of war. Instead they were too occupied of the inexhaustible weight of things they carried - fear, guilt, rage, trauma, sorrow, death, destruction, cruelty, memories, dreams, remnants of their identities and a capability for evil. Victory, vanquishing enemy and medals of honour was nowhere close to their salvation. They were often consequences of accidents, survival instincts and even darker, anti-noble feelings like revenge.

"It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards."

This book tells you that a war is not about bravery. Instead, it is always about the conscious, unwilling and unavoidable agreement to share your mental space with your fears. Fear of dying, of pain, of killing and worse, being responsible for somebody else's death are constant companions. It was personally the most evocative part for me about the book. It makes you aware of all the pain and death related aspects of life. It also shares that feeling of being ashamed naturally of our vulnerabilities and how frantically and desperately we try to cover it up until the last extent where desperation in extremities like a struggle for survival lays down everything bare. This anticipation of our own inadequacy and possible failure in the face of situation that demands courage is the worst of feelings. For fear and honesty soaked stories like these make empathise and reflect on my own fear and honesty. We feel no different (especially at the youthful stage of our lives) from the early 20s scared-to-shit and embarrassingly putting-a-brave-face-on soldiers, contrary to how we/they want to feel accomplished, powerful and progressive. It gets so under-the-skin both during action and all those inactive hostilities of environment that you realise your mortal fear as one of the most fundamental aspects of your identity. Any sort of bravery follows only on a personal level when one is afraid, conscious of one's fear and has to follow it through.

"True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis."

"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. 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. 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 book tells you that a war is never about higher level ideas or concepts. History, sides, causes, numbers and consequences are dishonouring the honesty of war. It is usually stories like these that counter the anonymity whose aim is to create a numbness or diversion from the brutality and terrible costs of a war. It's about that imaginable adrenaline response to primal fears that cause us to fight or flight. War is also sometimes about the darker pleasures of destruction, feeling in control and that gushing vivid vitality after escaping death or in the immediate vicinity of life-threatening danger. Fascism in any form often misplaces the importance of preserving abstract notions over humans who often have to face the irreversible costs of way. Stories like these tell that it's not defeat of this one side or deaths of so many individuals that matters, but the death of this one individual was so affecting and only the memory of those missing-in-actions remained when they could not be found, when they died alone - painfully or all at once as their luck might have been. A reflection over feeling what they felt, over experiencing the unreality of that unbearable reality, and over what each one of them carried to cope up with it will probably make us feel sorry for their arbitrary, inescapable situation and for our hypothetical selves who were/will ever be with them when we live their story.

"By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain."

Tim O'Brien has written this book with his memories and imagination. The range of experiences of all that happened and did not happen at the same time are told with a riveting honesty - an ownership of altered reality and responsible imagination that captured the blood, flesh and viscera of war experiences and what it meant for all those who were directly taxed by it. It is attention riveting with its terrors and sorrowful recollection. Surely one of the important reads among war-based books for me. It effortlessly captures attention with its melancholic rhythm and makes readers understand and acknowledge the essential fear about pain and loss in human lives.

"Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."