Introduction

Tim O'Brien wrote the short story "The Things They Carried" in 1985. It was published in the August 1986 issue of Esquire and again the following year in The Best American Short Stories of 1987. In 1990, it was the first story in the collection The Things They Carried. O'Brien had already won the National Book Award for an earlier book, Going After Cacciato, and The Things They Carried stirred the same praise. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award and won several other awards.

This story of a company of young U.S. army infantrymen who, in essence, are carrying the Vietnam War on their backs, is read and appreciated today as much as when it was first published. Veterans...