SOURCE: "Has He Forgotten Anything?" in Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 1, 1990, pp. 3, 11.

In the favorable review below, Eder relates O'Brien's memories of war to the actual writing of The Things They Carried.

Why is he still writing about the Vietnam War, Tim O'Brien's 10-year-old daughter asks him. Why not write about a little girl who finds a million dollars and spends it on a Shetland pony?

The reader may ask the same question, though probably not about the pony. Writing that commands the graceful and unsparing strength that O'Brien used in Going After Cacciato a dozen years ago is rare. How we need writers to give us an equivalent strength and discrimination for the more inchoate puzzlement of our own days!

O'Brien, whose reflections and comments run through this new chain of Vietnam stories [in The Things They Carried], faces the question. He takes it up, puts...