The Things They Carried

Tim O'Brien read this to us at Furman University when I was a junior at SCGSAH. I absolutely adore his voice. He's so unique. I love the portrayals of each character as lengthy lists of personal, intimate, and absurd items each man carried and how they tied in to each war story. I still pick it up to read my favorites.

106. The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien 246 pages. American Literature. Ever in search for the Great War novel, I took on a new author from another war: Vietnam setting. I always question authors who write war literature who are not combat veterans themselves. Thi guy is the real deal. It was not the great war novel I sought. But it did not drag me down with endless narratives about character civilian lives, like Naked and Dead did, ad nauseaum. This was a real fast read, but a haunting one, a first person narrative that used words that clearly painted a mental picture of jungle nights so dark that one could not tell whether their eyes wee open or closed; guilt over fragging a lone enemy with a fragmentary hand grenade; a dreadful bloody night caught in a field in the rain with a stench beyond words caused from the human waste deposited in the field for years; he dehumanization of victims to survive the Nam experience: burn victims are crispy critters, and an old VC resident of a town who is killed becomes a brunt of callous jokes that demonstrate, with unsettling clarity, the psychological and emotional damages suffered by our unfortunate Vietnam Veterans. The tale is told in one-third the pages needed for Naked and Dead, but equals its scope and power. I will read other novels by this author, but not for a while.

This story brought to mind Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood," due to the mixture of fiction and realism. The story tells of a platoon of soldiers and their experiences in Vietnam. It gives an interesting insight into the make-up of soldiers on active duty and serves as a comparison to today's army fighting in Afghanistan. The reader learns what various soldiers carry in the field. Besides the normal items such as their weapons, we see that one man carried a sewing kit, another had a New Testament, still another carried Dr. Scholl's foot powder, and that Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried the letters from his love, Martha, a college student at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. In a sad manner, we also discover tha Martha didn't share Jimmy's love but thought of him more as a friend. The author also give the reader an idea of some of the things the soldiers did on their off duty time. We learn of the soldier called Kiowa, who was teaching Rat Kelly a rain dance and another soldier adopting a stray puppy. This information made the soldiers seem more real. I enjoyed the book, which is made up of linked stories. However, I felt that it was more of a journal of the author, Tim O'Brien's experiences in Vietnam, than a novel. What appealed to me was the uniqueness and descriptions of men, who are my age, and what they went through in the war.