'The Things They Carried': More Than I Expected

Review of THE THINGS THEY CARRIED (Houghton Mifflin 1990)
Author, Tim O'Brien

Someone recommended Tim O'Brien to me, and when I decided to read THE THINGS THEY CARRIED, I checked it out first and discovered it was about Vietnam. I almost didn't read it. After all, I'd seen the movies--Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket--the horror, the horror, okay, I got it. But because he was so highly recommended by someone who seemed to share my tastes, I figured I'd give it 50 pages. (I always give a book 50 pages.) So I read 50 pages. And I kept going.

I kept going because it was so hard to put the book down. I'd never read a book about Vietnam, and while some of the scenes reminded me of parts of various movies, reading the book was a completely different experience. It covered so much more than the movies.

For instance, O'Brien tells us how he felt and how he thought about running to Canada after he got his draft notice. I never saw that in a movie. He also paints incredible pictures of his experiences during the war--scenes in which, right off, someone gets shot and killed and "dropped like so much concrete. Boom-down . . . like cement." How he remembered the face of the VC soldier he killed who looked like a young scholar, but whose jaw was in his throat and whose eye was replaced with a star-shaped hole. And how, under mortar fire in a flooded field of exploding human waste (where his company had mistakenly bivouacked), he saw a buddy get killed by being sucked under the shit and drowned and, with the field exploding all around him, he made a half-hearted attempt to save him, but ultimately ran away to save himself, breathing and swallowing shit in the process.

And there are funny parts, too. O'Brien has a great sense of humor and irony that leavens his stories in all the right ways and places. (Maybe it's an Irish thing.) He writes about courage, honor, cowardice, friendship, loss, guilt--and his stories tell you something about the awesomeness, waste, absurdity and lasting effect on the individual of war. They even say something universal about the human condition. But they told me something more.

O'Brien does what James Frey should have done when he wrote A MILLION LITTLE PIECES. He explains that he's making some of it up. And he tells you why, with a statement that I've always believed. O'Brien says he made stuff up because: "I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth."

And when I read that, I started to understand that I could never really feel what Tim O'Brien felt. That I would have to actually go to Vietnam and fight in a war there to completely understand the experience (no thanks, I'll pass). But Tim O'Brien was bringing me as close as I would ever get to that understanding.

And that, folks, is what I shoot for when I write. To tell other people about things I find significant (whether tragic, comic or absurd) as I have experienced them and do so in a way that brings them closer to understanding. And if I'm good--if I'm really, really good--to bring them as close as they can get to experiencing it without actually being there.

That's why I write. And, whether Tim O'Brien intended it or not, I know that now from reading this book.