The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
Summary
Twenty two linked stories follow the platoon Alpha Company through Vietnam, narrated largely by a character named Tim O'Brien who deliberately blurs memoir and invention. The title story catalogues the physical and emotional weight each soldier carries and centers on Lieutenant Jimmy Cross's fixation on a girl back home, whose letters he burns after a soldier is shot while distracted, blaming himself for the death. On the Rainy River recounts O'Brien's own draft crisis, days spent at a fishing lodge on the Canadian border deciding whether to flee, ultimately going to war out of embarrassment rather than conviction. How to Tell a True War Story lays out the book's method directly: any war story so moral it makes you feel good is not true. The Man I Killed and Ambush give two contradictory versions of a grenade killing a young Vietnamese man on a trail, and Speaking of Courage follows veteran Norman Bowker driving loops around a lake back home, unable to tell anyone what happened the night his friend Kiowa died in a flooded field, an episode In the Field returns to from inside the mud itself. The book closes with The Lives of the Dead, tying these wartime deaths to the death of O'Brien's childhood sweetheart at age nine, and arguing that telling stories is how the dead are kept moving and alive.
O'Brien deliberately undermines his own reliability, telling and then retracting the same events and insisting that story truth matters more than happening truth, so a reader finishes uncertain which parts happened to O'Brien and which are invention. That uncertainty is the entire point. It reads plainly, never showy, and lands hardest exactly where it admits a story might be a lie.
Historical Context & Significance
Houghton Mifflin published The Things They Carried on March 28, 1990, and the Chicago Tribune gave it the 1990 Heartland Prize for fiction outright. It was a finalist for the 1990 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, alongside Linda Hogan's Mean Spirit; both prizes that year went to the same book, John Updike's Rabbit at Rest, which had itself lost the 1990 National Book Award to Charles Johnson's Middle Passage. Five of the stories first appeared in Esquire, and O'Brien has said he set out to write a book with the feel of utter and absolute reality, a work of fiction that would read like nonfiction.
The novel has sold more than two million copies and become a fixture of American high school and college syllabi, a use O'Brien has said surprises him, since students often apply its account of guilt and storytelling to struggles that have nothing to do with war. One chapter, Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong, was adapted as the 1998 television film A Soldier's Sweetheart, and the Library of Congress included the book in its 2012 list of Books That Shaped America.