The Things They Carried (Flamingo): An award-winning history and politics memoir of the Vietnam War

Good book, good condition.

Tim O'brien can really write. It's refreshing after reading so many poorly written books to come across a writer like this. He uses language skilfully to evoke experiences of war and to give a kind of poetic meaning, or poetic void of meaning to the scenes he witnessed. The first chapter is really brilliant and many of the others are also very good. However, I can't help but also feel there is a gap between an approach like this and the reality of the war itself. Time and again films and books will tell you that Vietnam was hell and pointless and seek to immerse you in the experience of it. Yet I have never once come across storytelling which honestly tries to consider the alternative argument. I mean, certainly it was a horrible experience and I don't want to disrespect that, but there were also reasons for the fight, however muddied they became or were perceived to be. Reading a book like this I get a sense of the writer's absolute self involvement, and wonder if it wasn't so much the war that was different to those preceding it, but the post-war generation who fought it who had lost their moral certainties. Certainly worth reading and appreciating for O'brien's talent with the English language and the experience of Vietnam he captures.

A moving, thoughtful, personal, lyrical and wonderful read. You can't compete with someone who was actually there, actually experienced it, really saw the events and then the impact on coming home. I know it is fact mixing with fiction but this is still a top quality war story. For anyone interested in the Vietnam War or combat in general, I would highly recommend this - up there with All Quiet on the Western Front and Farewell to Arms!

Tim O Brien, a Vietnam vet, has written a book of short stories about how a young man came into that war, various stories about himself and company members within the war, and what happened, to him, and to others, later - sometimes a whole generation later. However, that is only one way of describing this book. Which is not only a superb anti-war piece, without polemic, but a kind of meditation on that - or any - war, its brutality, but also the nobility, not, absolutely not, of war itself, or of the abstractions with which the old marshall the young to make the ultimate sacrifice, but the nobility of what might have been. The nobility of the potential of those sacrificed lives had they not been sent to die and to kill. That potential was sacrificed whether the young came back to live and breathe amongst us, holding their damage, or whether parts of them were returned in body bags. This is a book profoundly against war. But above all, O Brien is a writer, so because the profound experience of that war is what has shaped him, this is the subject of his writing. He writes, as he tells us, a story, which is a distillation of the truth. But the story, which he tells us `is not a game. It's a form' is there because `I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth' `What stories can do, I guess, is make things present' This is a story of compassion towards the young men who were made to do things young men should not have to do. It is full of patchwork surprises. Certain horrific images become recycled, and looked at in different ways. Rather than linear progression, and not even in `peeling off the layers of an onion' form, what O Brien does is to look from different angles, different viewpoints, to look immediately, to look through memory, to unpick images and put them together again in slightly changed context. It is a beautiful piece of revelation, but make no mistake, will never be able to be used by those who tell lies to young men about the nobility of what they are about to do. `A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue,nor suggest morals of proper human behaviour, 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.' There is absolutely no sentimentality within these pages, but there is beauty in the unflinching facing of horror.

Reading the rave reviews I decided to read this book, and yes, it was good...very good in places. The writing is excellent, but there were times I lost interest and couldn't be bothered to read the last few pages, but just skimmed them. I much preferred 'Matterhorn' about this war, which gripped me throughout. Perhaps if I hadn't already read that, I would have liked this more.

When I commenced this 'Nam War story, given the unusual style of writing, I was far from sure I would stick with the author. I once worked in VietNam, way over 25 years ago, so many of the countryside descriptions came alive to me. Apart from the passages, or chapters, where Mr O'Brien talks about himself, the characters are fictional but the tales told were based on facts or events elsewhere in 'Nam over the whole period of that war. By the time I got half-way through his book, he had pulled me in,and having read a few stories set in other wars, and also in the same conflict, this one above all, brought home to me the horrors and the stresses and strains on extraordinary "ordinary" soldiers. The author almost became a draft dodger and even that tale left me thinking, as in, a lot. His phrase, too scared to be a coward, has stayed with me. This is an intellectual look at war and the stories which evolve from these wars, but this too was told for any human to understand. For once, the book reviews written and re-printed on the book's opening pages were absolutely accurate. This was one fine work. Thank you Mr O'Brien. Bigger thanks to all who served and continue to serve.

Tim O'Neil had me enthralled from the start. This is my era and this book is outstanding.

Mandatory reading if you want to make sense of what is going on in our part of the world. Beautiful prose.

Un merveilleux ouvrage entre le roman, les nouvelles et la poésie. Sur la guerre du Viet Nam, certes mais qui pourrait décrire l'âme de tous ceux qui, un jour, se retrouvent une arme à la main, jeunes et ne sachant pas pourquoi ils sont là. Plus que tout, un chef d'oeuvre de la littérature mondiale.

Un libro dove forma e contenuto raggiungono una simbiosi davvero straordinaria; metamoderno, nella sua decostruzione del medium del "racconto di guerra," e al contempo nel suo utilizzo cosciente e puro. Lo stile è diretto, sommario, nell'asprezza distaccata della narrazione; la certezza espressiva nel racconto rende evidente più che mai l'ambiguità di tutto ciò che è la guerra, quella guerra, il coraggio, la paura, la fraternità dei soldati.

I haven't read this yet but it looks very interesting.