The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction / by Tim O'Brien

Tim O'brien was an Army lieutenant during the Vietnam War. An infantry platoon leader, he was in on his fair share of up-close-and-personal enemy encounters as well as the often contradictory nature of "true" war stories. Among his other books, 'Things They Carried'--though fictional--re-creates the essence of a wartime atmosphere with unequaled clarity.



"A true war story is never moral." (p. 45)

A girl dancing in a bombed out village. Chamber music in the darkest, most isolated jungle. Boredom in the midst of gunfire. Not having the courage to run away from your fear. A man's death caused by his lieutenant's preoccupation with a girl thousands of miles off. Perhaps not the most characteristic depictions of the Vietnam War but "true" all the same. From the pages of this book, it's hard to believe there aren't more political assassinations. The most fervent nationalist angle could never reconcile the idiocy of going off somewhere, not to fight or employ 'diplomacy by other means', but to encounter death at such a level that ". . . you slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted or believed in." (p.212). It's not even as if Obrien's world, reconstructed within loosely linked vignettes of personally prevaricated reminisces, carries that much of an 'anti-war' sentiment. The book is more an observational blend of the disturbingly nondescript events which--dreadful as they were--reinvent the commonplace incidents that happen(ed) within a combat atmosphere. (FIC OBRIEN)