The Things They Carried

I had this book recommended to me by enough people that I decided I had to read it. Although to some of my friends who don't quite have the full picture of what I like to read (or listen to, in this case) might have thought that it was right up my alley, in reading descriptions and reviews of this book, I was afraid that it wouldn't be my kind of book. Regardless, I'd already ordered it, so I was going to at least give it a try.

I read almost exclusively non-fiction. The more technical details the better. The things they carried is not this type of book, at all. I did not like the first few chapters, "The Things They Carried" and "Love". I might have stopped listening after these two, but I was working on something and unable to pause. I'm glad I kept going, though, because the third chapter "Spin" intrigued me and and after "On the Rainy River" I was hooked. A few of my favorite chapters were: "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" and "How to Tell a True War Story".

I think that the reason I may have liked this book so much is because it is incredibly well written. The way that the stories, especially the insane ones, are told just make this book enthralling. My jaw was on the floor listening to a couple of these chapters. I felt like I was actually there. It was unreal. I have never experienced that with any other book I have listened to.

Yes, Listened to. I like audio books, they are the format that I use to consume most books. I was hesitant to get The Things They Carried in audio book form because Bryan Cranston narrates it. While I am not a Breaking Bad mega-fan, I have watched it and that is how I know Cranston. I was afraid that the audio book would be "Walter White talks about the Vietnam War" in my head. Again, I am happy to report that this is not the case. Bryan does an above and beyond wonderful job with the Narration. Typically I do not like it when Audiobook performers do voices for different characters, but Cranston does the characters so well that I don't even care. His Rat Keiley voice especially was really good.

I bought the MP3 CD of this audiobook. It comes broken up in to 35 files varying in length of anywhere from three minutes to twenty minutes, with an average file being about 15 minutes. The last three files are a post script narrated by the Author himself, but I did not listen to these as I was not particularly interested in what he was saying, and the sound quality was poor. The 35 files were easy to rip from the CD and put on my podcast player for easy playing.

If the premise of this book sounds even the slightest bit interesting to you, I highly recommend you check the book out. If you like audiobooks I especially urge you to get the Bryan Cranston narration.

Tim O'Brien comes back from war filled with stories that he shared with fellow soldiers in-country, stories that they shared to keep themselves alive while they were going through all the sh*t of the war. They carried in pictures and Yo-Yos and weapons and rations; they carried out stories. A friend of my older sister told us those type of stories when he got back from Vietnam. Stories I'll never forget and stories that seemed odd and scary and weird at the time. He was a hero to me then and still is to this day. He was a Green Beret. And since he was, I wanted to be one too. Until my view of the war changed. But my view of him never changed. It was just clouded in these weird and eerie stories. I remember thinking why is he telling me this stuff. This book helped me to understand the reason behind that telling.

To look at the long line of great American story-tellers, one cannot help but focus in on Mark Twain and his masterpiece, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". When Huck begins to narrate his story he tells you to read the one about Tom Sawyer for that will tell you all you need to know about them in Hannibal and that it was mostly true. Then he begins to tell about his side of the river, the lonesome side, the side without a mother, an abusive father and a black man that he saved and that helped save him. It's a great story. Hemingway said all modern American literature comes from that book. Lofty and sounds good, but the point is that stories begin somewhere and end somewhere. At the end of "Huck Finn" Huck reckons that if he knew how hard it was to write a book he would've never have started in the first place and that he's right glad its done with and that he has to light out for the territory ahead of the rest. The rest. That's all the writers and readers the fall under his shadow, that want to tell a story, find a story that's worth telling. O'Brien emerges from that shadow with stories of this own, ones that need to be told.

Tim O'Brien found stories to be the way to live after staring death in the face, to be the way to keep those he cared about and who had died alive. Linda, the 9 year old girlfriend that died of cancer, tells Timmy in his dream story that being dead is like being inside a book that nobody's reading, a story that nobody's telling.

The story that seems to haunt him the most is the one called "Speaking of Courage" about Norman Bowker. It's the story at the center of the book, the one that with each retelling tries to find a way to some sort of truth. It is the story that is prompted by a letter by the very person whom it's mostly about. (I say mostly about because each story is about all of them in one shape or form.) It's a story that Norman can't live with in the end. And in the retelling Norman comes back to circle the lake again and again with each reading and telling. But that's the main point. Stories need to be retold. They need to be kept alive, so the ones who are gone can live again.

Stories are told and retold around campfires and holiday tables. They are told in bars, at funerals, in grocery stores, at the back of churches, or on front yards. And they are in books. Open this one up and rich stories will come to life.

This is a brilliant and sensitive book about Vietnam. Although I wasn’t there, I served in the military during that period, safely stateside, and was glad to not go to a war that was so difficult to explain and justify. Nevertheless, I felt a sense of guilt for no other reason than that my peers were fighting and dying there. I have talked to others who stayed out of harm’s way while otherwise serving, and the same feeling was at least lurking in their psyche. Perhaps as a result, and having lived through a time when the country was torn apart by this distant conflict, I avoided the books and films that came out soon after the conflict ended. But as time passed, it became easier and appropriate to examine the experiences of those who were actually engaged in this misguided war.

A couple of years ago I read “The Matterhorn”. Like this book, it is a novel, but one obviously based on the experience of the author who served in Vietnam. I found The Matterhorn quite compelling, and the recollection that sticks in my mind was of the terrible physical hardship, and the complete exhaustion of the troops. There was much more to the book, but that is what stayed with me. I found quite a different viewpoint in The Things They Carried.

The book begins reciting the physical things that the troops carried- guns and boots and ponchos and rations and a myriad of supplies that necessarily weighted them down on their days and nights in the field. But it quickly became obvious that the title did not really refer to these tangible objects but instead to the emotional burdens that were much more weighty.

For the author, dealing with such emotional burdens begins as he grapples with a decision to obey the draft or go to Canada. There is a wonderful chapter about his stay in a cabin near the Canadian border where, along with the aged proprietor, he contemplates his decision. He decides against leaving the country, but not out of an internal patriotism, but instead from a sense of shame if he failed to report. He did not want to disappoint his family and friends, and this fear of shame was much more compelling than the fear of war. Indeed, he would go to war and kill and maybe die, because he was embarrassed not to.

This sense of shame, or embarrassment, also transferred to the battlefield. In fact, of all the things the soldiers carried, the most compelling was the fear of blushing. Men killed and died because they were embarrassed not to. Their acts of bravery were not a product of courage or valor, but from the fact that they were too frightened to be thought of as cowards. They also battled with the desire to be a good man in the midst of all the evil, to find justice amidst the dying. But war, whatever it is, is never moral-it does not instruct nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing what they have always done. War is hell, but it is also terror and adventure and courage and discovery. The author also notes that war is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling, war is drudgery. War makes you a man, war makes you dead. It can also be a rush, one may never feel more alive than when he’s almost dead. Amidst all the emotions, the book must also recount the grisly details of that combat, but it always seemed to me a story of emotion. And just as these men–actually boys– carried the shame of a judgmental society as their propulsion to fight and die, they acquired and returned with great burdens of guilt. This guilt was the thing they carried home, along with memories that they could not put out of their minds. These are probably the same memories that soldiers have always brought back, but those returning from Vietnam were perhaps the first to gradually discuss and try to deal with this emotional burden.

The book tells a difficult and instructive story. It again raises questions and issue that were discussed at the time but have faded with other memories of those times. The author’s thoughts are timelessly pertinent:

That you don’t make war without knowing why. That Vietnam seemed wrong to him because certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons. And that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause, because you can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.

Simple expectations when young lives are at stake.

I'm not sure when I first heard of this book as it's one of those that always been around for years. Of course this has been around since the early 90's so I guess it has been. Recently I read the authors memoir "If I die in a combat zone box me up and ship me home" which renewed my interest in the authors work. The clincher was seeing Tim O'Brien on the Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War which I found very interesting and compelling.

The book is set in during America’s war in Vietnam with no particular year or place though some are mentioned throughout the book. The initial chapter (or I’ve seen described as vignettes) is self-titled “The Things They Carried” in which following a platoon in the jungles of Vietnam. Described are the significant characters you will hear more of throughout the rest of the book. Not only do we learn of the things they carried physically in great detail but also emotionally. They may all be in the same place or situation but as we learn further they do not all carry the same things.

“The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near-necessities were p-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations and two or three canteens of water.” (page 2)

Some of the things they carried were unique to the individual. The Platoon Leader, LT Cross, carried photographs of a girl he pined for but she did not return the same feelings. One soldier carried extra rations of peaches. Another carried a toothbrush, dental floss and extra soap stolen from a hotel while on R&R. Another always carried tranquilizers. Another carried condoms. Another had comic books. One carried a New Testament Bible. The list goes on.

The first vignette serves as an introduction and a jumping off point to the other stories that follow. It doesn’t follow a hard plot line or flow in chronological order. One story maybe the author writing as a middle aged father revisiting Vietnam with his sometimes bewildered daughter. Then we look into the childhood of the fictional author, also named Tim O’Brien. The use of the author’s name as the focal character gives the book an impression of a memoir but it in reality it is not. I had recently read the author’s actual memoir “If I die in the combat zone” so I already knew it wasn’t but even I had to remind myself it wasn’t autobiographical. I have no doubt though the author drew upon his own experiences in writing this book.

If one is expecting hardcore details of battles or gritty hardcore close combat this will probably disappoint although many details that are gory and unpleasant it doesn’t dwell on the bloodshed or heroics. It’s a series of vignettes using the Vietnam War as a backdrop and drawing on the different soldiers to tell a series of separate stories loosely connected. Some are more believable than others but it is fiction. One often gets the feeling of underlying themes that are not obvious on the surface and require more thought. I can see myself reading this again and seeing stuff I missed previously.

I recommend this highly. Not just for those looking for books of war or combat but of excellent writing and storytelling. It makes you dive in and think about what you’re reading and into the minds and motivations of the characters. I already look forward to reading this again.

I love the way that humanity pervades these men's stories and how well the author brings that theme across. I used a story or two in my ESL classes years ago. I wish I had kept my copy of the book, but as usual, loaned it and never got it back. It may be time to read this book again. For sure, some stories will resonate more with the reader than others, but it's a poignant and timeless book. I highly recommend it!