The Things They Carried

One of the first questions people ask about The Things They Carried is this: Is it a novel, or a collection of short stories? The title page refers to the book simply as "a work of fiction," defying the conscientious reader's need to categorize this masterpiece. It is both: a collection of interrelated short pieces which ultimately reads with the dramatic force and tension of a novel. Yet each one of the twenty-two short pieces is written with such care, emotional content, and prosaic precision that it could stand on its own.

The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and of course, the character Tim O'Brien who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. They battle the enemy (or maybe more the idea of the enemy), and occasionally each other. In their relationships we see their isolation and loneliness, their rage and fear. They miss their families, their girlfriends and buddies; they miss the lives they left back home. Yet they find sympathy and kindness for strangers (the old man who leads them unscathed through the mine field, the girl who grieves while she dances), and love for each other, because in Vietnam they are the only family they have. We hear the voices of the men and build images upon their dialogue. The way they tell stories about others, we hear them telling stories about themselves.

With the creative verve of the greatest fiction and the intimacy of a searing autobiography, The Things They Carried is a testament to the men who risked their lives in America's most controversial war. It is also a mirror held up to the frailty of humanity. Ultimately The Things They Carried and its myriad protagonists call to order the courage, determination, and luck we all need to survive.

Quotes and thoughts while reading:

My father, a Vietnam vet, didn't allow me to read this book when I was in high school. Maybe he was afraid of the questions it would raise, maybe he didn't want me to live through the hellish experiences he had in Vietnam, maybe he didn't want to relive those hellish experiences, I'll never know. But I do know that at 16/17 I would not have been ready to take on this book, and that I'm glad I've read it now. My father was on my mind often while reading, I would set the book down and audibly sigh with the notions that what these men were describing were the exact feelings my father had during Vietnam. And at 25 it was also flooring to read, and conceive, that the men I was reading about were all younger than me at the time. Astounding. Terrifying.

"...They searched the villages without knowing what to look for, not caring, kicking over jars of rise, frisking children and old men, blowing tunnels, sometimes setting fires, sometimes not, then forming up and moving on to the next village, then other villages, where it would always be the same. They carried their own lives. The pressures were enormous..." (p 15) This section, right from the start, reinforcing the books title, throws you into the mindset of a Vietnam soldier (or at least one that lives in Tim O'Briens mind which although possibly fictional still feels very real). The things they carried.

"The average age in our platoon, I'd guess, was nineteen or twenty, and as a consequence things often took a curiously playful atmosphere, like a sporting event at some exotic reform school. The competition could be lethal, yet there was a childlike exuberance to it all, lots of pranks and horseplay. Like when Azar blew away Ted Lavender's puppy. 'What's everybody so upset about?' Azar said. 'I mean, Christ, I'm just a boy.' " (p 37) And it's true, they were just boys. Boys we asked to go to war. Boys who lost their childhood, who lost so much.

After reading David Brooks' "Road to Character" the idea of morality, and how we as a culture don't really think about morals anymore, it was refreshing to hear O'Brien talk about his "moral split". He goes so far as to tackle the concept of "A moral freeze: I couldn't decide, I couldn't act, I couldn't comport myself with even a pretense of modest human dignity... All I could do was cry. Quietly, not bawling, just the chest-chokes." (p 57) Maybe one of the reasons we don't think about morals, or morality, is because we haven't had the draft in so long. We didn't force people into roles they were uncomfortable. As a society, we haven't forced people into uncomfortable roles for a while. We have become comfortable, and maybe, that is where the issue lay. The draft forced people to do acts they disagreed with, to have to think about what they would rather do, and how their morals don't align with the actions they are taking.

"Later, higher in the mountains, we came across a baby VC water buffalo. What it was doing there I don’t know—no farms or paddies—but we chased it down and got a rope around it and led it along to a deserted village where we set for the night. After supper Rat Kiley went over and stroked its nose.
He opened up a can of C rations, pork and beans, but the baby buffalo wasn’t interested.
Rat shrugged.
He stepped back and shot it through the right front knee. The animal did not make a sound. It went down hard, then got up again, and Rat took careful aim and shot off an ear. He shot it in the hindquarters and in the little hump at its back. He shot it twice in the flanks. It wasn’t to kill; it was just to hurt. He put the rifle muzzle up against the mouth and shot the mouth away. Nobody said much. The whole platoon stood there watching, feeling all kinds of things, but there wasn’t a great deal of pity for the baby water buffalo. Lemon was dead. Rat Kiley had lost his best friend in the world. Later in the week he would write a long personal letter to the guy’s sister, who would not write back, but for now it was a question of pain. He shot off the tail. He shot away chunks of meat below the ribs. All around us there was the smell of smoke and filth, and deep greenery, and the evening was humid and very hot. Rat went to automatic. He shot randomly, almost casually, quick little spurts in the belly and butt. Then he reloaded, squatted down, and shot it in the left front knee. Again the animal fell hard and tried to get up, but this time it couldn’t quite make it. It wobbled and went down sideways. Rat shot it in the nose. He bent forward and whispered something, as if talking to a pet, then he shot it in the throat. All the while the baby buffalo was silent, or almost silent, just a light bubbling sound where the nose had been. It lay very still. Nothing moved except the eyes, which were enormous, the pupils shiny black and dumb.
Rat Kiley was crying. He tried to say something, but then cradled his rifle and went off by himself.
The rest of us stood in a ragged circle around the baby buffalo. For a time no one spoke. We had witnessed something essential, something brand-new and profound, a piece of the world so startling there was not yet a name for it." (p 78-79) Whew, this scene carries with it emotion, and seems so much more vitriolic than the other killing scenes in the book. We feel the pain Rat Kiley is going through, losing his best friend, then manically taking it out on this innocent animal. Maybe that is it, the innocence of the baby buffalo. Killing other soldiers, seems less like you are killing innocent people, and more like you are killing an enemy who would do the same to you. That's the psychological art of war. Make the men on the other side into your enemy, into an other. But here, you can't abstract it in this way. Here the buffalo is entirely innocent. Here we should draw the analogy to innocent people effected by war, and feel for them what we feel for the buffalo. Hmm, this section, while being repulsive, and emotionally charged, offered up a lot of thought and reflection upon the return.

"A good war story, he thought, but it was not a war for war stories, nor for talk of valor, and nobody in town wanted to know about the terrible stink. They wanted good intentions and good deeds. But the town was not to blame, really..." (p 150) " 'Speaking of Courage' was written in 1975 at the suggestion of Norman Baker, who three years later hanged himself in the locker room of a YMCA in his hometown in central Iowa... In the spring of 1975, near the time of Saigon's final collapse, I received a long, disjointed letter in which Bowker described the problem of finding a meaningful use for his life after the war... 'The thing is,' he wrote, 'there's no place to go. Not just in this lousy little town. In general. My life, I mean. It's almost like I got killed in Nam... Hard to describe. That night when Kiowa got wasted, I sort of sank down into the sewage with him... Feels like I'm still deep in shit." (p 155/156) I feel like here, this book takes on that gritty sense of reality. That this isn't just a work of fiction, there is truth behind all this, and whether or not what Tim O'Brien has written actually happened, someone felt it. And we, by reading this, feel it with them.

"We waited another ten minutes. It was cold now, and damp. Squatting down, I felt a sudden brittleness come over me, a hollow sensation, as if someone could reach out and crush me like a Christmas tree ornament. It was the same feeling I'd had out along the Song Tra Bong. Like I was losing myself, everything spilling out. I remembered how the bullet had made a soft puffing noise inside me. I remembered lying there for a long while, listening to the river, the gunfire and voices, how I kept calling out for a medic but how nobody came and how I finally reached back and touched the hole. The blood was warm like dishwater. I could feel my pants filling up with it. All this blood, I thought—I'll be hollow." (p 213)

The Things They Carried offered me the opportunity to enter a world my father lived in, but could never share with me. This book came at a time that was a flurry of emotion, and I look forward to reading it again, or talking with someone after their first read.