The Things They Carried

Read from Tuesday, July 19th to Thursday, July 21st.

As a follow-up to Going After Cacciato, I decided to read The Things They Carried, also by Tim O'Brien.  This is a brilliant collection of vignettes, essays and short stories about the Vietnam War.  Although it is classified as fiction, O'Brien claimed he drew on a lot of personal experiences, similar to Cacciato.  There are both short war stories about Tim and his group, but then there are commentaries on those stories by Tim himself.  He writes about the power of stories, he writes about death of friends in combat, and some by suicide, and life after the war, and returning to Vietnam many years later with his daughter.  She is young, and has trouble understanding why he is so interested in a low field, but then again, how could anyone really understand unless they were there?

The Things They Carried is the title story and also the lead story.  O'Brien details all the different equipment a soldier was expected to carry.  But it was more than physical.  There was also the mental burden each soldier had to carry.  There were the personal trinkets and talismans that made each soldier unique.  A stone sent by a lost high school crush, an illustrated Bible, stockings wrapped around like a scarf.  There are all the guns and explosives each soldier is required to have and to use when necessary. 

There is no specific plot, just memories and stories.  The unit loses a few men.  One steps on a mine and is blown into a tree.  Another is sniped while coming back from taking a piss.  The medic slowly loses his cool and shoots himself in the foot and is shipped off to Japan.  One night they camp in a field near a river.  But it is monsoon season, and the field floods, and it is the field where the nearby village goes the bathroom, so they are covered in a pool of shit.  Then they get mortared, and one soldier is sucked into a crater full of shit and dies.  The soldiers tell each other stories too.  There is the story of a group of soldiers in an isolated medic outpost.  One of them decides to fly his girlfriend over to keep him company.  Because there are no officers, she arrives and stays with them for weeks.  Slowly, she becomes accustomed to military life, and she shoots guns, and eventually she starts going on ambushes with a local green beret unit.  The soldier who flew her over loses his girlfriend to the jungle, as she melts into the landscape.

One of the most memorable scenes is actually something I first read in high school in English class, Junior year I believe.  Frustrated over the sniping of the soldier who got shot after taking a piss, another soldier finds a baby water buffalo.  He shoots it first in each knee, then blows off the nose, the ears, the jaw, slowly killing the beast, which just stands there taking the punishment.

What is real and what is fiction?  It is never completely clear.  O'Brien frequently says out in front that it is all made up, although it is written so realistically.  He discusses the power of war stories and what makes them important.  They reveal the brutal honesty of human existence, not the crazy heroics, but the simple moments of clarity.  Mesmerizing, fascinating and beautiful.  Four and a half out of five stars.