The Things They Carried Chapter 7
Karri Weston
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. 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 the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. (page 65)
Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him.
Wow. So I guess it boils down to this: War is ugly, and there is a bit of both truth and fiction in these stories. Sometimes the true facts are unemotional and distant, while a fictional account that truthfully portrays war is more emotional and more alive.
This has been on my TBR list for too long. But as someone who lived through the Vietnam Era and who had 2 brothers-in-law who fought in the war and someone who lost a friend, I may put years between reading books about this conflict. On the other hand, I feel it honors the men and women who served by trying to better understand what they went through.
This ended up being on my top reads for non-fiction. Although he is a veteran, his words are melodic and poetic and still it captures the horror of the war. In fact, my top two non-fiction, out of three, were about Vietnam. Great review!
Since finishing the book, I have thought of little else. Maybe because I had a brother in the war and I always wondered what it was like. I used to write to him and would like to think he carried one of my letters. The items carried were there to help cope with an insane situation. How else could they survive something a person can't even fathom.
I have read several disturbing books about Vietnam, notably for me Word of Honor by DeMille. They reinforce the concepts of how war is hell and how our young men are put in situations that are unwinable.
This book makes the war so real. It is obvious that the writer was there and that as a sensitive young man, he struggled with all the moral deliminas that other authors describe. But...oh the writing! This is so poignent and well expressed.
I had tried to read this book several years ago when it first came out and couldn't get into it. This time I was absolutely absorbed by the writing and the stories. I think it was one of the best war stories of that era. It's interesting how you react to a book differently at different times in your life.
I actually loved reading this book. I enjoyed it thoroughly. I loved the author's depiction of the things they carried - not only the actual things that they bodily carried, but the dreams and the memories and the emotions they carried; the fatigue, boredom, sorrow and fear they carried; all these things they carried with them.
I remember this period of time. I have read a little about it. I have with those, younger than myself, about that period, many of whom served. Never before have I have had a sense of the horrors of that time in our history. This author brought the time there alive for me. He brought the horror of being there right to me. I am just a bit from the ending so I will be back soon. He calls it fiction, every moment seemed real to me!
I enjoyed it, but had a difficult time with it. I have intentionally not read any books about this war. It was so unpopular and I knew people that were in it. I thought about reading this one and did decide to go with it. I am glad I did. I did, however, have a hard time reading about these young boys and what they were going though. No one should have to do this in their youth.
I first read this book sometime around 2000, give or take a few years. I remember being very moved. Mainly what I remember was that we read it in our book group for the annual dinner/discussion to which we invited our husbands, and their stories were moving also. Interestingly, although all the men were of draft age during this time, none of them had been drafted. Mainly it was the "luck of the draw" that their numbers had not been called. Rereading the book more recently I was struck by the fact that these young men depicted were really just boys, younger than my son is now. I remember when he was that age; sometimes he was a boy and sometimes he was a man. I was also struck this time around by the language used to describe the Vietnamese and I wondered if that derogatory language would have been used in a book today. I realize it is all part of what has been described earlier; soldiers need to feel that the enemy is evil in order to do the things that go into being a soldier.
I thought this book was well written and poignant - highly recommended. It's a bit disjointed but, in some cases, a call back to previous chapters and the dissonance between war and home were effective in evoking the confusion and difficulty in adjustment to war and after war.
I greatly enjoyed the book even though I don't usually go in for "war" books. But this was about so much more than war. I think it was a fantastic meditation on the humanity of soldiers, how even if they aren't entirely "truthful" (but, I'm of the opinion that truth is subjective, so...) there is still truth in experiences that are distilled into fictional stories. It was a more emotional book than I was expecting and really highlighted the emotional baggage of soldiers (yet another thing they carried) that seems sometimes to be swept aside in favor of stereotypical heroics and a tough-guy mentality. This was also the only fictional book I've read (so far) about the Vietnam war. Honestly, we didn't learn much about the war in school, so it made me go and research some of the particulars. I definitely learned things that I never would have considered to be the case before.
The title of the book was so "right on". The author started out by listing physical items carried into war, and then I realized that the really important significance of the book is the emotional and psychological. things they carried with them and brought back with them. I was surprised at the dark humor sprinkled throughout, but I realized that to stay "sane", these brave men had to rationalize the horrors of the war. For a relatively short book it carried a very large impact.
While I know this is a novel, I have to keep reminding myself of that because O'Brien's imagery and descriptions are all too real. Classmates, neighbors and relatives were all affected by this war. Some went, some fled and some were deferred. Of those that went they came home changed. Physically, mentally or not at all, our lives were changed. For those that came home they faced derision and sadly, rarely hailed. This should be required reading. It deserved the praise it's received.
They carried it all... the physical, the emotional. Powerful and poignant. Hard to believe that this is fiction. I felt that I knew each and every one of the men of alpha company, Jimmy, Bowker, Rat, Mitchell, Dobbins and Kiowa. How they felt, how they fought, how they cared, how they loved. I felt that I was right there with them in each chapter. To the author's credit he made me feel I was part of alpha company living each day with them. The intensity of the emotions this book evoked was surprising. Still cannot believe this is fiction!
I really liked this book. Having each chapter seemingly stand alone as a short story breaks up the intensity. Makes it more palatable. A good technique for this type of book.
It was a whole new way of thinking of the war. It was NOT about the war. It was IN the war. We all read about events that occurred. We were not there! This time we were. It was a whole new perspective of that entire time and, in many ways, far more meaningful..... and terrible.
I think this book is extremely successful in conveying the horrors of war, especially the Vietnam War (as it is called in the USA) or the American War, as it's called in Vietnam. The Vietnam War killed (counting MIA as killed) close to 60,000 American soldiers and approximately a quarter of a million South Vietnamese soldiers. There was still a draft, and few people alive today remember that since we are just a couple of years away from a half century of not having a military draft in the United States. It was one of the most turbulent times in American history: anti war protests, college students shot and killed on campus for protesting (listen to the song "Ohio" along with photos ( ). Brave soldiers came home without any World War type celebratory greetings but rather felt blamed instead of honored. Many boys came home without arms or legs, and even those who appeared whole had to deal with what they saw over there and think about what was going to happen to South Vietnamese friends who were left behind . Overwhelming sadness and lost.
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In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't tease it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh."True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis.
We crossed that river and marched west into the mountains. On the third day, my friend Curt Lemon stepped on a boobytrapped artillery round. He was playing catch with Rat Kiley, laughing, and then he was dead. The trees were thick; it took nearly an hour to cut an LZ for the dustoff.
Later, higher in the mountains, we came across a baby VC water buffalo. What it was doing there I don't know - no farms, no paddies - but we chased it down and, got a rope around it and led it along to a deserted village where we set up for the night. After supper Rat Kiley went over and stroked its nose.
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