The Things They Carried

     Normally when I blog, I don't take things too seriously because I am aware of the fact that nobody ever reads these things. However, this one is going to be good because Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried was unlike any other novel that I have ever read before. As a reader, I was completely sucked into this narrative from the first few pages when O'Brien skipped straight to the point and started naming off  all of the things that the soldiers in his Alpha company carried. The way he did it, though...it was beautiful. I want to use the word poetic, but I know that it could never really do justice to the way that O'Brien characterized the young soldiers in a way that I never even thought a wartime author would. Each soldier was given a set of items: weapons, survival essentials, food, etc. Exactly what you would expect from an American soldier deployed in Vietnam. More than that though, they were each intimately characterized by the things that they carried which they held so dear to them. Kiowa carried his grandfather's hatchet and moccasins, Cross carried letters from the girl he loved, Tim Lavendar carried dope and tranquilizers because he was terrified of dying. It was these little things that reminded the reader that these were normal guys, barely even adults, just like the rest of us who were forced to go overseas and kill so that they would not be killed. The line that struck me the most, though, was after O'Brien listed off all the weapons that the Alpha Company carried, putting the burdens only in terms of weight: AK-47s, M-60s, smoke grenades, killer grenades, chains of ammo, and a lot more things that I can't really remember. But after listing off all of this, O'Brien writes "But most of all, they were all in a silent awe of the things they carried". These young men have been given tools that could destroy massive amounts of human life, as well as maybe save their own, and their "silent awe" just goes to show their shock  in actually having to accept that their job - the reason why they were sent to war - was to kill. Especially because this narrative is told by a Vietnam veteran drafted against his will, it really opens up a whole new perspective. It also makes the source reliable because we, the readers, can know for a fact that O'Brien isn't trying to dramatize something that he's only seen in the movies. He tells it like it was so that he can keep the memories of the men in his company alive.

     The book is also filled with numerous other narratives following The Things They Carried. Each one drew new insight into O'Brien's past in Vietnam and how it has shaped his present day life as he attempts to find closure for all of the events that happened. My only regret is that I only had an hour in class to write about this book because it honestly deserves a lot more explaining than just one hour will allow. So yeah...for those of you who like to read for fun, check this book out. There's like 12,000 copies of it in the library.