"the Things They Carried" - Tim O'brien - 1986

"the Things They Carried" - Tim O'brien - 1986

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 from World War II to the war in Iraq find that it captures the realities of war, while probing the unrealities that frontline soldiers are forced to live out in order to survive—on both physical and psychological levels. These unreal, even surreal, demands on men are related to morality, courage, and fear. O'Brien leaves the reader unpeeling the truth, which like the proverbial onion has many layers.

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