The Things They Carried
“I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”
Neither a novel nor a short story collection, The Things They Carried is an arc of fictional episodes, taking place in the childhoods of its characters, in the jungles of Vietnam and back home in America two decades later. These connected stories are about young men in their late teens and early twenties doing their best to carry the weight of a brutal war on their shoulders, along with dozens of pounds of field kit and weaponry. They carry so much weight it is hard to even imagine how they could walk the miles they did, crossing rivers, muddy streams, up hills and down into valleys, somehow placing one foot in front of the other while their eyes and ears scan for danger.
The equipment is not all they carry. Some carry guilt, some carry cowardice, some carry aggression, some carry courage, some carry fear, some carry righteousness, some carry hatred, and some carry doubt. Of all the feelings they carry, the weight of futility has to be the hardest to bear. They carry with them the knowledge that where they are and what they are doing is all the choice they have. Short of doing damage to themselves to be airlifted out of there, they all carry the weight of being stuck.
The beauty of this book lies not necessarily in the war stories at its center, but rather in the undulating, overlapping entanglements that are people's lives, in the act of using storytelling as a means of recapturing our histories, bringing the many facets of our so often fragmented selves forward into the present day. The lyrical poetry of O'Brien's writing combined with the brutality of Vietnam imagery is truly a shock, traumatizing yet powerfully beautiful in its way, and the force of language itself is a revelation. Tim O’Brien’s writing is exceptional. With one sentence he can cut to the heart of an event. Occasionally he uses repetition of a scene or sequence that made me feel I was there, living it, then re-living the shock of it, trying to find the sense in it. This book does not go into the politics of war but rather the true reality of the war written by a man who became so broken by his enlistment, he almost decided to vanish from America forever. The Things They Carried reads like a confession; it shares the author’s supposed lack of courage and the men he ended up killing. It humanizes the soldiers on both sides of the war, and leaves much room for interpretation. The Things They Carried is truly one of the finest war stories and historical fiction novels ever written.
