Preliminary thoughts Memory can be highly unreliable. Our remembered truths may be completely different from the remembered truths of those who grew up in the very same house. Humor is the writer’s armor against hard emotions – and therefore, in the case of memoir, one more distortion of the truth.

Themes Physical and emotional burdens Fear of shame as motivation Subjection of truth to storytelling

Storytelling Fact and fiction is blurred: The objective truth of a war story is less important than the act of telling the story itself. Technical facts around any one event are less important than the subjective truth of what the war meant to the soldiers and how it changed them. Notes adapted from Jill Collela,Wiley Publishing Inc. New York 2001

The book’s different storytellers are designed to relate the “truth of experience.” O’Brien: Stories contain immense power; tellers and listeners confront past together and share otherwise unknowable experiences. By telling stories, O'Brien is able to gain some distance from the harrowing experience he had in Vietnam. But while stories are a coping mechanism, they are also blueprints for communicating in life.

First published in Esquire in 1986, “The Things They Carried” became the lead story in the book Viking published in The book received widespread critical acclaim and established Tim O’Brien, the writer, as a major figure in Vietnam literature.

Born October 2, 1946 Raised in small town of Worthington, Minnesota Attended Macalester College in St. Paul, where he took part in the antiwar movement and participated in war protests and peace vigils He graduated with a degree in political science and planned to go to graduate school to study government when he was drafted

Resisting the impulse to defect to Canada, O’Brien joined the infantry While he received the Purple Heart for wounds he received, he always despised the war and everything about it

After the war, while pursuing graduate studies at Harvard, O’Brien wrote his first book Since 1973, O’Brien has been a full-time writer The Things They Carried, the collection of interrelated stories we are about to read, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1993

The major historical context for O’Brien’s book is the war in Vietnam. The war was fought between North Vietnam, and its Communist allies, and the South Vietnamese, supported by the United States and other anti-Communist nations The reasons the U.S. became involved in the complex are complex, but a major impetus was the acceptance of the “domino theory”: the belief that the North Vietnamese would spread Communism throughout Southeast Asia and shift the balance of power during the Cold War.

Intensive U.S. involvement began in 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson sent U.S. Marines to defend Danang airfield By the start of 1968, nearly half a million American troops were in Vietnam Important Milestones: Tet offensive (1968); “Vietnamization” (1969); Mylai Massacre The war ended in 1975 with the capture of Saigon by the North Vietnamese

All young men were required to register for the selective service and face being drafted into the armed forces to serve in Vietnam. While some young men of wealth and privilege escaped the draft by receiving deferments, other objectors who were less fortunate fled to Canada or openly defied the draft and faced criminal charges.

The anti-war movement intensified at home from Protests became more frequent on college campuses, and police presence increased in response to the threat of violence. Important Milestones: Assassinations of MLK and RFK (1968); Riots at DNC in Chicago; Uproar over Mylai Disaster; Kent State (1970)

Battle: 47,434 Non-Battle: 10,786 Total In-Theatre: 58, million - Total military deaths for all countries involved 1 million - Total civilian deaths Recovered and identified remains, since January 1973, of Americans killed The total of American servicemen listed as POW/MIA at the end of the war is 2,646 and as of April ,642 are still unaccounted for.

April 30, South Vietnam surrenders to North Vietnam as North Vietnamese troops enter Saigon, ENDING the Vietnam conflict The war was estimated to cost about $200 billion. Anti-war opinion increased in the U.S. from the mid-1960s on with rallies, teach-ins, and other forms of demonstration. North Vietnamese guerrilla forces used the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a network of jungle paths and mountain trails, to send supplies and troops into South Vietnam. The bombing of North Vietnam surpassed the total tonnage of bombs dropped on Germany, Italy, and Japan in World War II. Today, Vietnam is a communist state.

The Things They Carried recounts the experiences of Lieutenant Jimmy Cross’s infantry unit before, during, and after the Vietnam War.

Love & Shame – How do feelings of love and shame propel the soldiers’ actions? The Individual and the Collective: How do the soldiers appear as individuals? How do they sacrifice their individual identities to become part of a group? Truth: In what ways is truth subjective? What is the difference between “story truth” and “happening truth”? Morality: How can morality exist within the context of war? Solitude & Isolation: How can solitude and isolation intensify feelings of despair?

Point of View and Narration: In the title story, the narrator is unidentified, but in other stories he is a “fictional character named Tim O’Brien.” Realism: Method of accurately describing the details, general attitude, and philosophy of ordinary life that favors confronting the realities of life instead of escaping or idealizing them. Hyper-realism: Lingering over details smaller than an ordinary observer could perceive (Example: the buzz of a mosquito) Magical realism: Weaving fantastic or imaginary elements into a narrative that otherwise has all the features of an objective realistic account. (Example: the sun sucks a soldier up into a tree)

Questions over the truthfulness of the book linger. O’Brien’s response in Contemporary Literature: “What I’m saying is that even with that nonfiction-sound element in the story, everything in the story is fiction, beginning to end. To classify different elements of the story as fact or fiction seems to me artificial. Literature should be looked at not for its literal truths but for its emotional qualities. What matters in literature, I think, are the pretty simple things – whether it moves me or not, whether it feels true. The actual literal truth should be superfluous.”