The Things They Carried

"A series of original short stories about the Vietnam War that functions as a novel."

"Yes, it’s short stories about Vietnam written by a guy who was there as a very young man. And it really is a book about what it is like to be a regular ordinary American teenager and suddenly find yourself neck-deep in a jungle fighting a war that you neither understand nor care about. Killing people that are so different from you with no opportunity to understand or appreciate their culture. And, just as Stephen King shocks you by presenting the surreal against the banal, so Tim O’Brien creates characters for you that are so immensely believable, based on real people and based on himself, and he also presents you with situations that just defy comprehension as far as any point of reference or context is concerned. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He presents you with a gang of teenagers carrying 60 or 70 pounds of equipment in 40-plus centigrade temperatures with malaria, fighting insects, fighting monsoons, fighting conscience, fighting political ideology, fighting religious ideas and their own code of ethics and morals even more than they are fighting what they have been told is the common enemy. And I think the way that he does that with such humanity and such heart is outstanding. And again it is a book I have read probably three times. I absolutely agree. I and other crime authors I know have been asked many times what creates tension and I believe the real tension is created by people being interested in and caring enough about their characters to want to know what is going to happen to them next. I think that is where real tension comes from irrespective of the genre. I am of the opinion that the location, the setting and the time period are just as important as any of the individuals in the books. I think the worst criticism for an author is: I read your book and I can’t remember what it was about. I want people to be unsettled, I want people to feel uncomfortable and challenged, I want people to have to think. I really couldn’t care whether people remember the title of the book they have read by me or even remember my name. That is of no concern. However, what is important to me is that someone is reminded of a book of mine they read six months ago, not because of all the characters and the plot, but because of the way it made them feel. And that is as much the job of putting them in New York or putting them in Washington in the middle of a political conspiracy or putting them in Georgia in the Depression in 1939 while there were child murders going on and feeling the heat and the dust and the parched air. All that kind of stuff is just as important to me because I think it contributes so much of the story."

"Thom : When we were making the project we were always grappling with this problem of fact and fiction. The whole project’s wrapped up in it. On the one hand we were trying to find pictures that worked as pictures – that was our primary goal – and sometimes it turned out that we’d made a picture of a real bomb site, sometimes we hadn’t, and sometimes it was a bit ambiguous. The project lasted for about six years, and we were constantly worrying about whether we were doing it in the right way. When I read this book, it just answered the question, as it was all about the role of fiction in storytelling. There’s a wonderful quote in one of the stories: “story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” I think that’s a really beautiful idea and really true. It’s about what makes a war story, and the idea you can get at the truth without telling the factual truth, that by making a fictional version of the story you can reach the real meaning of the story. He says, “the thing about a war story is you dream it as you tell it.” Thom: It’s a book of short stories. One of the stories is called ‘Good Form’. It’s about two-thirds of the way through the book and it addresses this issue. It admits that not everything you’ve read so far really happened, and explains it. O’Brien says, “I’m 45 years old now, I’m a writer, but I was a soldier, and I did see these things. But if I tell you how I remember it, it’s not true because I can’t remember it properly, it’s confused and mixed up with these other things that happened, and stories other people told me that I almost remember more than things I saw with my own eyes.” It’s all about the way fiction interweaves with fact in your memory. The book is about the Vietnam War and his experiences, but really it’s about how you remember trauma, and how you deal with it."

"I like this book because it was his second book about Vietnam. The first one, Going after Cacciato, was very surreal. It was about a patrol looking for Cacciato who was going to Paris, so they followed him to Paris. I don’t know O’Brien but my feeling was that it was an attempt by an author to try and have some artistic expression of what, at that time in our history, was looking pretty surreal. Apocalypse Now is not about Vietnam. It’s a surreal movie set in Vietnam but it could have been World War I. But when O’Brien wrote The Things They Carried he came down to absolute real brass tacks. It was no longer surreal, it was like here’s a list of what a grunt carries, an infantry soldier… Right. Because infantry soldiers carry so much weight. That’s where the nickname came from because these people carry from 80-120 lbs on their backs. It’s the same now in Afghanistan and Iraq. There have been enormous technological changes but that infantry soldier on the ground, who actually is the sharp end of the stick, carries a lot of stuff — from pictures of girlfriends to ammunition. The Things They Carried is a series of short stories involving those things, things that bring you to reality. I think because it snaps you between the two worlds. When you’re in the world of combat it’s a totally different psychic space. I don’t know what else to call it. The first time I lost somebody, one of my guys, I had to go through his pockets to get his personal effects, and in his left breast pocket was a picture of his high school girlfriend. He was just out of high school, of course. And the bullet had gone right through her face. And I just started to tremble… it was so… here’s a high school girl in his pocket with the bullet obliterating her face. It was just so bizarre. And then I had to get an artillery mission organised because they were landing too close to us and quickly you’re back into the… there’s no time to contemplate or mourn. It’s just like: ‘Oh God the shells are coming in…aaaaaargh.’ And you’re back into the other space. That’s why these poignant little bits are so… Well, raise five kids? No, I worked on the book for 30 years. Not out of choice, but because nobody would publish it or even read it. So I kept saying: ‘Well, I can make it better.’ In some ways it was a two-edged sword. A typical way of dealing with war and trauma is to go to the bar or do drugs and shift jobs every six months. I would go into the basement and work on my novel and I think that was healthy. On the other hand, while I was working on the novel, I would get into certain scenes that were very close to things I had witnessed and it would trigger memories and the unconscious and my post-traumatic stress disorder — which goes by a thousand names but has been with us since The Odyssey . If you read The Odyssey , Ulysses has every symptom when he has that banquet. Fascinating. Homer obviously understood post-traumatic stress disorder. The other classic description of it is by Robert Graves in Goodbye to All That ."

"In American fiction, I think we have to begin with Tim O’Brien. I have the utmost admiration for “The Things They Carried,” but “Going After Cacciato” is also stunningly good."