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What makes a good war story? How much needs to be true for it to feel real?

Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" is a powerful, heartbreaking and gut-wrenching book about the Vietnam war. I had previously read the title story, which is excellent on its own, but I can thank the Ken Burns & Lynn Novick documentary for pushing me to read the entire book. O'Brien was interviewed in their TV series, and his wartime experiences fueled his writing.

"The Things They Carried" isn't really a novel or memoir, it's more a collection of linked short stories, each one looking at a different aspect of the war or of Tim's life. He remembers and mourns his friends who died, and he tries to reckon with what the war really meant. One of my favorite stories was when he considered running away to Canada to escape the military draft, and how he finally decided to return home and report for duty. He realized he would rather fight in a war he didn't believe in than risk being ostracized by his family and hometown.

The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.

I listened to this on audio, which was narrated by the actor Bryan Cranston, and he was a great choice. His gravelly voice handled both the grim and the bizarre elements of the war, and he has the warmth of character to make it feel like we were sitting around a campfire, sharing our deep, dark stories.

Five stars to Mr. O'Brien for working through a lot of angst and for writing so well, and five stars to Mr. Cranston for conveying it so beautifully.

Meaningful Quotes
"To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil -- everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble."

"For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity. Now and then, however, there were times of panic, when they squealed or wanted to squeal but couldn't, when they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons blindly and cringed and sobbed and begged for the noise to stop and went wild and made stupid promises to themselves and to God and to their mothers and fathers, hoping not to die. In different ways, it happened to all of them. Afterward, when the firing ended, they would blink and peek up. They would touch their bodies, feeling shame, then quickly hiding it. They would force themselves to stand. As if in slow motion, frame by frame, the world would take on the old logic -- absolute silence, then the wind, then sunlight, then voices. It was the burden of being alive."

"We kept the dead alive with stories. When Ted Lavender was shot in the head, the men talked about how they'd never seen him so mellow, how tranquil he was, how it wasn't the bullet but the tranquilizers that blew his mind. He wasn't dead, just laid-back. There were Christians among us, like Kiowa, who believed in the New Testament stories of life after death. Other stories were passed down like legends from old-timer to newcomer. Mostly though, we had to make up our own. Often they were exaggerated, or blatant lies, but it was a way of bringing body and soul back together, or a way of making new bodies for the souls to inhabit."

"There were occasions, I believed, when a nation was justified in using military force to achieve its ends, to stop a Hitler or some comparable evil, and I told myself that in such circumstances I would've willingly marched off to battle. The problem, though, was that a draft board did not let you choose your war."