The Things They Carried

Part history, part fiction, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried bridges genres. Composed of a series of sometimes free standing, sometimes interconnected stories, The Things They Carried (Mariner, 2009) is O'Brien's meditation about ordinary soldiers away from home struggling with the incomprehensible. O'Brien uses real place names and inserts himself into his stories as both narrator and character as he describes his comrades in the American 23rd Division. Join Kiowa, Norman Bowker, "Rat" Kiley, Ted Lavender, and O'Brien as we discuss and reflect on memory and truth, lives lost and decisions made under the influence of Vietnam. The book is available in print, and, if you have Audible Books, Bryan Cranston reads the text followed by O'Brien's journal of his 1993 return to Vietnam.