The Things They Carried

About the Author

WIlliam Timothy O'Brien is an American novelist that was born October 1, 1946 in Austin, Minnesota. He was the son of a salesman and an elementary school teacher. As a child, he was raised in Worthington, a small town in southern Minnesota that would become his inspiration and "door" to his early initiation as a writer. 

O'Brien spend his college years trying to ignore the development of the Vietnam War or railing against it by attending peace vigils and war protests. However, a mere two weeks after his graduation, O'Brien, who had been recently informed that he had been accepted to a Ph.D at Harvard University, received his draft notice of possibly fighting in the war. 

On August 14, 1968, he entered the military for basic training at Fort Lewis, Washington and arrived, on February 1969, to Vietnam. He served in the Fifth Battalion of the 46th Infantry, 198th Infantry Brigade, American Division until March of 1970. His area of operations was in the Quang Ngai Province, which would later become the setting of his novel "The Things They Carried". 

Upon the end of his tour, O'Brien returned home with an endless supply of observations  and anecdotes that he would later use as the memoirs of his war novels. His career was launched in 1973 with the release of "If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home" about his war experiences. He continued his studies and went to graduate school at Harvard University and he received an internship at the Washington Post.

He is well-known for writing about the Vietnam War and the impact it had on the American soldiers that experienced it, his works tracing a fine line between blur and reality, fact and fiction, and a true story and storytelling.  

O'Brien won the U.S National Book Award for Fiction in 1979 for the Vietnam novel "Going After Cacciato", but his best work of fiction is the critically acclaimed piece entitled "The Things They Carried", a collection of interrelated short stories that narrate his wartime experiences. 

About the Novel

The Things They Carried is a collection of related stories by Tim O'Brien, about a platoon of soldiers in the Vietnam War. 

It narrates the experiences of the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Kiowa, Norman Bowker, and Tim O'Brien, who, in the novel, is the narrator of the stories, a survivor of the Vietnam war, and a father at the age of 43. 

In the relationships between the men of the Alpha Company, we readers feel and experience their isolation and loneliness, their rage and their fear. We interact with their inner child, the one who misses its life back home, its family, its girlfriend and its buddies, and we feel a stab of pain with each of their misfortunes. 

However, the soldiers appear to find sympathy and kindness in the strangers they meet along their tour in Vietnam (like the old man who showed them the way through a mined path or the girl who danced while grieving), as this unexplored place becomes the only family they have. Consequently, we hear the voices of these men and build images upon their dialogues and when they tell stories about others, we hear them telling stories about themselves.     

The Things They Carried narrates the impact of Vietnamese war upon the American soldiers that fought in it, and the repercussions it had on them both physical and psychologically. The stories within it, strive to submerge the reader to the ambiguity of war and all the different layers it has that can be only deciphered by those who vividly experience it. 

Although it is based in some of the author's own experiences as a soldier, this work is considered a "work of fiction" due to the fact that the autor employs a complex literary technique called metafiction, where the fact and the fiction are blurred to the point where one can't be isolated from the other.