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I had a friend who went to war. Part of him did not come home. His shoulder and much of his upper body was metal plate, but that is not the part I am talking about. The part that was left there was a piece of his soul, an innocence and lightness that could never be recaptured. He talked about the war when he was in his cups, which he was too often. His best buddy in the war was killed in front of his eyes, and Sam was convinced (be it true or not) that the bullet he took was meant for Sam. He felt his friend had saved his life and that he was not worthy of that sacrifice. Knowing him made reading this book a harder experience for me, it made the stories more real, it reminded me how many Sams there were out there in the jungles of Vietnam.

This is, of course, a book about war, and as such, not surprisingly, a book about loss. It is also a book about death, even the deaths of those who live, for people die in stages sometimes, they die in bits and pieces that they bury and exhume and rebury.

I cannot imagine anyone reads this book without taking it personally. Certainly the men who fought this war must find something I can never touch inside its pages. What I found myself seeing were Sam’s eyes, the way they sparkled when he was free of war for a moment and the way they clouded and glazed when he tried to tell anyone about what he was feeling. I would sometimes catch him in a quiet moment at his desk, and I knew without a word that he was there. From the first page, I was walking with Sam, not with Tim, but then I realized Sam and Tim and Kiowa and Curt Lemon, are all the same person for one short moment in time.

I know why I have had this on my TBR for so long and procrastinated about opening it to read. No one really wants to go back to that war for even a second. I understand as little now about why we were there as I did then, and history usually gives a person more perspective, not less. I think about all the potential we lost, not only in the person of those who died, but in those who came back so changed and could find no way to move forward. Tim O’Brien is one of the lucky ones. He found a voice through his writing and purged some of his ghosts in that way. Some men just carried them to the grave, unpurged...and that must be the worst weight they were asked to carry.