A Soldier's Story of War: The Things They Carried

"The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien is a true account of the Vietnam War as told by one of its veterans. Tim O'Brien was born in 1946 and was raised in Minnesota. He was a lonely, overweight child who occupied himself by practicing magic tricks (Lee 2). "For a brief time, he contemplated being a writer, inspired by some old clippings he'd found of his father's" (Lee 2). But when O'Brien entered college "his aspirations turned political" (Lee 2). "He was a political science major at Macalester, attended peace vigils and war protests, and planned to join the State Department to reform his policies" (Lee 1).

O'Brien "never imagined he would be drafted upon graduation and actually sent to Vietnam" (Lee 2). "From 1969-70, O'Brien had been an infantryman in the Quang Ngai province, and his platoon had been stationed in My Lai for a year after the massacre" (Lee 1). When he received his classification as an infantryman he considered fleeing to Canada (Lee 2). O'Brien "now thinks it was cowardice not to, particularly since he was against the war, but in 1969, as a twenty-two-year-old, he had feared the disapproval of his family and friends, his townspeople and his country" (Lee 2). "He went to Vietnam and hated every minute of it, from beginning to end" (Lee 2).

"When he came back to the States, he had a Purple Heart (he was wounded by shrapnel from a hand grenade) and several publishing credits" (Lee 2). "He had written personal reports about the war that had made their way into Minnesota newspapers, and while pursuing a doctorate at the Harvard School of Government, O'Brien expanded on the vignettes to form a book, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home" (Lee 2).
The first publisher he sent the book to turned him down because they were already publishing a Vietnam story (Lee 2). However, they suggested another publisher who took the book (Lee 2). It "was published in 1973, just as O'Brien was being hired as a national affairs reporter for the Washington Post, where he'd been an intern for two summers" (Lee 2). "The job helped tremendously in terms of discipline, which, O'Brien confesses, was a problem for him until then" (Lee 2).

"After his one-year stint with the Post, O'Brien simply wrote books" (Lee 3). They included Northern Lights (1975); Going After Cacciato (1978), which won the National Book Award over John Irving's The World According to Garp; The Nuclear Age (1985); and The Things They Carried (1990), which was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award (Lee 3). In 1995, O'Brien wrote In the Lake of the Woods, in which he takes the question of how much we can know about an event one step further than he did in The Things They Carried (Lee 3).
After writing In the Lake of the Woods, O'Brien felt it was his best book to date, but it took its toll on him (Lee 4). When he finished writing the book, he stopped writing for the first time in over twenty years (Lee 4). "The road back has not been easy, particularly with the loss of his editor and good friend, Sam Lawrence, who died in 1993" (Lee 4). But he is writing again. "And in defiance of some editors and critics, who suggest he should move on from Vietnam, he will in all likelihood continue to write about the war" (Lee 4).

"The Things They Carried" begins with just that: what the Vietnam soldiers carried during the war. O'Brien doesn't just list these items; he mentions what each soldier carried and why, along with a description of the things the soldiers carried. This chapter is only the beginning of a story about the soldiers of the Vietnam War, not just the war itself.

O'Brien writes about the experiences he and the other soldiers experienced during the war. He mentions who died and how. He mentions how the other soldiers felt when they lost their friends. He talks about the language the soldiers used. He talks about intimate details that a person can learn only after living through an unforgettable experience with another person.

"The Things They Carried" is not a detailed story about what happened during the war. It is many stories that happened at different times during the war, and even some events that occurred before and after the war. But like a novel, it has a particular set of characters and a particular storyline for each character. The difference is the characters come and go and live and die as O'Brien tells the stories.

One of the stories is an account of what happened when O'Brien thought of fleeing to Canada. He wrote a letter to his parents and drove to northern Minnesota. When he got there, O'Brien checked into a cabin on the RainyRiver, which separates Minnesota from Canada. He hid there for a while, trying to decide what to do One day, the owner offered to take him fishing on the River. While out there, he docked so close to the border that O'Brien could have swum to his freedom. Being so close to freedom forced him to decide what he really wanted to do. As much as he hated it, O'Brien decided to honor his duty. H knew it would be better than living with the guilt of fleeing.

Another story O'Brien tells is when one of his friends died in the war in what could only be described as an outdoor toilet. Their captain set them up for a night near a swamp not knowing what the weather would be like or what the swamp really was. During the night, the rain started, flooding the swamp. At one point, soldier was showing a picture of his girlfriend to one of his buddies, Kiowa. Suddenly, they were under attack. As they tried to flee through the swamp, Kiowa went under. The soldiers tried to save him, but they couldn't. After the attack, they searched the swamp and finally found his body to send home.

A third story involves one of the soldier's girlfriends. She came over to visit him and ended up staying. All the soldiers liked her and treated her like an equal. She began to feel like one of them and little by little learned what they did. She began hanging out with the Green Berets. She would go with them on their missions and began to live nd act like a soldier. She liked going into the mountains and disappeared there one night. She was never found.
These stories and more make the reader feel as though he or she is involved in the situations happening in the book. O'Brien writes the scenes so that the reader can see, hear, smell and taste everything that is happening.

The jumps between time allow the reader to see what O'Brien felt during the war. After reading what happened during the war, the reader is transported back to the present and finds out how O'Brien interprets what happened thirty years later. This allows the reader a chance to mull over what just happened and hear first hand what it was like to be in a particular situation.

To end the book, O'Brien compares losing his friends in the war to losing a friend to cancer when he was a child. This is another story he used in the book. He looks back on that time, how he was then and how he handled that event in his life. Now as a grownup who lost more friends to tragedy, he is able to help the young boy he was who lost a friend. In comparing these two stories, O'Brien is able to show how we use different events in our lives to shape ourselves and grow.

I have always been interested in stories about Vietnam. However, the stories I read and the movies I watched involving the war were always fictional and wrapped around a romance story. This is the first factual story I have read about the war. Although I knew that it was a terrible war, I was not prepared for some of the graphic scenes in the book. Not so much the blood and gore, which really were not part of the story, but the surroundings and the situations the soldiers had to endure on a daily basis. When O'Brien described the outdoor toilet that Kiowa died in and wrote the scenes involving the search for him in it, I had to stop reading and take a break so I wouldn't feel sick. This is how well O'Brien described the scenes in the book. However, I am glad I got to see this side of the story. Now I will have a better understanding of the situation when I read or see another fictional Vietnam story.

I thought O'Brien wrote the story in a way that gave the reader a chance to catch his or her breath after reading a detailed story of how one of the soldiers died or went through a terrible situation. By writing about the present as well, I was able to see how O'Brien felt about the things that happened and how he interpreted them.

I was a bit confused by some parts that O'Brien said never really happened as he described them but were part of the story. I realized he was just writing the scenarios in a way that fit the rest of the book and continued reading. The fact that the book was not written in detailed order also made it difficult for me to describe what happened in the book. It was as though I was reading a few different books at the same time. But the basis of the book, what happened in Vietnam, was continually present.

The individual stories were emotional, fascinating and graphic. Some of the graphic details of the stories bothered me, but I kept going to find out what was coming next. Some of the stories made me laugh. Most made me sad. But all of them made me open up my heart and let my feelings pour out.