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The Things They Carried is so full of microburst storytelling that its shortcomings as a fully formed narrative are overcome. Tim O'Brien first published many of these chapters as short stories: Speaking of Courage (1976) appeared in Massachusetts Review and won an O. Henry Award in 1978; The Ghost Soldiers (1981), The Things They Carried (1986), How To Tell a True War Story (1987), The Lives of the Dead (1987) and Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong (1989) appeared in Esquire; In the Field (1989) in Gentleman's Quarterly and On the Rainy River (1990) in Playboy.

The Vietnam War became heavily dramatized in the years leading up to the publication of The Things They Carried, in film (Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket being the standard bearers), on TV (Tour of Duty on CBS, China Beach on ABC and Vietnam War Story on HBO) and even a Top 40 pop tune ("19" by Paul Hardcastle) which used period newsreels as lyrics. The triumph of the book is the way O'Brien--sometimes using violence, sometimes not--is able to strike like lightning on a clear day, searing details across my imagination that I won't be able to get out anytime soon:

-- On ambush, or other night missions, they carried peculiar little odds and ends. Kiowa always took along his New Testament and a pair of moccasins for silence. Dave Jensen carried night-vision vitamins high in carotene. Lee Strunk carried his slingshot; ammo, he claimed, would never be a problem. Rat Kiley carried brandy and M&M's candy. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried the starlight scope, which weighed 6.3 pounds with its aluminum carrying case. Henry Dobbins carried his girlfriend's pantyhose wrapped around his neck as a comforter. They all carried ghosts. When dark came, they would move out single file across the meadows and paddies to their ambush coordinates, where they would quietly set up the Claymores and lie down and spend the night waiting.

-- If you weren't humping, you were waiting. I remember the monotony. Digging foxholes. Slapping mosquitoes. The sun and the heat and the endless paddies. Even in the deep bush, where you could die any number of ways, the war was nakedly and aggressively boring. But it was a strange boredom. It was boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom that caused stomach disorders. You'd be sitting at the top of a high hill, the flat paddies stretching out below, and the day would be calm and hot and utterly vacant, and you'd feel the boredom dripping inside you like a leaky faucet, except it wasn't water, it was a sort of acid, and with each little droplet you'd feel the stuff eating away at the important organs. You'd try to relax. You'd uncurl your fists and let your thoughts go. Well, you'd think, this isn't so bad. And right then you'd hear gunfire behind you and your nuts would fly up into your throat and you'd be squealing pig squeals. That kind of boredom.

-- Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn't hit you until twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you get to the end you've forgotten the point again. And then for a long time you lie there watching the story happen in your head. You listen to your wife's breathing. The war's over. You close your eyes. You take a feeble swipe at the dark and think, Christ, what's the point?

-- What happened to her, Rat said, was what happened to all of them. You come over clean and you get dirty and then afterward it's never the same. A question of degree. Some make it intact, some don't make it at all. For Mary Anne Bell, it seemed, Vietnam had the effect of a powerful drug: that mix of unnamed terror and unnamed pleasure that comes as the needle slips in and you know you're risking something. The endorphins start to flow, and the adrenaline, and you hold your breath and creep quietly through the moonlit nightscapes; you become intimate with danger; you're in touch with the far side of yourself, as though it's another hemisphere, and you want to string it out and go wherever the trip takes you and be host to all the possibilities inside yourself.

-- The countryside itself seemed spooky--shadows and tunnels and incense burning in the dark. The land was haunted. We were fighting forces that did not obey the laws of twentieth-century science. Late at night, on guard, it seemed that all of Vietnam was alive and shimmering--odd shapes swaying in the paddies, boogiemen in sandals, and Charlie Cong was the main ghost. The way he came out at night. How you never really saw him, just thought you did. Almost magical--appearing, disappearing. He could blend with the land, changing form, becoming trees and grass. He could fly. He could pass through barbed wire and melt away like ice and creep up on you without sound or footsteps. He was scary. In the daylight, maybe, you didn't believe in this stuff. You laughed it off. You made jokes. But at night you turned into a believer: no skeptics in foxholes.

O'Brien's command of prose, the marriage of the literary with the journalistic, is the chief reason to read The Things They Carried. The focus is not placed on battles or events or what happened in the war, but on how a wide variety of stimuli in Vietnam made O'Brien feel about the war. As he points out after an encounter with a dear little old lady leaving one of his book readings, this is not a war story, it's a love story. The approach seems righteous and much of the material is drawn from that well. And many of the stories he tells are unforgettable, playing with truth to the point the author has to address the subjective nature of truth at one point, but hard to put out of my mind.

As drunken as I was on O'Brien's command of prose and his storytelling, there are three reasons why The Things They Carried stopped short of total satisfaction for me. The first is that instead of one chapter leading into the next and so on, these are vignettes, some masterful, others pedestrian, each self-contained for the most part. Second, there's an anticlimactic quality in this jumping around that took me out of the novel, something that was not a problem as long as these vignettes were published in magazines or literary journals. Third, and also no fault of O'Brien's, I felt that so much of his material had been strip mined by film and television, by 2016, I'd seen a lot of it already.

It's difficult for me to imagine that Full Metal Jacket and other movies didn't draw inspiration from O'Brien or use him as a war correspondent--the adrenaline kick of combat mixed with the absolute terror of being killed being a recurring theme in the Stanley Kubrick film in particular. O'Brien addresses the ritualistic joking the grunts utilized to avoid dealing with death, the scripted nature of which became a criticism of Full Metal Jacket. Still, I can see why the book has become a staple of high school and college English curriculum. O'Brien used his experiences to mold a deeply felt and powerful document of a time that history might otherwise soon forget.