The Weight it Carries: Tim O'Brien as a New Classics Author

When Tim O'Brien fictionally recounts the young American soldier's exploits in the Vietnam War, one is hardly bored by the historical context. O'Brien's short story, "The Things They Carried," which was later used as the first chapter of his novel bearing the namesake, explores a brief snippet of the lives of boyhood soldiers stationed in Vietnam by examining the objects they carried with them. Beyond M-16's and radios, beyond M&M's and marijuana, beyond bandages and bellyaches, these men carried their guilt, fear, innocence, youth. O'Brien highlights the "things" carried by each man in sordid detail, humanizing each soldier with raw yet casual verse. O'Brien allows the reader to become as jaded by war as the soldiers have learned to be, and in this, his work transcends that of historical or antiquated literature, and becomes eternally and incredibly humanistic.

Despite the fact that O'Brien revisited the Vietnam War some twenty years after the event when authoring his short story, the material is hardly reflective. The reader is placed in the 1960's, lugging "humps" on the frontlines of battle in a supposedly God-forsaken country. O'Brien gives the readers companions, brothers, and sons in Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, Kiowa, and Ted Lavender; he allows them to learn their deep, dark secrets, their loves, wants, needs, and concerns. By forging these fictitious characters through real events, readers born decades after the era find themselves in the thick of the generation.