The Things They Carried

by Tim O'Brien

earplugs.

she received the kiss

a kid at war, in love. He was twenty-four years old. He couldn’t help it.

rabbit’s foot.

carried a thumb

resources were stunning—sparklers for the Fourth of July, colored eggs for Easter—it

was the great American war

chest—the fruits of science, the ...

But we can't care for veterans!?

something orderly and reassuring. There were red checkers and black checkers. The playing field was laid out in a strict grid, no tunnels or mountains or jungles. You knew where you stood. You knew the score. The pieces were out on the board, the enemy was visible, you could watch the tactics unfolding into larger strategies. There was a winner and a loser. There were rules.

But the thing about remembering is that you don’t forget.

Norman Bowker

“I’ll tell you something, O’Brien. If I could have one wish, anything, I’d wish for my dad to write me a letter and say it’s okay if I don’t win any medals. That’s all my old man talks about, nothing else. How he can’t wait to see my goddamn medals.”

The average age in our platoon, I’d guess, was nineteen or twenty, and as a consequence things often took on a curiously playful atmosphere,

Kiowa saying, “No choice, Tim. What else could you do?” Kiowa saying, “Right?” Kiowa saying, “Talk to me.”

All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit.

Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons. I saw no unity

What really happened to the USS Maddox on that dark night in the Gulf of Tonkin?

was my view then, and still is, that you don’t make war without knowing

why.

I

was ashamed of my conscience, ashamed to be doing the right thing.

It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that’s all it was.

would go to the war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to.

I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.

“Garden of Evil. Over here, man, every sin’s real fresh and original.”

In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted.

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

in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.

was nearly three weeks before she returned. But in a sense she never returned. Not entirely, not all of her.

“You’re in a place,” Mary Anne said softly, “where you don’t belong.”

They were like body armor,

doing his patriotic duty, which was also a privilege,

watched my friend Kiowa sink into the muck along the Song Tra Bong.

“war nicht so schlecht.”