Reviews for The things they carried

The average rating for The things they carried based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-09-18 00:00:00 Paul Thompson It was in the spring of 2006 and I was on patrol in Kirkuk Iraq with a unit in the 101st Airborne. I had my full "battle rattle" on: helmet, body armor, vest with extra magazines, M4. We were in the Kurdish part of the city and it was a beautiful day in the bazaar. I came to love the Kurdish people, they were hardworking and resilient. Many people don't know this but a percentage of Kurdish folks are red headed. No kidding, fair skin like me and RED hair. It was the kind of day where in the back of our mind we were maybe more vigilant than necessary because the threat of anything bad seemed so far away - so therefore we needed to be more on the guard. But for the most part, it was a quiet day and people were out shopping and enjoying the day. I was on the sidewalk and looking at the goods on display. Huge bags of nuts and seeds, fabric, plastic toys, a little bit of everything. A mother was walking with her little boy, he looked about 2 or 3, with a cute brown outfit that was tailored to fit him, perhaps homemade. I noticed her looking at some goods and he saw something across the street and like little boys the world over, took off past me and headed into the street. I am a father of three boys and at that time they were 16, 13 and 6 and I thought about them everyday if not hourly. My wife and I had been chasing healthy and happy, mischievous boys for years and if I was hyper vigilant for bad guys, I was even more sensitive to children getting loose. As natural as if I were on the sidewalk in Middle Tennessee, I reached down and caught him, said something incomprehensible to him like "whoa little man, don't loose momma" and I smiled at his mother and she smiled at me and then in that moment, I was not an armed soldier occupying her city and we spoke the same language and we were neighbors keeping a little boy out of the street. That was years ago and so much happened over there, but I will always remember that moment because it was an instance of unconditional and timeless humanity during wartime. The reality was and is that labels like "soldier" and "enemy" and "foreign national" do little to assuage the inherent and complicated humanity that we all bring with us and share between us. What Tim O'Brien accomplished in The Things They Carried, his 1990 collection of short stories and essays about his experiences in Vietnam two decades earlier, is to demonstrate that even in the middle of a horrific war experience, that the soldiers and residents of that country were fundamentally and undeniably all human and capable of experiencing the wide scope of human emotion amidst wartime, and further that the very lethal nature of war made the emotions more vivid and alive. Whereas all of my brothers in arms and I volunteered, O'Brien and his fellow soldiers were mainly drafted and were thus accidental warriors because of conscription. Here were young men who did not want to be there, for the most part, but O'Brien takes an expansionist and objective stance and reveals that some people did find their place there and learned things about themselves they would not have otherwise discovered but for that martial experience. Poignant, touching, endearing, heartbreaking, terrifying, saddening, maddening, O'Brien has succinctly stated what so many have before tried to and failed. He has formed a voice from this wilderness of human experience and has documented for us all a glimpse into moments of humanity during wartime.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-10-11 00:00:00 Charles McLaughlin I first bought The Things They Carried at the Bruised Apple, a used bookstore and coffee shop in downtown Peekskill, New York, back in 1991 when I was fifteen years old. By the time I graduated from high school a few years later I'd read it so often that the pages, already brittle, were nearly worn through, entire sections underlined in pencil. Loaned out and lost to a college crush years ago, a dear friend bought me a replacement copy awhile back signed to me by Tim O'Brien himself. This new copy is not quite as loveworn, but still it is cherished. The beauty of this book lies not necessarily in the war stories at its center, but rather in the undulating, overlapping entanglements that are people's lives, in the act of using storytelling as a means of recapturing our histories, bringing the many facets of our so often fragmented selves forward into the present day. The lyrical poetry of O'Brien's writing combined with the brutality of Vietnam imagery is truly a shock, traumatizing yet powerfully beautiful in its way, and the force of language itself is a revelation. As O'Brien writes, "The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head."