The Things They Carried
The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. Tim O Brien is the author of this novel. O’Brien makes the reader see that soldiers are not superheroes but rather everyman types who are doing their best to cope with the drudgery, ugliness, and inhumanity of war. It is a powerful book expressing all the conflict, fear, contradiction, pain, anger, confusion that one would feel being sent to a war like Viet Nam which was encumbered with so little understanding for why a war, against who, under what conditions, fighting for what cause and why me and not him. All the unanswerable questions have resulted in a stack a mile high of literature to try it make it explainable if not understandable. The Things They Carried moves around between the time before the narrator goes to Vietnam, while he is there and life after. It is told in snippets that come together well. In short, this is a good read if you are interested in the life of a GI.