The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried
Author: Tim O’Brien 270 pp
My rating: 4*
Started July 19 2009, Finished July 22 2009.

In these finely wrought stories exploring his Vietnam experience, O’Brien mixes memoir and fiction, distilling potent material that whether imagined or remembered, feels very true, describing a world of stoned and terrified infantry grunts whose patrols lack senior officers, tangible enemies and any purpose whatsoever but are all the more deadly for these reasons. The intent is to capture the feel of the experience rather than exactly document it, so little explanation is given as to the wherefore and whys, an approach that worked well for me, except when a character engages in ambush by hand grenade (145), a weapon choice which seemed motivated by dramatic effect rather than combat plausibility.

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You’d be sitting at the top of a high hill, the flat paddies stretching out below, and the day would be calm and hot and utterly vacant, and you’d feel the boredom dripping inside you like a leaky faucet, except it wasn’t water, it was a sort of acid, and with each little droplet you’d feel the stuff eating away at important organs. (37)

Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. (41)

… it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead. (44)

Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference -- a powerful, implacable beauty -- and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly. (89)