The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
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"The best of these stories--and none is written with less than the sharp edge of honed vision--are memory and prophecy. These tell us not where we were but where we are, and perhaps where we will be. . . . It is an ultimate, indelible image of war in our time, and in time to come" -- Los Angeles Times "The Things They Carried is as good as any piece of literature can get . . . It is controlled and wild, deep and tough, perceptive and shrewd." --Chicago Sun Times "In prose that combines the sharp, unsentimental rhythms of Hemingway with gentler, more lyrical descriptions, Mr. O'Brien gives the reader a shockingly visceral sense of what it felt like to tramp through a booby-trapped jungle, carrying 20 pounds of supplies, 14 pounds of ammunition, along with radios, machine guns, assault rifles and grenades. . . . With The Things They Carried, Mr. O'Brien has written a vital, important book--a book that matters not only to the reader interested in Vietnam, but to anyone interested in the craft of writing as well." --Michiko Kakutani, New York Times "[B]elongs high on the list of best fiction about any war....crystallizes the Vietnam experience for everyone [and] exposes the nature of all war stories."--New York Times, "Books of the Century" "With The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien adds his second title to the short list of essential fiction about Vietnam. . . . [H]e captures the war's pulsating rhythms and nerve-racking dangers. But he goes much further. By moving beyond the horror of the fighting to examine with sensitivity and insight the nature of courage and fear, by questioning the role that imagination plays in helping to form our memories and our own versions of truth, he places The Things They Carried high up on the list of best fiction about any war." --New York Times Book Review |
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a 2-acre (8,000 m²) U.S. national memorial in Washington D.C. It honors service members of the U.S. armed forces who fought in the Vietnam War, service members who died in service in Vietnam/South East Asia, and those service members who were unaccounted for (missing in action, MIA) during the war.
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Vietnam Veterans of America, Inc. (VVA) is a national non-profit corporation founded in 1978 in the United States that is committed to serving the needs of all veterans. It is funded without any contribution from any branch of government. VVA is the only such organization chartered by the United States Congress and dedicated to Vietnam veterans and their families. The group holds a congressional charter under Title 36 of the United States Code. Its founding principle is "Never again will one generation of veterans abandon another."
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Veterans with service-related health issues received face-to-face assistance from Wounded Warrior Project® (WWP) during a Soldier and Family Assistance Center Semi-Annual Growth Progression Strength (GPS) event at Fort Stewart, Georgia. WWP's Benefits Service team has set an unprecedented record, securing more than $85.4 million in annualized monetary benefits for wounded warriors in fiscal year 2017 alone.
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Tim O'Brien Discusses Writing and the Vietnam War
Big Think Interview with Tim O'Brien
Tim O'Brien Reads "The Things They Carried" in Ken Burns's The Vietnam War
Episode 10: The Weight of Memory (March 1973-Onward)
"Arlington Reads" with Tim O'Brien
"The Great Vietnam War Novel Was Not Written by an American"
by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Thanh Nguyen Discusses His Novel The Sympathizer at the
2015 Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.
War Baby: The Amazing Story of Ocean Vuong, Former Refugee and Prize-Winning Poet
"Aubade with Burning City"
By Ocean Vuong
South Vietnam, April 29, 1975: Armed Forces Radio played Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” as a code to begin Operation Frequent Wind, the ultimate evacuation of American civilians and Vietnamese refugees by helicopter during the fall of Saigon.
Milkflower petals on the street
like pieces of a girl’s dress.
May your days be merry and bright ...
He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips.
Open, he says.
She opens.
Outside, a soldier spits out
his cigarette as footsteps fill the square like stones
fallen from the sky. May
all your Christmases be white
as the traffic guard unstraps his holster.
His hand running the hem
of her white dress. A single candle.
Their shadows: two wicks.
A military truck speeds through the intersection, the sound of children
shrieking inside. A bicycle hurled
through a store window. When the dust rises, a black dog
lies in the road, panting. Its hind legs
crushed into the shine
of a white Christmas.
On the nightstand, a sprig of magnolia expands like a secret heard
for the first time.
The treetops glisten and children listen, the chief of police
facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola.
A palm-sized photo of his father soaking
beside his left ear.
The song moving through the city like a widow.
A white ... A white ... I’m dreaming of a curtain of snow
falling from her shoulders.
Snow crackling against the window. Snow shredded
with gunfire. Red sky.
Snow on the tanks rolling over the city walls.
A helicopter lifting the living just
out of reach.
The city so white it is ready for ink.
The radio saying run run run.
Milkflower petals on a black dog
like pieces of a girl’s dress.
May your days be merry and bright. She is saying
something neither of them can hear. The hotel rocks
beneath them. The bed a field of ice.
Don’t worry, he says, as the first shell flashes.
their faces, my brothers have won the war
and tomorrow ...
The lights go out.
I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming ...
to hear sleigh bells in the snow ...
In the square below: a nun, on fire,
runs silently toward her god —
Open, he says.
She opens.
"DetoNation"
There’s a joke that ends with — huh?
It’s the bomb saying here is your father.
Now here is your father inside
your lungs. Look how lighter
the earth is — afterward.
To even write the word father
is to carve a portion of the day
out of a bomb-bright page.
There’s enough light to drown in
but never enough to enter the bones
& stay. Don’t stay here, he said, my boy
broken by the names of flowers. Don’t cry
anymore. So I ran into the night.
The night: my shadow growing
toward my father.
"Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds"
Instead, let it be the echo to every footstep
drowned out by rain, cripple the air like a name
flung onto a sinking boat, splash the kapok’s bark
through rot & iron of a city trying to forget
the bones beneath its sidewalks, then through
the refugee camp sick with smoke & half-sung
hymns, a shack rusted black & lit with Bà Ngoại’s
last candle, the hogs’ faces we held in our hands
& mistook for brothers, let it enter a room illuminated
with snow, furnished only with laughter, Wonder Bread
& mayonnaise raised to cracked lips as testament
to a triumph no one recalls, let it brush the newborn’s
flushed cheek as he’s lifted in his father’s arms, wreathed
with fishgut & Marlboros, everyone cheering as another
brown gook crumbles under John Wayne’s M16, Vietnam
burning on the screen, let it slide through their ears,
clean, like a promise, before piercing the poster
of Michael Jackson glistening over the couch, into
the supermarket where a Hapa woman is ready
to believe every white man possessing her nose
is her father, may it sing, briefly, inside her mouth,
before laying her down between jars of tomato
& blue boxes of pasta, the deep-red apple rolling
from her palm, then into the prison cell
where her husband sits staring at the moon
until he’s convinced it’s the last wafer
god refused him, let it hit his jaw like a kiss
we’ve forgotten how to give one another, hissing
back to ’68, Ha Long Bay: the sky replaced
with fire, the sky only the dead
look up to, may it reach the grandfather
the pregnant farmgirl in the back of his army jeep,
his blond hair flickering in napalm-blasted wind, let it pin
him down to dust where his future daughters rise,
fingers blistered with salt & Agent Orange, let them
tear open his olive fatigues, clutch that name hanging
from his neck, that name they press to their tongues
to relearn the word live, live, live—but if
for nothing else, let me weave this deathbeam
the way a blind woman stitches a flap of skin back
to her daughter’s ribs. Yes—let me believe I was born
to cock back this rifle, smooth & slick, like a true
Charlie, like the footsteps of ghosts misted through rain
as I lower myself between the sights—& pray
that nothing moves.
