The Things They Carried

by Tim O'Brien

The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.

In a way, I guess, she’s right: I should forget it. But the thing about remembering is that you don’t forget.

Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true.

Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead.

Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery.

You can’t tell where you are, or why you’re there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.

What happened to her, Rat said, was what happened to all of them. You come over clean and you get dirty and then afterward it’s never the same.

it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You