SOURCE: "The Story that Never Ends," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4552, June 29-July 5, 1990, p. 705.

In the following review of The Things They Carried, Loose examines some elements of what constitutes a "true war story" in O'Brien's fiction.

For nearly two decades Tim O'Brien has written about the impossibility of telling stories true to the American experience of Vietnam, and he is getting better all the time. In his latest sequence, The Things They Carried, the narratives O'Brien brought back from the war are enlivened by an increasingly sophisticated sense of genre. A "true war story", O'Brien argues, has no moral; it exhibits an absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil; it is never really about war, it is about love and memory and sorrow. Above all, a true war story may never have happened:

Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps...