My father was in Vietnam. Not that one would know it necessarily. I probably wouldn't have known if my mother hadn't told me. He doesn't talk about it. If you ask him a question about it he might shrug his shoulders and grunt like it was no big deal. But you would know better than to believe that. That's just my dad. That's how he is. I remember there were some slides that he shared with us once or twice, though with the crazy swiss-cheese memory that is the inside of my head, it's just as likely all of that could have been a dream.

The real semi-personal experience I have about the Vietnam War was the class I took in high school dedicated to the US-Vietnam Experience. It was taught by three teachers together, all of whom had served in the war in some facet - in the air cavalry, as a nurse... I'm sorry to say my swiss-cheese memory ate the memory of what the third teacher's experience was. The point is I learned a lot through their stories, the emotions that showed on their faces during lectures or movies or clips that they showed us. It was an intense class and I wish I only had the chance to appreciate it now as an adult.

Movies and books. That's it. Those are my real experiences.

I'm not sure why I've put off reading Tim O'Brien. I've heard enough people raving about him, and about this book in particular. But like a lot of other authors and books, this is one that I've always felt would be there, so no big rush. Though I envy the people I meet who say they had to read this book in high school or college. This is another one of those books I got to read on my own, though I wish so badly we had it read it in that class in high school.

This is a powerful book not just about the war itself, but the power of the mind and storytelling, the way memories overlap and feed off of each other, how one memory of destruction in Vietnam could bring up the memory of a first love at the age of nine. There's a fluidity here between the stories that both humbled and shamed me. The book is a collection of vignettes, little gasps of memories in the author's mind. They're all intense glimpses into his life, but told with such poetry.

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This is one of those books that is bittersweet - bitter because of the subject matter which made my heart hurt for everyone, and sweet in the sense that it's such a beautiful book which would never have been written if the author hadn't been drafted in 1969 and experienced what he did.

nAnd in the end, of course, a true story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.

-page 85, "How to Tell a True War Story"

These stories will stick with me, particularly "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong". I fell in love with O'Brien over that story.

Декілька років тому я надихнувся цією неймовірною книжкою і знайшов час та сили перекласти її «у шухляду». Це й досі один із найпотужніших творів, який я коли-небудь читав. Нарешті він дістанеться українського читача.

As a pacifist, I did not expect to love The Things They Carried - a book comprised of short stories centered on the Vietnam War. However, Tim O'Brien's magnificent writing won me over quicker than I could say "callipygous." This book isn't just about the brutality of war, it's about the human condition, the emotions that entrench us in times of desperation and loss. There isn't much more I can contribute concerning the book that hasn't been said so here are a few of my favorite passages from it.

"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 utterly vacant, and you'd feel the boredom dripping inside of you like a 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 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." (O'Brien, p 34)

"Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down. It was a comforting theory. It dispensed with all those bothersome little acts of daily courage; it offered hope and grace to the repetitive coward; it justified the past while amortizing the future." (O'Brien, p 40)

"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 moonlight 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." (O'Brien, p 144)

*review cross-posted on my blog, the quiet voice.

Powerful writing about being a soldier in Vietnam. I, personally, had a friend once who was a marine there when he was 19. He lost both legs above the knees when he stepped on a land mine. "The guy next to me died" he told me. "I killed him". He couldn't see it any other way... He stepped on the mine, his buddy died. No matter that he nearly died himself, lost his legs, his testicle, his soul, his life as a functional human being, his sense of selfworth, his ability to feel he could live in 'the normal' world and that then he lay face-down on a bed for close to a year while they tried to patch up his brutalized, shrapnel filled body. No, none of that mattered. What mattered was that he was responsible for his buddy's death.

While we sat on his boat under the stars in the Caribbean, 20 years later, with the sea lapping gently at the sides, the salty tang in the air and wild burros braying in the dark, Tommy also told me all about slogging through the swamps and rice paddies with weapons and ammunition and mess kit and rations and a change of socks and...... The list went on and I forgot much of it... But Tim O'Brien reminded me of what Tommy can never forget, it is seared into his mind and body forever.

A powerful book. One not to be brushed aside lightly.

Updated Review (11/24/15):

I wanted to read this again, as I’d previously posted I’d read this in my first attempt at college. I felt the same reading it, and now I have the mental content to match. This book goes deeper than action and war atrocities. You see the war through O’Brien’s eyes, but he would say the books hits closer to the truth. The short stories in this book happened in the places and times, but the author makes them up, or changes them. He does this to explain the feeling, the experience of the war.

The book exemplifies pure genius. I’ll read this again. He writes with poetic language, almost like a modern Shakespeare, but not a romantic comedian – a man trying to understand things humanity can’t understand. The message I received hit me with this: You think you know life until suffering comes, then struggle to understand; sometimes you make a choice on sticking around, because all you thought about goes down in a field of sopping shit – all of life becomes a pile of generational shit that sinks to a drowning nothingness.

He comes close to understanding.

The feeling. The way to understand goes beyond words. You can only get it through experience. Psychologists say the mind can’t tell the difference between living an experience and reading it. This story brings something inside closer.



Original Review (Read in first and only semester at UWW, 1998)

Remember reading this in college. I don't remember the content, but as Maya Angelou said, I remember how it made me feel. I read it as assigned reading but it made me sad and puzzled about life when I lived at a time of gambling with my life.

Smart, interestingly structured linked collection of short stories set during and around the Vietnam War. O'Brien's recursions - and specifically, his modifications to earlier stories - delve into the trauma of combat, and the book is most effective when it explores the struggles of soldiers before and after war. It is somewhat limited by its lesser moments (a too-long prank-war, the non-sequitur, ending, and bizarrely enough, the famous opening), but the central episodes of the piece - the deaths, the killing - are at once upsetting and wonderfully rendered. The result: a book that is both under and overrated.

I had been meaning to read Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried literally for years. I finally tackled this book — part novel, part memoir — after my Advanced Placement English Literature class voted to include it as one of our reads this year.

The book's just as fabulous as everyone has always said — a true classic. As O'Brien himself notes, The Things They Carried isn't mainly about war — although the hubris, carnage and waste that was the Vietnam War looms large, of course. Rather, the book deals with love and how we "carry" our loved ones with us, even after their deaths.

Don't miss this one.

This book is a set of connected short stories about Alpha Company - a group of young men making their way through the Vietnam war. These stories are mostly horrifying. They are very human. Through these stories, O'Brien gives you an incredible sense of place. You can see and feel these things happening. It is a powerful book about the Vietnam war, and it puts you inside the lives of the people who were sent there to fight it.

The three stories that are going to stick with me for a very long time - "On the Rainy River," one of a few times in the book that O'Brien deals with the nature of courage and the reasons people make the decisions they do. "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" is riveting. Also the story of the death of Kaiwa, told across several of the short stories from varying perspectives.

This is considered a classic Vietnam work, but the book itself is as much about storytelling as it is war. O'Brien wants you to understand the way story conveys truth. It's hard to read this book without wondering how much of it is factual and how much isn't, but his aim isn't facts, but truth - what the war was like, what combat is like, what death is like, what people are like.

[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

I must confess... my TBR pile has become more of a hill in recent years. Buried in that mound was ‘The Things They Carried’; a highly recommended book that always seemed to get sidetracked whenever I planned to pull it out and give it a read. Trust me, I’m kicking myself for not getting to this sooner. It was a rare treat, one where storytelling, substance, and craft come together in some very fine writing indeed.

This book is a collection of short stories about the unpopular Vietnam War, loosely (or maybe actually more specifically) written from the author’s own experience as an infantry grunt. Tim O’Brien has captured what few writers could about war: the uncomfortable, if not uncanny, truth. Yes, war is hell. War is also exciting, funny, boring, patriotic, confusing, enjoyable, numbing, negative, positive, and a frighteningly natural condition of humanity as well as a popular vehicle for the unreliable narrator. His short stories cover every inch of it, from the long mundane marches through the jungle, to the sudden and brief firefights that can turn men into martyrs or monsters, to the moments of almost inaccessible introspection from young men carrying the weight of their actions or inaction during wartime.

Soldiers tell tales; to one another especially, sometimes to friends, family, or strangers. They exaggerate and understate, polish and muddy, spin and sell these stories to each other. ‘The Things They Carried’ recounts this with an unflinching eye and holds it to the highest standard. It’s brilliant, somber, hilarious, horrific, and hard-hitting. O’Brien’s writing is top notch with an incredible pace and flow that wastes no reader’s time. In short, it’s a soldier’s storytelling written with a master’s hand. This author is one of THE guys to be reading; the real deal, no charlatan or knock-off here.

So, what stopped this from receiving a full five stars? Well, these short stories occasionally give way to sections from the author written in a style that comes off more like essays, afterthoughts, and articles of insight. Personally, I thought these were unnecessary more often than not. O’Brien’s storytelling does not need a soapbox on the side. They speak for themselves in volumes. I felt these seemingly additional (and somewhat out of place) pieces scattered through the book detracted somewhat from the rest of it.
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But that rest of it is almost unparalleled. When O’Brien is telling a war story there is no doubt he is in his element and in total control of his craft. ‘The Things They Carried’ comes in a damn close second to my favorite novel about Vietnam (if not in general), ‘The Names Of The Dead’ by Stewart O’Nan. If this book is at all on your radar, don't do what I did and put it off. Make it a priority. You'll be glad you did.

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.

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.