The style of O’Brien’s book is often described as journalistic. His integration of military jargon and observational details certainly supports this claim—but there is much more to the text.

O’Brien’s vignette-like chapters alternate perspectives from the third person to the first person, giving the reader a glimpse—both detached and personal—at the wartime events of the book. Each chapter has a different thematic significance, and many of them contain repetitions of facts or events discussed previously. The circular, repetitive organization of the book underscores O’Brien’s desire for verisimilitude and authentic truth.

The language of the text also varies. For instance, the first chapter juxtaposes lists of practical objects and colorful slang. Other chapters favor a more lyrical style. Over the course of the book, the reader receives a comprehensive picture of O’Brien’s literary talent.

In addition to these stylistic variations, O’Brien includes various symbols throughout the story. One of these is the baby water buffalo from “How to Tell a True War Story.” In this story, Rat Kiley, in despair over the recent death of Lemon, at first shows affection toward the young animal. However, after the calf refuses to eat some of Kiley’s food rations, Kiley reflexively begins shooting it over and over in various non-fatal areas until he has utterly mutilated its body. The men are stunned into awe after witnessing this; one even remarks that sins are “real fresh and original” in Vietnam. O’Brien, however, views the buffalo’s death more sympathetically, understanding that its demise was an expression of Kiley’s anguish. The mixed reactions to the buffalo suggest that it represents the sublime aspect of war. Depending on the spectator, war can be both beautiful and horrifying, peaceful and violent, melancholy and angry. The graphic descriptions of the buffalo and the confounded feelings of the men who witness its death combine to reflect the experience of the sublime.

Early in The Things They Carried—Tim O’Brien’s third book about American soldiers in Vietnam, and his fifth overall—early, that is in all the shuffling back and forth between past and present, between Quang Ngai Province in 1968 and the time of the telling in 1990, ten- year-old Kathleen asks her forty-three-year-old father, “Tim O’Brien,” why he continues to write war stories. She wants to know why he is so “obsessed.” The cynical reader—and many American readers are cynical in the aftermath of American involvement in Vietnam—may believe that he or she already knows the answer. Following the critical success of Going After Cacciato (1978), winner of the National Book Award, O’Brien had claimed that he was not a writer of Vietnam War fiction. After his second non-Vietnam novel, The Nuclear Age (1985), was panned by reviewers and he saw the popular interest in the war increase with each new commercial film and television series, however, that is exactly what he became. The same cynical reader may find the author’s record of a visit paid by a former lieutenant—one of the recurring characters in The Things They Carried and also one of the members of Alpha Company singled out in the book’s dedication—as well as the printing of a letter from another character, Norman Bowker, not so much sincere as self-serving.

The cynical reader would be wrong. The Things They Carried is not self-serving; it is self-examining in ways and to the extent that no work on the same subject has been. The praise and prizes bestowed on Going After Cacciato notwithstanding, O’Brien’s latest book may well be his best. Neither polemical nor sentimental (the twin pitfalls of films and fiction about what has come to be known synecdochically and rather imperialistically as “Vietnam”), it is a brilliantly and disturbingly obsessive work whose actual subject is not the war but the difficulty of writing about it. “Things happened, things came to an end. There was no sense of developing drama. All that remained was debris” and “all I am left with are simple, unprofound scraps of truth,” O’Brien reports in If! Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973), a book whose structure is as fragmentary and discontinuous as its genre is uncertain (fiction or memoir). The discontinuity of the war experience and of the narrative situation increases in Going After Cacciato, as Paul Berlin’s memory and imagination spin separately on, the one chronologically jumbled, the other chronologically and geographically straightforward. Neither work, however, quite prepares the reader for the displacements of The Things They Carried; the “simple, unprofound scraps of truth” now seem less apparent and the “debris” more pervasive, reaching beyond the characters, the men of Alpha Company, to include the narrator-writer and the reader as well.

In Anything Can Happen, a book of interviews edited by Tom Le Clair and Larry McCaffery (1983), O’Brien explained that “the true core of fiction” is “the exploration of substantive, important human values.” Yet when the narrator returns to Vietnam to affirm one of them by stripping off his clothes, immersing himself in the foul waters of a rice paddy/village latrine, and placing Kiowa’s hatchet-talisman at what he hopes is the very spot where his friend died, neither of the two people who witness his strangely sacramental act of remembrance seems able to approve of or even understand what he has done. His daughter is incredulous, and the old Vietnamese farmer who stands some distance away appears to be angry. The isolation and uncertainty evident in this scene typify the entire book; they extend out into every narrative action and every act of narration and, therefore, into the reader’s experience of both. The first of the book’s nineteen chapters (if it is a novel) or stories (if it is a collection) or, simply, parts (if it is something generically “other”) is made in the image of the larger text (or perhaps vice versa). Either origin or offspring, The Things They Carried takes the form of a list struggling to become a litany, a secular enumeration yearning for wholeness and spiritual redemption. Artfully contrived yet following no clearly discernible pattern, it catalogs the “things” the men of Alpha Company carried, everything from flak jackets to fear; above all they carried the knowledge “that they would never be at a loss for things to carry and the opposing dream of “lightness,” of being “purely borne” (a punning condensation of their twin desires of being carried and being reborn).

Like O’Brien’s act of remembrance, the dream stands apart. Instead of either fulfillment or even a “sense of developing drama,” the reader finds what the characters do, chapters/stories/parts oscillating back and forth in time and space. The repetition of information from one section to another creates a sense of stalled action and Sisyphean doom or, more optimistically, the need to go over the same ground again and again in the faint hope of finding the missing link that will allow the action to develop dramatically, to imagine a different end. Lacking this sense of developing drama, individual stories tend to dissolve, leaving the reader with an apparently random collection of individual images: Rat Kiley and Curt Lemon playing catch with a smoke grenade, until the latter steps on a booby- trapped artillery round; or Azar detonating the Claymore mine to which he had strapped a puppy and then responding to the others’ horror with a line that rings all too true: “I’m just a boy.” There is Norman Bowker, mustered out and back home, driving around and around a lake, the village they burn because Ted Lavender has been shot, the dancing of the fourteen-year-old girl whose entire family has been killed in an air attack, and the triple-canopied jungle, mist-filled and ominously silent. The starkness of these and other images parallels the simple fact that as the stories progress and the number of casualties increases, the sense of causality declines.

As O’Brien wrote in If! Die in a Combat Zone, “things happen,” and even in the narratively more complex Going After Cacciato, the reader can take a certain comfort in being able to distinguish recollections from imaginings. In The Things They Carried, the very nature of these things, their ontological status as well as their ethical value and thematic meaning, are in doubt, strangely so given O’Brien’s choice of epigraph, a passage from John L. Ransom’s Andersonville Diary (1881):

This book is essentially different from any other that has been published conceming the “late war” or any of its incidents. Those who have had any such experience as the author will see its truthfulness at once, and to all other readers it is commended as a statement of actual things by one who experienced them to the fullest.

The passage makes plain what most readers of war fiction assume: that such fiction is not only essentially realistic, and referential, but that it is as well autobiographically revealing, whether the text be Leo Tolstoy’s realistic Sebastopol (1887), Stephen Crane’s impressionist The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Ernest Hemingway’s modernist A Farewell to Arms (1929), Norman Mailer’s epic The Naked and the Dead (1948), or Joseph Heller’s absurdist Catch-22 (1961). While it was possible forAndersonville Diary to claim to be different from other books about the Civil War by virtue of its greater truthfulness, meaning its factual accuracy and historical verifiability, however, The Things They Carrieddiffers from other books about Vietnam by laying claim to a very different “greater truthfulness” by insisting upon its status as fiction, O’Brien problematizes the connection between word and world and, indeed connections of all kinds. Both essay and fiction, “How to Tell a War Story” insists: “This is true,” and another generically ambiguous chapter, “Good Form,” begins:

It’s time to be blunt.

I’m forty-three years old, true, and I’m a writer now, and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier.

Almost everything else is invented.

But it’s not a game. It’s a form. Right here, now, as I invent myself, I’m thinking of all I want to tell you about why this book is written as it is. For instance, I want to tell you this: twenty years ago I watched a man die on a trail near the village of My Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt enough. I remember his face, which was not a pretty face, because his jaw was in his throat, and I remember feeling the burden of responsibility and grief I blamed myself And rightly so, because I was present.

But listen. Even that story is made up.

Teasingly ambiguous and indeterminate, the words “almost everything” transform this war fiction into a Borgesian garden of forking paths, a funhouse of distorting mirrors. It is a rather odd narrative turn for a writer who has spoken against experimental writing—odd but nevertheless appropriate to his aim of distinguishing between “happening-truth” and “story- truth” and forcing the reader to carry a measure of that burden of uncertainty and self-doubt which the men of Alpha Company had to carry and, in these pages, continue to carry.

It is also unsettling to find a writer who has dismissed films such asApocalypse Now (1979) as “Simplistic and stupid” and “garishly overdrawn rhetorical statements” now writing his own equally fantastic version of Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness (1902). One of the collection’s longest stories, “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” is also one of its most effective and, in its premise, certainly the most ludicrous: a soldier at a remote medical station smuggles in his girlfriend from Cleveland Heights. Mary Anne Bell is seventeen, pretty, and innocent, but also vulnerable, drawn to the seductiveness not of sex but of the violence within. She goes on ambush with six Green Berets, is later seen wearing a necklace of human tongues, and eventually disappears into the jungle, another Colonel Kurtz: “She had crossed to the other side. She was part of the land. She was wearing her culottes, her pink sweater, and a necklace of human tongues. She was dangerous. She was ready for the kill.” The ending is frightening but also strangely, melodramatically comic, and trying to gauge the story’s authentic register is difficult, perhaps impossible. Is “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” a retelling of Heart of Darkness or a parody of Apocalypse Now?Is it even about Mary Anne and all she represents (America’s loss of innocence in Vietnam, for example) or, even more than in Conrad or Francis Ford Coppola’s film, is it about its own telling? “O’Brien” narrates the story through Rat Kiley, who claims to have been a witness to all but the end, which he learned (as a story) from still another narrator. This narrator also claims to have been a witness, but learned of Mary Anne’s final fate (the lines quoted above) from the Green Berets, whose own. version depends as much on imagination as it does on observation.

The strangeness does not end there:

Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion. It was a bad habit, Mitchell Sanders said, because all that matters is the raw material, the stuff itself, and you can’t clutter it up with your own half-baked commentary. That just breaks the spell. It destroys the magic. What you have to do, Sanders said, is trust your own story. Get the hell out of the way and let it tell itself

But Rat Kiley couldn’t help it. He wanted to bracket the full range of meaning.

Curiously, it is precisely this kind of commentary which O’Brien deleted from If I Die in a Combat Zone for its republication in 1979 and that he has said he will remove from Northern Lights (1975) should it ever be reissued. In The Things They Carried, this and similar passages seem at once intrusive and integral. Even as they serve “to bracket the full range of meaning,” the commentaries fail to satisfy; they are explanations which do not explain. They do not so much “bracket” (explore and clarify) meaning as defer it.

This deferral process becomes especially apparent in the sequence of five sections beginning with “Speaking of Courage,” whose main character, Norman Bowker, is representative of all the members of Alpha Company in his need to speak and thus to share his burden of guilt and uncertainty. Back home, however, his girlfriend is married, his best friend has drowned, and his father has withdrawn into the world of televised baseball. The only person interested in listening to him is the voice which comes over the intercom at the local A & W drive-in restaurant. Embarrassed, Norman leaves, spending the rest of his ironic Fourth of July driving around and around the lake, telling himself what he would have said to his father, had his father been willing to listen. “Notes” immediately follows, adding a number of biographical details, including his letter to O’Brien and news of his suicide. The suicide in a sense completes, or “brackets,” the previous story, which in turn explains Norman’s suicide. “Notes” ends, however, with O’Brien claiming that it was he, not Norman, who watched as Kiowa died. “Good Form” puts this autobiographical disclosure in question, as well as the events depicted in the sections which immediately precede (“In the Field”) and follow it (“Field Trip”). The reader must proceed—as the narrator-writer does and as the men of Alpha Company did—without the consolation that Hemingway believed his writing could provide in an earlier age of disillusionment, that of “getting things right.”

The Things They Carried does not offer the quick fix provided by the Vietnam War Memorial; it offers, instead, the most thorough examination yet to appear of the failure not simply to understand but even to find an appropriate means for depicting what has been insufficiently described as the American experience in Vietnam—that burden of guilt, confusion, and silence carried then, carried still.

Sources for Further Study

Bookust. LXXXVI, March 15, 1990, p.1395.

Chicago Thibune. March 11, 1990, XIV, p.5.

Kirkus Reviews. LVIII, February 1, 1990, p. 132.

Libraty Journal. CXV, February 15, 1990, p.212.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. April 1, 1990, p.3.

New Statesman and Society. III, May 18, 1990, p.38.

The New York Times Book Review. XCV, March 11, 1990, p.8.

The New Yorker. LXVI, June 4, 1990, p.102.

Newsweek. CXV, April 2, 1990, p.57.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXVII, January 26, 1990, p.404.

Time. CXXXV, March 19, 1990, p.84.

The Wall Street Journal. March 23, 1990, p. A13.

This story is not told in chronological sequence. Rather, the random observation of one character after another alternates with a deliberate litany of weights and masses, the things they carry. Tim O’Brien’s style here is fragmentary, close at times to pure stream of consciousness. His language is largely flat and understated, except where it is salted with slang, military jargon, and obscene black humor. The men’s conversations are brief, punctuated by dashes rather than quotation marks, so that their spoken words are not easily distinguished from narrative.

Lavender’s death is announced matter-of-factly in the second paragraph. Again and again the story returns to this event, each time revealing a little more detail, a new perspective, almost as if in a dream. The story spirals away from, circles around, focuses momentarily on this death.

The style is the story—a plodding, monotonous narrative punctuated by brief flashes of action. The catalog of objects carried, the accumulating weight of things, extends in steady, numbing procession. Gradually the repetition of weights and measures acquires meaning. This is what their lives have become, step after step, ounce after ounce.

Even the names seem symbolic. Jimmy, a boy’s name, is paired with a man’s title, lieutenant; these two qualities meet or cross in the protagonist. The boy inside the man’s body is forced to become an adult and shoulder the burdens of an adult. Kiowa is also one in whom past and present views of race, war, and religion collide. His Indian grandmother remained an enemy of white people during her lifetime, yet his father now teaches Baptist Sunday school in Oklahoma City. Although Kiowa still carries his moccasins and an ancestral hatchet, he also carries boots and modern weapons. Finally, the delicacy of lavender, both scent and hue, suggests Lavender, the fragile youth who cannot bear to meet war face to face, and who quite literally loses his mind when he is shot in the head.

O’Brien’s story is heavy with irony. Lavender, weighted down by extra ammunition and sheer panic, is the only American to die. Jimmy Cross leaves behind his love for Martha, choosing instead to bear responsibility and guilt for a death that could not have been foreseen. The story’s emphasis on their innocence and vulnerability, coupled with the repeated date of Lavender’s death, suggests poet T. S. Eliot’s opening lines from The Waste Land (1922):

April is the cruellest month, breedingLilacs out of the dead land, mixingMemory and desire, stirringDull roots with spring rain.

In this cruel month, in this cruel war, all these young men carry in their hands and on their backs their damaged, terrified, desperate lives.

The War in Vietnam

Historians frequently describe the Vietnam War as America's longest conflict, dating it from President Harry Truman's commitment of $15 million to support French forces in Indochina in 1950 to the fall of Saigon in 1975. The reasons behind U.S. involvement in Vietnam are intricate. In short, U.S. policymakers, starting with the Truman administration, believed that the spread of Chinese Communism in Southeast Asia threatened the global balance of power during the Cold War. The so-called "domino theory" suggested that the entire region would "fall" to communism if the U.S. did not back South Vietnam against northern incursions.

For several years, the U.S. supported South Vietnam with technology, materials, and military advisors. Intensive American involvement began in 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson deployed U.S. Marines to defend Danang airfield. Over 15,000 American military advisors were already in Vietnam. By early 1968, nearly half a million American troops were stationed in Vietnam, and bombing raids were intense and frequent. The war's trajectory changed in early 1968 when Communist forces launched a series of attacks during Tet, the Asian New Year holidays. Americans realized then that victory would be neither swift nor easy.

The years 1969-70, when "The Things They Carried" is set, represent the phase of the war known as "Vietnamization." In 1969, President Nixon began secretly bombing Cambodia, a strategy that enraged antiwar protesters in the United States. American troops were gradually withdrawn while heavy bombing persisted. Frustrations with the war grew both domestically and among the troops. Although it was not disclosed until a year later, in March of 1968, American troops burned the village of My Lai to the ground and killed "everything that breathed." Journalist and author Stanley Karnow described the war: "In human terms at least, the war in Vietnam was a war that nobody won—a struggle between victims. Its origins complex, its lessons disputed, its legacy still to be assessed by future generations. But whether a valid venture or a misguided endeavor, it was a tragedy of epic dimensions."

The War at Home

The years 1968 and 1970 were particularly tumultuous on the home front. As opposition to the war intensified, protests grew larger and more fervent. Authorities responded to the threat of violence by increasing police presence on college campuses and at demonstrations. Within two months in the spring of 1968, both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Riots and arrests occurred outside the Democratic convention in Chicago, while television viewers watched as police and national guardsmen used heavy-handed tactics, beating and tear-gassing protesters.

In early 1969, Nixon initiated troop withdrawals while simultaneously beginning covert bombings in Cambodia. October and November saw massive anti-war demonstrations in Washington. November also brought the shocking revelation of the Mylai massacre. By 1970, the antiwar movement had spread nationwide, leading to more frequent and intense clashes between protesters and law enforcement. In May, national guardsmen fatally shot four students protesting the war at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio.

According to Stanley Karnow, by 1970, domestic resistance to the war started to impact the troops on the ground. ‘‘Antiwar protests at home had by now spread to the men in the field, many of whom wore peace symbols and refused to go into combat. Race relations, which were good when blacks and whites had earlier shared a sense of purpose, became increasingly brittle.’’ Additionally, the public perception of the American GI deteriorated as more stories of brutality and drug use emerged from the battlefield.

In recent years, the image of the Vietnam veteran has improved significantly, largely due to the establishment of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington and increased public understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder. However, in the 1970s, returning soldiers faced unprecedented challenges in reintegrating into their communities and families. Veteran John Kerry, who later became a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, recalls his own experience on a cross-country flight: ''I fell asleep and woke up yelling, probably a nightmare. The other passengers moved away from me—a reaction I noticed more and more in the months ahead. The country didn't give a shit about the guys coming back, or what they'd gone through. The feeling toward them was 'Stay away—don't contaminate us with whatever you've brought back from Vietnam.'’’

Point of View and Narration

The narrator's identity in The Things They Carried intrigues both critics and readers. In the title story, the narrator remains unnamed, but in other tales, he is a "fictional character named Tim O'Brien," as the author, Tim O'Brien, clarifies. Although the third-person narrator in "The Things They Carried" is not explicitly identified, he could be the fictional Tim O'Brien given the interconnected nature of the stories. This narrator's role is to depict the soldiers and their experiences in the Quang Ngai province, with a focus on the day Ted Lavender dies. The narrator is technically omniscient, having insight into the characters' inner thoughts and feelings, especially those of Lt. Jimmy Cross. However, O'Brien's narrator also exhibits traits of a limited third-person narrator by providing only partial, fragmented, or incomplete information about the characters and events.

Realism

A notable stylistic aspect of O'Brien's story is its detailed depiction of the physical realities of war. This approach falls under the broad literary category known as realism, a term that critics often use to describe the accurate portrayal of everyday life and a general attitude that prefers confronting the harsh truths of life rather than escaping or idealizing them. An example of realism in both senses is O'Brien's portrayal of Ted Lavender's death, where he includes specific details such as the weight and contents of Lavender's load and the fact that he hadn't zipped up his pants. O'Brien also emphasizes that Lavender's death was a random, senseless accident, rather than a heroic event.

Realism is a broad term that encompasses several variations. Two forms of realism frequently associated with O'Brien's work are hyper-realism and magic realism. The story qualifies as hyper-realism because O'Brien focuses on the minutiae of the soldiers' lives in Vietnam, highlighting details that an ordinary observer might overlook. Additionally, the story incorporates elements of magic realism, a genre of modern fiction that blends fantastical or imaginary elements into a narrative that otherwise maintains the characteristics of an objective, realistic account.

The theme of illusion versus reality is reinforced through the narrative technique of the story itself. The reader is guided through Lieutenant Cross's dreamlike reflections, effortlessly transitioning from the monotonous march across Vietnam to visions of kissing Martha and touching her knee. When Lee Strunk ventures into a tunnel to investigate a VC hideout, the imagery of Martha and Cross making love causes the two worlds to blend and then separate, mirroring Martha's thoughts as she discovers the pebble she eventually sends to Cross. This technique, often referred to as magic realism, helps readers suspend disbelief, allowing them to better understand the soldiers' confusion.

O'Brien employs another technique to convey the sense of monotony and endless repetition by meticulously listing all the items the soldiers carry. He makes no distinction between significant and seemingly trivial objects. Items of great importance to American culture are mixed with things of little consequence: "they carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct." This method brings the reader to the soldier's perspective, who no longer finds any particular joy or pride in either grand or minor things. To the soldier, everything is a burden, differing only in the weight they impose on his soul.

1. To what degree can it be argued that Tim O'Brien's works are predominantly autobiographical?

2. What importance do Martha's picture and the pebble she sends hold? How can one argue that these items differ from the other things the soldiers carry?

3. Considering the soldiers' state of mind, what conclusions can you draw from their reactions to Ted Lavender's death?

4. Do you believe the soldiers in The Things They Carried are heroes? How do you define heroism? Does reading this story alter your definition? How can it be argued that the story aims to redefine readers' understanding of what constitutes heroic action?

"The Things They Carried" is set during the Vietnam War, yet the core of the story centers on the internal, moral emptiness experienced by each soldier, reflecting an American misunderstanding of war and ethics. The traditional myth of war and the American soldier often portrays a significant moral struggle intertwined with personal spiritual development. While war is undeniably brutal, it is perceived to be somewhat mitigated by the courageous soldier who undergoes a transformation brought about by the righteousness of the cause. However, in "The Things They Carried," this war myth is dismantled, revealing the stark reality of a futile endeavor in which the American soldier is inexplicably ensnared. The soldiers are depicted not so much by their individual characteristics but by the immense burdens they bear—both physical and emotional. They carry standard essentials like "P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wrist watches, [and] dog tags. . .," each with tangible weight. Additionally, they bear emotional or psychological loads, such as Jimmy Cross's unrequited love for Martha and Ted Lavender's pervasive fear.

One of the most striking symbolic items is carried by Norman Bowker: a thumb severed from a Viet Cong corpse, given to him by Mitchell Sanders. This thumb, more than anything else, symbolizes the moral void in which the soldiers are trapped. When Sanders discovers the Viet Cong corpse, he suggests there is a moral to the boy's death. Yet, when Henry Dobbins inquires about the moral, Sanders has no clear answer. Eventually, after Sanders cuts off the corpse's thumb, even Dobbins concedes he cannot discern any moral lesson. "There it is man," Sanders responds, implying that the absence of morality is, in fact, the moral.

1960s: All young men are required to register for the Selective Service and face the possibility of being drafted into the military to serve in Vietnam. While some affluent young men avoid the draft by enrolling in college, less privileged objectors either flee to Canada to evade service or openly resist the draft, risking criminal prosecution. Former heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, then known as Cassius Clay, is among the conscientious objectors who choose imprisonment over military service.

1990s: Although young men are still mandated to register with the Selective Service upon turning eighteen, the U.S. military has been entirely voluntary since President Nixon ended the draft in 1972.

1960s: During the height of the Cold War, America's foreign policy is focused on preventing the spread of communism globally. Military and political leaders invoke the domino theory to justify the significant financial and human costs of the Vietnam involvement.

1990s: With the Cold War over and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, American citizens and their leaders are more hesitant to engage in foreign conflicts in developing countries.

1960s: Aside from the exotic-sounding names they read about in newspapers or see on television, Americans know little about Vietnamese culture. Even major U.S. cities have few, if any, Vietnamese restaurants.

1990s: Due to the influx of so-called "boat people" in the 1970s and the continuous stream of immigration since then, Vietnamese culture has made a lasting impact on America.

Tim O'Brien's writing has often been likened to Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey. Although O'Brien's work offers distinct stylistic and thematic elements, it echoes Homer's epics through its blend of fiction and fantasy. However, while Homer's tales celebrate the bravery of soldiers, O'Brien presents a contrasting perspective of the American soldier, replacing traditional myths of valor and perseverance with the relentless grind of war. In The Iliad and The Odyssey, war is depicted as a journey of personal development, where each encounter serves as a new challenge and an opportunity for growth. Conversely, the Homeric epics also feature gods and demi-gods embroiled in conflicts that are portrayed as historical evidence of the ancient Greeks' nobility.

Many of these challenges possess an almost surreal quality, offering a stage for personal transformation. In stark contrast, O'Brien's portrayal of war as an endless, monotonous slog reveals it as dull, meaningless, and exhausting. In his depiction, trivial items are indistinguishable from important ones, and there is no room for growth or change. Despite sharing a dreamlike quality with Homer's world, O'Brien's encounters lack any underlying meaning. He writes:

Their principles were in their feet. Their calculations were biological. They had no sense of strategy or mission. They searched the villages without knowing what to look for, not caring, kicking over jars of rice, frisking children and old men, blowing tunnels, sometimes setting fires and sometimes not, then forming up and moving on to the next village, then other villages, where it would always be the same.

O'Brien's debut book, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973), was soon followed by Northern Lights (1974) and Going After Cacciato (1978). The latter tells the tale of a soldier who deserts the Vietnam War to travel to Paris and won the National Book Award. In 1985, he published The Nuclear Age, which explores a young boy's fixation on the nuclear arms race.

O'Brien has also authored a collection of interconnected short stories titled The Things They Carried (1990), continuing the narrative of Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and his comrades. In 1994, he released In the Lake of the Woods, which revolves around a Vietnam veteran whose wife vanishes from their rented cottage in the Canadian wilderness.

Departing from his usual wartime themes, O'Brien penned Tomcat in Love (1999), a more humorous piece about a Vietnam veteran whose wife has left him, prompting him to seduce every woman he meets.

Tim O'Brien's work has seen limited adaptations. One notable adaptation is the 1998 movie A Soldier's Sweetheart, featuring Kiefer Sutherland. The film tells the story of an army medic who brings his girlfriend to a military outpost. When she vanishes, he must embark on a quest to find her. Another of O'Brien's works, In the Lake of the Woods, has been adapted into a Hallmark Hall of Fame Production.

The Things They Carried was released in an abridged format with music in 1991. Narrated by Anthony Heald, this version can be found through Harper Audio.

Sources

Bonn, Maria S., "Can Stories Save Us? Tim O'Brien and the Efficacy of the Text," in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 36, No. 1, Fall 1994, pp. 2-14.

Coffey, Michael, An Interview with Tim O'Brien in Publishers Weekly, February 16, 1990.

Harris, Robert R., "Too Embarrassed Not to Kill: A Review of The Things They Carried," in New York Times Book Review, March 11, 1990, p. 8.

Karnow, Stanley, Vietnam: A History, New York: Viking Press, 1983.

Myers, Thomas, Walking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

O'Brien, Tim, "The Vietnam in Me," in New York Times Magazine, October 2, 1994, p. 48.

Weber, Bruce, "A Novelist Wrestles With War and Love," in New York Times, September 2, 1998.

Further Reading

Herring, George, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam 1950-1975, 2nd edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979.
This concise yet thorough book is divided into clear sections that can be read independently and includes a valuable and extensive bibliographic essay.

Lee, Don, "A Profile of Tim O'Brien" in Ploughshares, Vol. 21, No. 4, Winter 1995, p. 196.
A helpful overview of O'Brien's career, including biographical details.