Book Review: The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

Yes, it’s another Tim O’Brien book and yes, it’s another short story collection or is it a novel? The lines blur, and maybe that’s the point. Why? Well, my library had a copy in surprisingly good condition, and it seemed like the right time to revisit Vietnam at least through O’Brien’s strange, shifting lens. I don’t own many of his books, partly because the urge to read them comes in waves, and partly because you can only carry so much war in your head at one time. Let’s take a look at The Things They Carried, a book that has been haunting literature classes and personal bookshelves since the 1990s.

The opening story, “The Things They Carried,” is a deceptively simple list of objects, but each one feels heavier than the last. The soldiers carry canteens, photographs, chewing gum but also guilt, fear, and longing. O’Brien turns inventory into biography, showing us how material weight mirrors emotional weight. There’s no single moment of action here, just the slow realization that the heaviest burdens aren’t visible at all.

Another story that stood out was “On the Rainy River,” in which the narrator who may or may not be O’Brien himself drives north toward the Canadian border after being drafted. It’s a story of indecision, shame, and the strange ways we measure courage. He never actually crosses, but the pull of both choices lingers. The tension isn’t in battle; it’s in the quiet, sick feeling of knowing your life is about to change forever. It’s also the rare war story that admits bravery doesn’t always look like what we think it does sometimes it’s just staying, when leaving might have been easier.

From: USA Today

“How to Tell a True War Story” might be the most famous piece in the collection, and with good reason. It opens by telling us that in a true war story, nothing is ever absolutely true. Facts are slippery, details shift, and emotion becomes the only reliable compass. By the end, you’re left wondering if truth is something you can pin down at all or if the act of telling changes it beyond recognition. O’Brien is more interested in how stories feel than in what actually happened.

Another striking entry is “Speaking of Courage,” in which a soldier named Norman Bowker drives aimlessly around a lake back home. The war is over, but the silence around him is unbearable. O’Brien captures that hollow space where survival and living don’t quite overlap. There’s no heroism here, just a man circling the water, unable to step back onto solid ground in his own life. The story pairs beautifully with “Notes,” which reveals the behind-the-scenes truth of how “Speaking of Courage” came to be blurring reality and invention even further.

What ties these stories together isn’t chronology or a neat arc it’s the lingering, unsettled feeling they leave. O’Brien makes moral ambiguity the center of gravity, showing us how war erodes the tidy boundaries between bravery and cowardice, truth and invention, memory and myth. He invites us to hold contradictions without trying to resolve them. My favourite story has to be “On the Rainy River,” precisely because nothing explodes, no one dies, and yet the whole weight of the war seems to hang on one unmade decision.

All in all, The Things They Carried is neither a straightforward war memoir nor a purely fictional exercise. It’s a reminder that some burdens are never fully put down, even decades later. It won’t give you the satisfaction of a clean moral takeaway but maybe that’s why it stays lodged in your mind long after the last page. Like the soldiers themselves, you’ll find you’re still carrying pieces of it around, without quite meaning to. And perhaps that’s the truest thing a war story can do leave you unsure of what was real, but certain of what it made you feel.