Tim O'Brien

My friend Pete Farley recommended The Things they Carried and this book still affects me.

From Writer's Almanac today

It's the birthday of author Tim O'Brien (books by this author), born in Worthington, Minnesota. He graduated from Macalester College in St. Paul and went to Harvard for graduate school. He was drafted to go to the Vietnam War, and he went, even though he was opposed to it. Before he went off to Vietnam, he was spending the day in northern Minnesota and had the chance to cross the border into Canada, but he decided not to. He said later: "I did not want people to think badly of me. My conscience told me to run, but I was ashamed of my conscience, ashamed to be doing the right thing." When he returned from Vietnam, he worked as an intern at The Washington Post. He left journalism after the publication of his book If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973). Almost all of his books deal with the Vietnam War. O'Brien also wrote Going After Cacciato (1978), July, July (2002), and The Things They Carried (1990).

The Things They Carried (1990) is a series of linked short stories about a group of soldiers in Vietnam, including a soldier named Tim O'Brien. The title story is one of the most anthologized short stories in contemporary American literature. It begins: "First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending."

Tim O'Brien said: "Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember but the story."