This is quite the book, and Cranston is quite the reader. Well suited with gravely voice, solemn tones, perfect diction and flow that draws me in. I'm left with a few thoughts:

Part One, carrying a burden

The first chapter, 'The Things They Carried' was one of the longer chapters, at 47 minutes. As read by Cranston, it is a moving and primitive ballad, the grown-up version of a repetitive narrative structure (think 'The Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly,' or more likely Gilgamesh or one of those tales) that builds a rhythm leading to a powerful end. It was one of the most moving things I've heard in a long time, a kind of spoken word poetry, a sermon from an endless hike, culminating in a too-familiar longing to fly.

"Because you could die so quickly, each man also carried at least one large compress bandage, usually in the helmet band for easy access.

"For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity. Now and then, however, there were times of panic, when they squealed or wanted to squeal but couldn't, when they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons blindly...

"At night, on guard, staring into the dark, they were carried away by jumbo jets. They felt the rush of takeoff. Gone! they yelled. And then velocity--wings and engines--a smiling stewardess--but it was more than a plane, it was a real bird, a big sleek silver bird with feathers and talons and high screeching. They were flying. The weights fell off; there was nothing to bear. They laughed and held on tight, feeling the cold slap of wind and altiude, soaring, thinking It's over, I'm gone!--they were naked, they were light and free--it was all lightness, bright and fast and buoyant, light as light..."

Part two: unreliable narrators

Tim O'Brien is fooling himself. There's no judgement attached to that statement; I'm not calling it good or bad or anything else. But if he thinks that he's left the war behind and that he's not one of 'those' vets with post-traumatic stress disorder, he is absolutely wrong.

Part three: truthiness

O'Brien takes time in many of his tales to talk about the value of tales, about the veracity of the stories he is telling, about how he might make something up so that it feels true to the reader. This is where I disagree with him both as a reader and as a writer. In 'How to Tell a True War Story,' he eventually expounds on this idea, but first he has some powerful thoughts about war stories in general.

"If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil." This feels sadly, honestly true; there is very little that is redeemable in war, in large scale violence, in the purposeful and anonymous killing of people to make a political or moral point, and any sort of stories that try to find it are like putting a Snoopy band-aid on a gunshot wound.

I adored his acknowledgement of the memory of moments, which made me think of nothing so much as Dali's Persistence of Memory, and relativism.


"In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed."

That is a perfect description of the non-linearity of memory, recalling that accident scene in the middle of the night in Deerfield so long ago: the kid in the cornfield, the white and red and blue flashing lights, the circle of light around us and the strange elongated shadows outside our perimeter as I knelt by the kid's head and held his spine straight. I remember it as a cubist painting and not a sequence of events.

All of that said, I believe that I disagree with him, that "story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth." I think a story can be absolutely true, and that with adequate craft, the writer will lead the reader to the conclusion, the sentiment--the moral, as Mitchell Sanders would claim. I believe that the occurrence itself is significant enough, and that with well-chosen words, the reader will be able to feel it, to understand the meaning of the event. But I could be wrong, and we're both deluding ourselves that the authors has control of the story.

Part four: an overview

All of that said, the collection itself is a mix. It's more about the experience of war than the actual war. It reminded me of when I was in high school and a plethora of Vietnam movies came out, including Platoon and the more lighthearted take, Good Morning Vietnam, and I suddenly found myself wanting to understand my dad's experience there.

I've heard that this is a book that some kids now read in high school. I don't know that this is a collection that can help someone unfamiliar with the Vietnam war understand; the darkness of the jungle, the tunnels, the antipathy of the public, the absence of soldiers' conviction in a 'good' war, the absolute isolation and the adolescent technology, all in contrast to the more modern 'conflicts' that soldiers have participated in since 2001.

Despite protestations to the contrary, there is much here that is not specific, and there is much that is too specific (the water buffalo, the girl dancing, the puppy, the sewage field) and much that is apocryphal (the water buffalo, the girl dancing, the puppy, the sewage field). This is where I find myself arguing with O'Brien again, that the specifics only matter for the feeling of truthiness. This book relies on concepts associated with war to fill in the details and the emotion, and thus the impact would likely be lessened for someone unfamiliar with the real details.

The rating? Cranston, a solid five stars. The titular story? A solid 42 stars. There was a lot of material to think about, and for a brief moment I wished I was in English class so that I could write a paper on it. The collection as a whole? Interesting, fraught, unhappy, deceiving, monotonous, provoking.

No doubt, much like war.

Three and a half platoons, rounding up. ( )

This book is fantastic.

The things they carried by Tim O Brien is a collection of twenty-two stories chronicling the author's recollections of his time as a soldier in the Vietnam War. About one third ways through the book I realised that this account was not entirely based on fact and that some of the stories were fiction and I did initially think that this was going to affect my ability to understand and gel with the characters and stories but I think the book was so well written that for me it seemed as if I was seeing the war through O'Brien's eyes and this overcame my need to know exactly what was fact and what was fiction.
I found this in my audio library and to be honest I did very little research on what exactly the book entailed because the narrator's voice was so amazing that I just got stuck in and what I great book I stumbled upon.

A few of the stories shocked and saddened me and one in particular will stay with me for a long time(On the Rainy River). I found the story (The Dentist) funny and was glad there was a little humour in there among all the sadness.

I am really glad I read this book and I hope to purchase a copy for my bookshelf, I can absolutely recommend the audio version of this one as the narrator was excellent.

. ( )

In this novel, the author’s beautiful writing brings alive his service as a soldier in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. He shares closely-held fears, funny stories, horrible experiences, personal philosophies, and soldier-to-soldier conversations. It presents a good balance of wartime’s bad and the ugly with the not-so-expected love and beauty. The author exquisitely expresses his universal ideas about war. Psychological realities of becoming, being, and having been a wartime soldier are keenly described.

For some readers, the book presents itself as a collection of stories. For me, it works well as a novel because it had me thinking of the author as the protagonist. As he recalls his youth, he remembers his call to the draft, his years of service in Viet Nam, his buddy’s post war return to civilian life, and even a sweet love of his young childhood. Although the time skips around, that is how our memories work--with no set chronology as to what we remember or in what order. In remembering, our minds sometimes turn fact into fiction and vice versa. O’Brien uses this blend of fact and fiction to makes his war stories truly memorable. ( )

O'Brien writes chapter vignettes of experiences during the Vietnam war. Each chapter jumps around events from being drafted (do you go to Vietnam or Canada) to how they dealt with death and everything in between, but not in any chronological order. The stories feel very much like haunting nightmares that O'Brien is dealing with, jumping from one memory one night to another memory the next night. Each chapter's nightmare pulls you in, wanting more but afraid of what more is. A gripping view of what war is for the mind/subconscious living through it (micro view) vs the strategies and higher ups view planning it (macro view). If you ever thought war might in some way be fulfilling in some weird way, then reading this is a must to remake your thinking. ( )