"The Things They Carried"

"The word war itself has a kind of glazing abstraction to it that conjures up bombs and bullets and so on, whereas my goal is to try to, so much as I can, capture the heart and the stomach and the back of the throat of readers who can lie in bed at night and participate in a story." - Author Tim O'Brien

The quote holds true in this book “The Things They Carried,” because he talks about the experience on a group of soldiers in the Vietnam War. Reading this story will put you right along the lines of the soldiers. It is one of the rare works of recent literature that has helped define Vietnam and the experience of war.

In this News Hour interview, he talks about goals in writing the book and how it relates to his experience fighting in the Vietnam War, and what the younger generation should know about war. Tim O'Brien had to set out to write about for people that were over 25, he wasn't aiming at high school or the college audience. “The Things They Carried” is meant to go above what war is really about and more into the physical objects you carry with you and the memories you brought with it.