The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien (Book 8 of 2015)
For those of us who like me, were lucky enough to have a high draft number, (mine was 306), and escaped the war in Vietnam, Tim O’Brien has shown us slices of life in it, in his novel The Things They Carried. And it’s everything that we thought it was, everything that we protested to end.
The Things They Carried is a collection of short stories, several of which were published prior to being incorporated into the book, that paints a vivid picture of the Vietnam experience, which for the most part it wasn’t pretty. The book follows the exploits of the men that Tim O’Brien served with the one’s who died like: Curt Lemon, Ted Lavender, and Kiowa and those who made it through, alive, but changed forever like: Lt Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, and the narrator who has been writing about the war, since it ended, hoping some how that the stories will save him.