The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien
233 pages

One sentence summary: A Vietnam War veteran recounts stories of the war, his friends/ platoon members, and the after-effects of the war in a mashup of  fiction and fact.

Official Description: Direct from: Amazon.com (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002TWIVNA/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)

A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.  

The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. 

Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. 

The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

My Opinion:

This book played with my emotions. Since it was a required reading book, I was already aware of the controversy surrounding the book: whether it is fact or fiction. O'Brien counts the book as fiction, but my teacher believed that it was fact because if the government knew about everything that went on then these men would be in a lot of trouble. I do not know what to believe just that this book played with my emotions too many times.

My favorite character was maybe Rat Kiley due to his individual story located in chapter 7. "The Sweetheart of Song Tra Bo".