Tim O'Brien deliberately uses a wandering hit and miss method to recreate his experiences in the Vietnam War. He repeats the same stories, but with a few facts and some perspective shifted. Through his technique, the reader experiences the great contradictions within war, and the inadequacy of the human heart and psyche to handle something so hugely grotesque and senseless. Each soldier in his company is trying to offset the horror and stench and the absence of normalcy by clinging to something tangible and ordinary: a girlfriend's stocking, a New Testament, a rabbit foot, a pebble.


The book is called The Things They Carried. I reread it earlier this week, but it's still hanging on. O'Brien hides nothing behind fancy words or embellishment; there is a bell-like simplicity to his writing. He acknowledges there is no lesson, no truth from the war, but he has written with honesty and, the contradiction, beauty.