Recommendations from our site
“It’s short stories about Vietnam written by a guy who was there as a very young man. And it really is a book about what it is like to be a regular ordinary American teenager and suddenly find yourself neck-deep in a jungle fighting a war that you neither understand nor care about. Killing people that are so different from you with no opportunity to understand or appreciate their culture. He presents you with a gang of teenagers carrying 60 or 70 pounds of equipment in 40-plus centigrade temperatures with malaria, fighting insects, fighting monsoons, fighting conscience, fighting political ideology, fighting religious ideas and their own code of ethics and morals even more than they are fighting what they have been told is the common enemy. And I think the way that he does that with such humanity and such heart is outstanding. And again it is a book I have read probably three times.” Read more...
The best books on Human Dramas
R J Ellory, Novelist
“But when O’Brien wrote The Things They Carried he came down to absolute real brass tacks. It was no longer surreal, it was like here’s a list of what a grunt carries, an infantry soldier…” Read more...
Karl Marlantes, Military Historians & Veteran
“The book is about the Vietnam War, but really it’s about how you remember trauma, and how you deal with it.” Read more...
The Things They Carried is a semi-fictional collection of short stories about an American platoon in the Vietnam War.
Narrator: Bryan Cranston
Length: 7 hours and 47 minutes
