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“It’s time to be blunt. I’m forty-three years old, true, and I’m a writer now, and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier. Almost everything else is invented…I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening truth.��
- Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried has sat on my bookshelf for years. Maybe since high school, meaning that it has sat on various shelves, in various rooms, in various states, for almost twenty years. I have no excuse for this. No good excuse, anyway. The other day, one of my (grossly overloaded) bookcases collapsed. While sifting through the debris, I found a copy of the novelization of the movie Independence Day. Yes, that movie. The one with Randy Quaid “acting�� crazy. Not only did I have it, but I remembered reading it.

But not The Things They Carried.

Until now.

Spurred on by Ken Burns�� The Vietnam War, which features O’Brien as a contributor, I finally tore through this thin volume. I’m glad I did.

***

The Things They Carried is one of the most well-known �� if not the most well-known �� war novel in the English language. In case you’re like me, though, and you haven't gotten around to this yet, it is an interlocking series of short stories. Many of the stories appeared at different times and in different venues, but they are meant to go together, flowing one from the next. Each story informs, amplifies, and sometimes even critiques the others.

All the stories revolve around the men of Alpha Company. This is a fictional unit, but O’Brien toys with the idea of truth and fiction a great deal. This begins before the book even starts, when O’Brien dedicates The Things They Carried to Alpha. That might be the most surprising thing to me. I expected a hardcore look at Vietnam. Instead, it is a powerful piece of metafiction that happens to be set in Vietnam.

***

The Things They Carried started off pretty much as expected, opening with the famous eponymous tale detailing what the men of Alpha Company carried into war, from firearms and claymores to love letters and charms. It is good stuff, yet not entirely unique. Growing up in the shadow of Vietnam, I used to read a good deal of Vietnam war fiction, many of the titles borrowed from the bookshelves of veterans. Most of these books �� from the great to the good to the pulpy to the terrible �� are oriented at the platoon or company level, following small groups of disparate men in the jungle. For a while, I recognized O'Brien's novel as a familiar species, even if its sensitivity was different.

Soon enough, it starts to separate itself from the pack.

***
The next two paragraphs may �� or may not �� constitute spoilers. Out of an abundance of caution, you may want to skip them.

Partway through the The Things They Carried, O’Brien moves in an unexpected direction. He begins interjecting more of himself into his writing. He caps this off by telling two stories in succession, the latter story explaining that the former had been fictionalized, that names had been changed, that events had been elided.

At first, O’Brien’s manipulation of the artificiality of the novel as a form took me out of things. Good fiction forces you to suspend your disbelief. But when you point out literary tropes, it’s no longer possible to harbor that suspension. Eventually, though, O'Brien's technique started to pay off. It hit me that his musings on his own inventions and story-making decisions gave his tales an unexpected authenticity. I began to believe, wholeheartedly, in an underlying realness, despite the fact that everything �� including O’Brien’s meta-commentary �� is make believe.

***

Of course, none of the literary experimentation found here would mean a thing if it lacked substance. The Things They Carried packs a lot of memorable moments into less than 250 paperback pages. There is a darkly hilarious sequence in which a soldier at a thinly-regulated medical detachment invites his girlfriend in from stateside to spend time with him in-country. The premise is gonzo, and only gets better as the girlfriend rapidly transforms into Colonel Kurtz. She starts visiting nearby villages, hangs out with the Green Berets, and eventually participates in patrols and ambushes.

Another section, haunting and mournful, sees the O’Brien character deciding whether to run to Canada in order to avoid Vietnam. He drives up to the Rainy River, where he spends a week with an old man at an otherwise-empty resort. The old man takes him fishing, right next to the international border:

I remember staring at the old man, then at my hands, then at Canada. The shoreline was dense with brush and timber. I could see tiny red berries in the bushes. I could see a squirrel up on one of the birch trees, a big crow looking at me from a boulder along the river. That close �� twenty yards �� and I could see the delicate latticework of the leaves, the texture of the soil, the browned needles beneath the pines, the configurations of geology and human history. Twenty yards. I could’ve done it. I could’ve jumped and started swimming for my life. Inside me, in my chest, I felt a terrible squeezing pressure. Even now, as I write this, I can still feel the tightness. And I want you to feel it �� the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You’re at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You’re twenty-one years old, you’re scared, and there’s a hard squeezing pressure in your chest.

The Things They Carried is filled with such moments of beauty, sadness, perceptiveness, and power. It should be said, though, that it is a very narrow viewpoint into the Vietnam experience. The fictionalized O’Brien writes from the perspective of a well-educated young white man, which makes him a familiar Virgil of Vietnam. There is not much separating the O’Brien-narrator from Charlie Sheen’s Taylor in Platoon, or Matthew Modine’s Joker in Full Metal Jacket. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. It is �� after all �� the distillation of his experiences. He’s not going for the final, comprehensive word on decades of fighting in Southeast Asia. I mention this only because limits the novel’s breadth. Topics you might expect, such as politics or race, are barely mentioned, if at all.

***

Really, there’s not much for me to add, only repeat. The Things They Carried is as good as advertised. The biggest surprise is that it had as much to say about writing and story structure as it did about the most controversial war in American history.