The Missing Link Project: The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

I had read parts of this book before, including the title story, which is widely anthologized. I'd also heard the author read the book's final story, "The Lives of the Dead," at the Sewanee Writers' Conference in 2008. It is a wonderful book, and if you haven't read it I encourage you to do so.

It is a fictional memoir, I suppose. The narrator has a lot in common with the author—name, profession, background, service in Vietnam. And it is impossible for a reader to separate fact from fiction. O...