Book Review: The Things They Carried

Tim O’Brien in his 1990 classic, The Things They Carried, sublimely extricated an insight into war that is more nuanced and encompassing than the typical adage (which I’ve used!) of “war is hell.” That is, we — nations, and basically kids, like O’Brien, drafted into the Vietnam War — go to war to stave off shame and embarrassment. Much of diplomacy between countries, and resulting wars, can often be distilled down to “saving face” and appearances, and similarly, among young men going off to war, with their own external and internal machinations motivating them to “save face.” War is hell, but as O’Brien notes, it’s also the place of exuberant life — after all, being that close to death ensures as much — and ugliness and beauty, and the unspoken versus the spoken, the truth versus little fictions. War, more than any action we partake in as humans, besides perhaps love, is the crucible upon which humans straddle that dichotomy of truth versus little fictions, of telling it like it was and like it seemed, of telling stories and storytelling. This language and memory rumination, along with the aforementioned raw insight into war and the people who participate in it, is what makes O’Brien’s book such a breath-taking read, and one of the best of the year. His is one of those books where a few pages in, you know you’re in for something astonishing, where I could spend an entire book review just quoting different passages and insights.

In war, the “things they carried” are the literal things you’d imagine, like the ammunition and weapons and rations and extra socks and underwear and things particular to each man, like one man’s girlfriend’s pantyhose he wore around his neck for good luck, or the Indian man’s New Testament, but there’s also the other things they carried, like war itself, killing people and the imagination of what those people were like and could have been, if not for this war and dying, the risk of dying, the hell of the Vietnam landscape and mosquitos and a shit swamp, and the stories themselves about what they’ve seen and what it seemed like they’ve seen. O’Brien’s book somehow operates in this perfect space of showing vignettes into the “things they carried” while also having a chronological sense of things, even when he goes back in time to talk about his first love, a 9-year-old girl who died of a brain tumor. Death, it seems, had a way of following him around.

The thing they wanted to carry, but it seemed unlikely to come — even among their peers in the jungle with them — was the satisfaction someone who would be able to listen to what they’ve been through, to truly listen, and get it. That was a weight they wanted to carry, intangible as it was, but it didn’t come from superiors to each other to those back home. And yet, O’Brien writes and continues to write about war experiences because he needs to tell those stories about how it was and how it seemed.

When you’ve been to war, experienced war, faced down death, and killed, truth isn’t so much the guiding light, but what is is the need to share your experience, share an experience, to approximate, somehow, what it was like to be immersed in war — something that is beyond the imagination of most, even in a century that had seen two world wars (the number of people who do the fighting itself is still relatively small); and yet, there is also that innate feeling of staving off embarrassment if not warring — even if that takes bringing your daughter to Vietnam as a 10-year-old, as O’Brien does, but it doesn’t quite seem to catch, like a bullet in the buttocks, as O’Brien also experienced.

As much ink as O’Brien has spilled in this book and others about war, maybe it’s one of those things you had to be there for, ultimately. Like his buddies he served with and remembers, the ones who died, the ones who went mad and shot themselves in the foot to get out of war, and the ones like him, who went mad in a different way after losing the camaraderie of being “in” war with his friends.

I’ve read a fair amount of war books over the years, fiction and non-fiction (and this is billed as fiction, for the record, but is a beautiful blend of his real life experiences and fiction), but I think this might be the definitive war book to read, if you haven’t. Not to shame or embarrass you into reading it, of course.