The Things They Carried is one to of the most interesting collection of short stories that I have ever read. Each story is different, though they all share one common theme. They all take place in Vietnam. In the short story “The Things They carried”, the narrator describes the things that different soldiers carried in Vietnam. Odd objects carried by one soldier were bars of soap stolen from a hotel. “Spin” talks about the positive moments in this horrible war. One of the soldiers finds an orphan puppy and raises it himself, feeding it with a plastic spoon and keeping it in a ruck sack. Only to have a fellow soldier strap the small animal to a land mine and detonate the device. “How to Tell a True War Story” gives several examples of the tall tales that soldiers tell to one another in their fox holes. “The Man I Killed” and “Ambushed” are both told from the point of view of a remorseful soldier. In both of these stories the soldier has killed a man and afterward has not been able to deal with the reality of what he has done. The personal accounts of the soldiers lend the book a sort of authenticity that news coverage cannot provide.
I find my self deeply interested by these stories, for I only just began to learn about the Vietnam War during my freshman year of high school. I found it hard to hear about the war from the point of view of the soldiers, for many of them do not want to have to remember what happened then. I think that if the rest of this book is not assigned, then I will finish the book for my own leisure.
