"The Things They Carried" is a collection of short stories about the Vietnam War.  Like "Winesburg, Ohio" the stories are related in that the same characters appear again and again.  Here the stories are all about one company of soldiers in Vietnam, including a soldier named Tim O'Brien.  In fact, the author blurs the line between fiction and reality in this book, as the characters and incidents are based on the author's experience fighting in the Vietnam War.  Part of the point of the book is the blurring of what really happened and what is fiction.  The author says at one point that it's his right as an author to change the facts to make the story more real.  In order to convey to someone who wasn't there the true experience of Vietnam, he alters the facts to make the story pack more of a punch, to make it more visceral.  Because when he describes lying in a field of mud and shit (literally, the field was used as an outhouse by the locals), and mortar fire is raining down all around, and his best buddy dies in front of him because he sinks into the mud and shit and subsequently drowns, it's a horrifying and gripping story for softies like me who are reading the book while lying on the couch sipping on a glass of 21 year-old rye whiskey and have never been under mortar fire, let alone enemy fire of any kind, unless you count being jostled while trying to get a place at the bar.  But also, I could imagine that war, and especially this war where everyone is drafted and doesn't want to be there, is a very surreal experience...almost as if the real experience already blurs the line between fiction and reality.

The stories in this book cover the gamut of the war experience...contemplating fleeing to Canada to avoid the draft but ultimately going to war for no other reason than to save face, looking into the eyes of someone you've just killed and wondering who they were and what their life was like, watching your friends die in horrific ways, getting dumped by your girlfriend while at war, going back home and not having anyone understand how empty and alone you now feel.  But as I said, this book also deals with questions of what it means to tell these stories, of how the storyteller can viscerally impact the reader of these stories to make it more like actually experiencing them, but also how the experiences themselves sometimes make it hard to differentiate between fiction and reality.

When the Greek Titan Atlas lost to Zeus in battle, he suffered the harsh fate of being condemned to hold up the entire sky. His predicament, however, is nothing to the personal hell that men of war face. The life of a solider revolves around killing with, and death by guns; in such an environment, it becomes necessary for one to justify one’s own contributions to this atrocity: The constant moral dilemma of whether to kill or face being killed represents a pain that Atlas never had to endure. To declare that all soldiers who have taken a life are heartless, though, cannot be further from incorrect. The fact that these men are (more or less) able to face two of the greatest human fears – the fears of both having committed a horrible crime and having made a horrible mistake – indicates a terrible, internal struggle in any sane individual. And while this conflict has no adequate resolution, these soldiers find a final mental barrier against the bloodshed and sadness in one word: denial. Both the short story, “The Things They Carried,” and the movie, Platoon, demonstrate the important role that denial plays in inspiring disillusionment and allowing soldiers to retain some amount of sanity amidst such horror.  

War unlike anything else is probably the most surreal reality that anyone will ever see. In the short story, “The Things They Carried,” the author, Tim O’Brien, presents the not so typical dramatization of war. He shows a war without the zealous glorification of death, he does not even hand out the notion dying with honor or dignity. O’Brien purposefully gives his war and his characters a nihilistic feel in order to show the necessary denial that the soldiers create. The soldiers only seem capable of “humping” day in and day out. They are not even in Vietnam to fight some greater communist threat; they are there to carry a gun and a pack and a million other items through the jungle until they walk straight out of their minds. O’Brien goes into great detail to reiterate over and over the tremendous toll that this took on the men; “it was automatic, it was anatomy, and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kid of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility”  The physical nature of carrying pounds upon pounds of gear seems to break and force them into a drone of up and down; but this is not the case. Instead the men accept the humping as the only reason they have for being half way across the world in some dense jungle. They abandon conventional logic for something that makes more sense to them. Maybe the idea that these soldiers are there only to lug everything around is absolute preposterous; but to the platoon, the idea of killing people they have never even met is just as unreal.  

The Things They Carried, is not only the title of Tim O'Brien's novel, but it is also the title of its first chapter. In this chapter, O'Brien describes the characters of his novel and gives a detailed explanation of what exactly where they carrying with them throughout the war of Vietnam. By doing so, O'Brien introduces the reader to the different personalities of the characters (which may or may not represent real comrades from the Alfa Company) and their attitude towards war. Tim O'Brien describes every single detail about what his comrades from the Alpha Company where carrying even the things that where in their pockets, and more surprisingly, he even remembered what their weights where.

While reading this first chapter of The Things They Carried, I realized how the author was capable of memorizing all of these little details that no one else would pay attention to, but one day, twenty-years from that day, Tim O'Brien would start writing a novel about all these things with all of the long forgotten details as if it had happened yesterday.

Although my memory may not be as good as Tim's memory apparently is, I can make a connection with this chapter because I also have those long lost details of a long lost scenery in my early life that for some unknown reason I have managed to keep inside my mind.

This is very closley tied into what we were talking about in the seminar the past two days. I start to see that most soldiers are either pro war or anti war there seems to be no in between but they all agree they have to for their country. After only reading one chapter it seems to be an interesting read.