SOURCE: Bunting, Josiah. “Vietnam, Carried On.” Book World—Washington Post (23 April 1990): B13.

In the following review, Bunting considers the defining and unifying characteristics of the stories in The Things They Carried.

A war writer's compulsion to write about why, and how, he writes about war and about what constitutes good war writing is not often resisted successfully. It rises like second growth forest, from soil in which his memory has already quickened and that has nourished his imagination and sometimes its trunks and shoots bristle in the midst of taller usually stronger trees. Too often the consequence is literary criticism, or reflections on the unreliability of memory, or simple assertions about writing about combat, that should have stood alone. It is rare that writers of unusual imaginative powers have critical gifts to match. When the fruits of both are mixed, the result is to diminish each. Perhaps The...