the things they carried book review

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The things they carried, common sense media reviewers.

Vet's stunning, devastating Vietnam War stories; a classic.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this book.

Though the chronology and context of the Vietnam W

"A true war story is never moral." Story

Author Tim O'Brien skewers the traditional nar

The book is filled with gruesome depictions of fir

Lots of swearing and offensive language. Every cur

Some references to smoking "dope," getti

Parents need to know that The Things They Carried is a gut-wrenching combination of novel, story collection, and memoir partly based on the real experiences of acclaimed author and war veteran Tim O'Brien during the Vietnam War. Focusing on the physical horror and emotional destructiveness of warfare, the…

Educational Value

Though the chronology and context of the Vietnam War is touched on only sporadically, the book is a revealing window into an often misunderstood place and time in 20th-century history.

Positive Messages

"A true war story is never moral." Story-truth can be more important than truth-truth, and therefore storytelling is an effective means of conveying the nuances of reality, particularly when considering the horrors of war.

Positive Role Models

Author Tim O'Brien skewers the traditional narratives of soldiers (including himself) as heroes, wars as righteous struggles, and combatants as courageous or honorable. Yet as narrator, his insights and compassion are moving and thought-provoking.

Violence & Scariness

The book is filled with gruesome depictions of firefights, mortar sieges, unexpected explosions, and general death and destruction. There are descriptions of disfigured corpses and details of the visceral feelings associated with killing and dying. For instance, there's a chapter devoted exclusively to telling the story of a man the storyteller killed with a hand grenade and the bloody aftermath.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Lots of swearing and offensive language. Every curse word you can imagine is used, from "motherf--ker" to "c--ksucker" to "p---y," as well as racial slurs such as "gook" and "redskin" and sexist slang such as "cooze" and "bitch."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Some references to smoking "dope," getting drunk, and taking tranquilizers recreationally.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Things They Carried is a gut-wrenching combination of novel, story collection, and memoir partly based on the real experiences of acclaimed author and war veteran Tim O'Brien during the Vietnam War. Focusing on the physical horror and emotional destructiveness of warfare, the book grapples with heavy questions about mortality, trauma, honor, cowardice, and the loss of humanity in desperate situations. There are gruesome depictions of firefights, mortar sieges, unexpected explosions, and general death and destruction, including descriptions of disfigured corpses and details of the visceral feelings associated with killing and dying. One chapter tells the story of a man the storyteller killed with a hand grenade and the bloody aftermath. Lots of swearing (including "bitch," "motherf--ker," and "c--ksucker") and racial slurs ("gook," "redskin"). Considered a classic of literature about the Vietnam War and a meditation on war itself, The Things They Carried was written for adults, but many teens read it.

Where to Read

Community reviews.

• Parents say (3)
• Kids say (3)

Based on 3 parent reviews

I read this in high school, it was the most memorable book of all

Not appropriate for 15 or 16 year olds, what's the story.

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED follows an infantry unit wandering through the jungles of Vietnam in the late 1960s at the height of the American intervention. The semi-autobiographical, nonlinear storytelling of award-winning author Tim O'Brien darts from anecdote to anecdote, leading readers through misty riverbanks along the Song Tra Bong, to napalm-charred villages, to fields of manure and piles of corpses, exposing the grim and graphic realities of war. Tracing the emotional lives of several soldiers in his unit, O'Brien draws parallels between the memories and objects the men bring with them to the war, and what they wind up bringing back with them when they leave, if they're so lucky to return in one piece. In searching for meaning and understanding through recollection and retelling, O'Brien concludes, "In the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen."

Is It Any Good?

Profound, heartbreaking, thought-provoking war literature at its finest, this novel isn't content to simply explore the emotional lives of soldiers. Instead, The Things We Carried begs the reader to question the very nature of life, death, and survival. Not only does the book engage with the invisible scars of battle and the PTSD that results from combat, but it also alludes to the destructive psychology of nationalism and imperialism and the folly of concepts such as valor, honor, and truth. In a passage early on, the narrator declares, "In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true."

The writing is blunt but vivid, deep but relatable, concise but somehow expansive. O'Brien's writings (including the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone and the novel Going After Cacciato ) are considered essential to the Vietnam War canon for a reason. And The Things They Carried is a perfect example of how literature can add to our understanding of history when it engages authentically with the people who lived through the events being discussed.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the concept of story-truth vs. truth-truth in The Things They Carried . Why are embellishments sometimes important to telling a story more fully? What did you learn about the Vietnam War that you didn't know before?

What do you think of the level of violence and swearing in The Things They Carried ? Does it seem key to creating a realistic portrayal of war?

How can studying the accounts of real soldiers inform our opinions about the human cost of war? How did the experiences of soldiers in Vietnam and their subsequent portrayal in entertainment and the media shape public perceptions of that war and the military in general?

Book Details

• Author : Tim O'Brien
• Genre : Historical Fiction
• Topics : Friendship , History
• Book type : Fiction
• Publisher : Mariner Books
• Publication date : March 28, 1990
• Number of pages : 233
• Available on : Paperback, Nook, Audiobook (unabridged), Hardback, iBooks, Kindle
• Last updated : September 27, 2016

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THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

by Tim O’Brien ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 1990

It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.

Pub Date: March 28, 1990

ISBN: 0618706410

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990

SHORT STORIES

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More by Tim O’Brien

BOOK REVIEW

by Tim O’Brien

More About This Book

SEEN & HEARD

IN THE NEWS

SIGHTSEEING

by Rattawut Lapcharoensap ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2005

A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.

Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.

In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

A PERMANENT MEMBER OF THE FAMILY

by Russell Banks ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2013

Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.

One of America’s great novelists ( Lost Memory of Skin,  2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.

Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.

Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013

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by Russell Banks

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The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien | Parent Guide & Review

This post may contain affiliate links. If you click on a link and decide to buy, I make a small commission for referring you. This helps me make a few cents for doing what I love.

Note: This post about The Things They Carried was written while I was filled with a lot of passion and wasn’t written from an objective perspective. After reading through it again, I know there are spots where I let my feelings speak more than they ought. I’m not changing what I’ve previously written, however, I added four sections towards the end based on a comment I received after someone read this very article.

I would love to hear more of your comments and thoughts about this book. Please either leave a comment at the end of the post or send me a message, and I will respond.

Disclosure: I am an Amazon affiliate. If you click on a link and decide to buy something, I will get pennies for referring you. This in no way changes the price for you. It just helps me make a bit for doing what I love.

High School Horrors

The first time I read The Things They Carried, I was seventeen and a junior in high school. It was for an American Literature class that I was able to earn college credit for. That year I learned about American history in my Advanced Placement United States History class and the cultural shifts in my American Literature class. I remember that class being really cool to see history from a facts and numbers point of view and to jump into the cultural aspect by reading a book.

When we started the unit about the Vietnam War, this is the book we started in my English class. I hated reading this book and any other books assigned for class. None of the books were relevant to me and I didn’t want to read any of the books. If the only exposure I had to books was from my high school English classes, I wouldn’t have read a book after high school. I didn’t like reading any of the books they assigned. Occasionally I liked dissecting the book afterward and some of the activities but always hated the actual reading part. I love fantasy or books set in the medieval age with knights and strong women. 

I Hated The Things They Carried at Seventeen

The Things They Carried is not about a young woman running away to become a knight. Nor is it about mythical beasts or magic. Instead, it is about a young man’s experiences fighting a war in Vietnam. It is full of tales of walking through rice patties hoping you don’t step on a land mine. There are accounts of men fantasizing about what to do when the war is over. It is a work of fiction, but it reads like a memoir and a loose collection of short stories and disjointed events. The Things They Carried is not a cohesive novel with an arc, and it doesn’t read like a typical story. That being said, I hate it.

Yep, I’m going to say that again and embrace it. I hate this book. Not very many books make me say that about very many of them, but this one stuck with me. I remember it having terrible language, lots of graphic scenes from the war, and not being my cup of tea. 

Having Second Thoughts

Later in college, this book got brought up a couple of times. I decided that maybe The Things They Carried couldn’t be nearly as bad I remembered it. Right? So maybe, now with my higher learning and appreciation for literature, I would like The Things They Carried. Maybe, I would even rant and rave about it, like my high school teacher used to.

I forgot about my desire to read the book for a time until I joined a couple of Facebook groups dedicated to books. A couple of people were talking it up and saying how good it was. Also, it was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize which is like a Nobel Prize for books! So I decided that I probably really should read it again. But, I put it off yet again because of terrible memories and having plenty of other books to fill my time. 

I Finally Read it Again… Well, started.

So fast-forward to a few months ago. I received a text from my mom asking which book my younger sisters should read in their high school literature class. Guess what… The Things They Carried was on that list. I obviously did not recommend it, but I also checked it out from the library. I wanted to actually reread it and have a better reason than “I hated it in high school.”

I’ve had this book for about two months and only read 70 pages out of 260. I would read a little bit. Then put it on pause and read about 5 other books before talking myself into reading a few more pages. At this point, I’ve decided to give up reading it and stop torturing myself with a book I don’t like and probably never will.

Reasons Why I Still Hate The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried is even worse than I remembered it from High School! In the first 70 pages, the f-word occurs seven times plus fifteen other uses of profanity. Yes, students hear language like this on a daily basis walking the halls of a high school, but it is also against the rules and can get individuals in detention. If you could get in trouble for reading your school book out loud in the hallways, it probably shouldn’t be taught at school either. 

This book has a lot of very graphic scenes in it as well. Things I don’t want in my head as an adult, let alone when I was seventeen. In the first 70 pages, there are multiple graphic deaths from a gunshot wound and a land mine. These death scenes had very detailed descriptions of the individuals, and it isn’t pretty. Plus, some very gruesome descriptions of working at a meatpacking plant as a “de-clotter,” an individual who sprays aged pig corpses with a high-powered hose to remove blood clots. This sounds terrible, but the way the meat plant was described is more graphic and gag-inducing than the war scenes.

Another thing that turned me off of this book was the adult content. None of it is explicit, however, there are plenty of innuendos. There are a few short sentences scattered throughout about soldiers on leave spending the weekend in bed. Or in another instance, they are stuck out in the middle of nowhere, wishing they were spending time in bed. In either case, I don’t want to know about it. Especially, as a seventeen-year-old. 

A Semi-Redeeming Quote to Show Off the Writing Style

“They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment. Tim o’brien, The Things They Carried

Why Teachers Still Teach It

Now that I’m a little older, and know more about literature, I appreciate how beautiful the writing is. I really enjoyed some of the parts of the book, but it was the writing style than the content. Stylistically it is beautiful! There are many themes and motifs woven through. Plus, the whole vignette and jumping around on the timeline is done very well. It may not be the typical timeline type of book, but the pieces he places where he does is a work of art. That is the only redeeming thing about this book, and why a teacher might consider teaching this to a class of high schoolers. This book was written for adults, not teens, and it isn’t appropriate for mature teenagers.

Better Alternatives to The Things They Carried

There are many other beautifully written books without bad content. Three books come to mind. None of these are focused on the Vietnam War, but they are similar stylistically to The Things They Carried. These books are To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, and Gilead also by Marilynne Robinson. 

Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 and a National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. So essentially it is a really good book. There is slim to no language. I can’t remember any adult content and slim to no graphic content. Instead, it is about spiritual battles and the connections that happen between generations. Some teachers may feel like they are opening up a whole new can of worms by introducing religion into the mix. Honestly, I prefer a book with a little religion any day over a gritty war scene where someone blows up a puppy for fun. (Yes, that does happen in The Things They Carried. I couldn’t believe it when I read it either.)

Additional Thoughts about The Things They Carried

An individual recently reached out to me with the opinion that The Things They Carried should be required reading for any voter prior to casting their first vote. This individual has been in the middle of a war zone multiple times. They made some very compelling points about how many of the high schoolers reading this book about war will be in the middle of a war zone very soon. They also wanted teenagers and adults to understand the “physical and emotional catastrophe there’re in for” when those in power call for “boots on the ground.”

The individual made a very compelling argument. These high schoolers will be voting in the next year or two for the politicians making these decisions, and voters should be informed of the consequences. They need to know what kind of situation they are asking their friends, family, and other peers to go into, and what those loved ones will face.

Fiction vs Reality

When I read this as a sixteen-year-old I didn’t make that connection between the world of a book and reality. That may have been the fault of my teacher or my own naivety. I think books are a great place to explore hard things and can lead to great discussions and self-reflection about difficult topics like war.

However, I worry about the harm of such an exposure too and I feel like this is a personal choice that each parent and child have to come to together. Reading a book about war has a similar effect on the brain as physically experiencing such things. Obviously, it isn’t the exact same but the brain cannot tell the difference between something happening in a book and something happening in reality.

The Price of Understanding

Do I want them to understand how terrible war is? Yes. I want them to understand what it means to be at war. These future voters should understand what those weapons are capable of and the consequences of their votes. They need to understand how those votes impact the lives of millions of people. It impacts those who are currently serving, those who have in the past, and those who didn’t come home.

However, that understanding comes with a price. I want the mental and emotional scarring, and maturity that comes with learning, to be a choice and not something thrust upon the reader or required. That sounds naive and childish, but we are talking about children who are turning into adults.

I believe that every experience we go through, every book read, every YouTube video watched, irrevocably changes us into someone new. We are different because of the new information and new experiences, even if those are fictional experiences. I give my recommendations and insights to allow each of you to make a more informed decision about the books you read. Some of the books I’ve read have given me invisible scarring. Is it the same as actually going to war and coming home changed? No, but I want each of you to have the choices that I didn’t.

My Recommendations

So long story extremely short, I do not recommend this book to anyone under the age of eighteen. I do not think this book should be taught in a high school period mainly because it was not written for a teenage audience. Even if it is a college-level course, there are better books to introduce literature to teens without the language and violence found in this book. However, I also understand the reason why teachers and educators teach this and the impact they hope it to have. I don’t think this should be required reading, and if taught, should be with parental approval.

If you liked this book you may also enjoy How Dare the Sun Rise: Memoirs of a War Child . It is the true story of Sandra Uwiringiyimana who grew up in the middle of a war zone prior to migrating to the United States. Another you might like is The Good Soldiers by Dave Finkel . I have not personally read the second book but I think it would be a good fit.

A Note to Parents and Teachers

Parents and teachers of high school students, if you are having a hard time finding age-appropriate books that are engaging, please reach out to me. I took a class at BYU specifically about teen and young adult literature. We discussed and how to choose books to read in a group setting. The books we read had hard topics in them but the books came at them in an age-appropriate way because they were written for teens. I can think of ten books off the top of my head that would be better to use and still have hard conversations.

I’ll try to cover more about this topic in a later post but reach out to me with questions about books, lesson plans, discussion questions, or if you want to share your experiences with The Things They Carried. Until next time!

Happy Reading!

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I am a high school teacher and teach The Things They Carried every year to English IV. Now most of these students are eighteen or will turn eighteen over the course of their senior year. But I read this book because so many students come to me and HATE reading. There has to be a reason for them to read, unfortunately, beyond simply it’s an assignment. Yes, there is language. Yes, there is gore. But they love reading it. It captures their interests. It makes them excited for just a moment to come to English. So after the close readings are finished and the literary analysis is done, I am confident they leave my classroom with one book read AND enjoyed. I find that far outweighs the language. I don’t think the merit comes from just being a Pulitzer, so your suggested replacements simply don’t work for all students. Just like The Things They Carried does not work for all.

Thank you for your comment! I am a big believer that not every book is right for every person. I love that you are trying to inspire the love of reading in your students! I read this book when I was 16 and it was the most mature book that I was exposed to. I think it would have been different by the time I was a senior. What books would you suggest as a replacement for The Things They Carried?

The point of the book is to educate future citizens on why war is bad. It doesn’t matter if they have fun reading it

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

Analysis of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 26, 2021

In the short story cycle The Things They Carried (1990), Tim O’Brien cemented his reputation as one of the most powerful chroniclers of the Vietnam War, joining the conversation alongside Philip Caputo ( A Rumor of War ), Michael Herr ( Dispatches ), David Halberstam ( The Best and the Brightest ), and the poet Bruce Weigl ( Song of Napalm ), among others. Comprising 22 pieces—some little more than vignettes, others more “traditional” stories—the collection details the experiences of the soldier Tim O’Brien, who returns to his native Minnesota after a tour of duty in Vietnam. In his subsequent role as author, O’Brien records his recollections in a false memoir of sorts as a way of reconstructing the war’s elusive “truth.” O’Brien’s goal in The Things They Carried, he tells Michael Coffey, “was to write something utterly convincing but without any rules as to what’s real and what’s made up. I forced myself to try to invent a new form. I had never invented form before” (60).

“In the Field” follows Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and his platoon of 17 remaining men as they search a Vietnamese muck field for Kiowa, a lost comrade. Cross, who figures prominently in several of the book’s pieces—including the eponymous “The Things They Carried,” the collection’s most anthologized story—feels tremendous guilt over Kiowa’s death, not the least because the previous evening, just before an ambush, Cross refused to disobey orders and to move his men to higher, and therefore safer, ground. Kiowa, buried when a fellow soldier inadvertently gave away the platoon’s position to the enemy, was a popular soldier. Out of respect for their fallen comrade, the men dutifully wade through waist-deep sewage searching for his remains; they sustain themselves with a morbid sense of humor, making light of the situation in order to quell their fear of random, sudden death at the hands of a faceless enemy. Cross quickly realizes that he is ill suited for the military, having been shipped to Vietnam after joining the officer training corps in college only to be with friends and to collect a few college credits. “[Cross] did not care one way or the other about the war,” O’Brien intones, “and he had no desire to command, and even after all these months in the bush, all the days and nights, even then he did not know enough to keep his men out of a shit field” (168).

Tim O’Brien/The Austin Chronicle

War is a great leveler in O’Brien’s fiction. In the field where Cross and his men search for Kiowa, “The filth seemed to erase identities, transforming the men into identical copies of a single soldier, which was exactly how Jimmy Cross had been trained to treat them, as interchangeable units of command” (163). The young lieutenant, however, suspends his humanity only with great difficulty. Ruminating on Kiowa’s death, he imagines writing a letter to the soldier’s father before deciding that “no apologies were necessary, because in fact it was one of those freak things, and the war was full of freaks, and nothing could ever change it anyway” (176). Cross’s rationalization may absolve him (at least in part) of his guilt over Kiowa’s death, though it is also a tacit admission of his lack of control over the war’s daily life-and-death struggles. Cross’s desire to organize the details of Kiowa’s death in his own mind is an extension of O’Brien’s attempt in The Things They Carried to construct a coherent narrative that finds the essential truth of war (a notion that the author confirms in the ironically titled “How to Tell a True War Story” which acts as an interpretive key to his recollections).

Upon the discovery of Kiowa’s body, the men properly mourn the loss of their fellow soldier, though “they also felt a kind of giddiness, a secret joy, because they were alive, and because even the rain was preferable to being sucked under a shit field, and because it was all a matter of luck and happenstance” (175). Cross, yearning for war’s end, imagines himself on a golf course in his New Jersey hometown, free of the burden of leading men to their deaths. O’Brien examines the onus of responsibility often, and in the related story “Field Trip,” which details the author’s return to Vietnam two decades later to the field where Kiowa died, O’Brien finds a world barely recognizable as the one he left behind. “The field remains, but in a form much different from what O’Brien remembers, smaller now, and full of light,” Patrick A. Smith writes of O’Brien’s visit. “The air is soundless, the ghosts are missing, and the farmers who now tend the field go back to work after stealing a curious glance in his direction. The war is absent, except in O’Brien’s memory” (107). But it is memory, O’Brien makes clear, that supersedes experience and haunts soldiers long after the shooting has stopped.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Coffey, Michael. “Tim O’Brien: Inventing a New Form Helps the Author Talk about War, Memory, and Storytelling.” Publishers Weekly, 16 February 1990, pp. 60–61. O’Brien, Tim. “In the Field.” In The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Smith, Patrick A. Tim O’Brien: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005.

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History Books » American History » Vietnam War

The things they carried, by tim o’ brien, 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...

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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...

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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

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The best and the brightest by david halberstam, the things they carried by tim o’ brien, the war poems of wilfred owen by wilfred owen, ed. john stallworthy, dispatches by michael herr, small wars by an-my lê, strategies of containment by john gaddis.

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Book review: the things they carried.

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Book Review

The things they carried.

• Tim O'Brien

Readability Age Range

• Mariner Books, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Chicago TribuneHeartland Prize, 1990; National Book Critics Circle Award, Finalist, 1990; Pulitzer Prize Finalist, 1991; Pritzker Military Library Literature Award, 2013

Year Published

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien has been reviewed by Focus on the Family’s marriage and parenting magazine .

Plot Summary

According to the author, this nonchronological collection of fictitious scenes is an accurate account of the experiences of many American soldiers in Vietnam.

The men of Alpha Company carry many things — weapons, armor, ammunition, food, letters, good-luck charms and an assortment of personal items including New Testaments, pantyhose and severed thumbs. But their emotional baggage is heavier than their physical load.

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross blames himself for the death of Ted Lavender, who was shot while relieving himself. Azar straps Ted’s puppy to an anti-personnel mine and pulls the trigger. Lee Strunk and Dave Jensen make a pact to kill the other if one is badly wounded. When a rigged mortar round takes off Lee’s leg, Dave doesn’t kill him, but Lee dies anyway.

Curt Lemon steps on a booby-trapped 105 round while using a smoke grenade to play catch with his best friend, Mitchell Sanders. Tim O’Brien, who had the opportunity but is unwilling to cross the border into Canada when he was drafted, picks pieces of Curt out of a tree. Later, Mitchell repeatedly shoots a baby buffalo — to injure, not to kill. Horribly maimed, it dies a slow and painful death.

Both Jimmy Cross and Norman Bowker blame themselves for the death of Kiowa. Jimmy shouldn’t have told his men to camp over the village latrine. Norman would have been able to pull Kiowa out of the muck if the smell of excrement hadn’t overpowered him. Norman hangs himself three years after the war, wracked with guilt and unable to find meaning in a life that doesn’t include fighting. Tim kills a young Vietnamese recruit with a hand grenade. It isn’t in self-defense. It isn’t in battle; he’s simply afraid. And now he can’t forget.

The men fantasize about shooting off their fingers or toes so the chopper will pick them up and take them away from the war, but they’re too afraid to be cowards — except for Rat Kiley, who can’t shake the images of internal organs and severed body parts that haunt him on the night-long marches. He shoots himself in the foot and is transferred to Japan.

After being shot twice, Tim is relieved from active duty. When Alpha Company briefly visits the base where he is stationed, he realizes that he’s no longer one of them. He wrestles with feelings of anger and plots revenge against a medic who provided him with substandard care, but when the war ends, Tim is one of the lucky ones. He resumes his education and finds a way to release his emotions through his writing. He takes his daughter Kathleen to Vietnam and revisits old battle sites. In Vietnam, the men use words to distance themselves from reality. Now, Tim uses words to bring reality closer. He learns that by writing stories, he can make the dead live again. He can put faces on corpses that he was once too scared to look at. He can rewrite his past the way he wishes it happened or is still happening — and maybe save himself in the process.

Christian Beliefs

Kiowa is a devout Baptist. He carries an illustrated New Testament at all times and uses it as a pillow. During battle, men make hasty promises to God. Later, they joke about their near escapes. Henry Dobbins remembers counting bricks when he attended church as a child. In his teens, he considers becoming a minister because he’d enjoy the perks (potlucks and a free car and house). He doesn’t feel particularly religious, but he would like to wear a robe and be nice to people. Norman Bowker, who later hangs himself, worries about the existence of God.

Other Belief Systems

A soldier carries a pilfered statuette of Buddha. Tim makes a vague reference to the gods. When he is trying to decide whether to defect across the river to Canada, Tim hallucinates about people in his life — past, present and future. At night, soldiers believe in ghosts. When the platoon uses a pagoda as a temporary base, monks deliver water and watermelons to the soldiers. They also help them clean their guns.

Authority Roles

Jimmy Cross, the platoon leader, burns pictures and letters from the woman he loves in an effort to be more alert and daydream less. He feels that his inattentiveness and poor decision-making caused Kiowa’s and Ted’s deaths. A soldier wishes his father wasn’t so worried about him winning medals. Elroy Berdahl, a resort owner near the Canadian border, doesn’t say much but is an influential force in Tim’s life. He gives Tim the chance to escape to Canada, but when Tim is too embarrassed to defect, he reacts with perfect nonchalance.

Profanity & Violence

Frequent profanity and coarse words include: a–, a–hole, b–tard, b–ch, d–n , the f-word, h—, p—, p—y, cooze, gook, pecker, poontang , and s— . Racial slurs and other coarse language are also used. The name of Jesus is misused. The language the soldiers use to distance themselves from reality can also be offensive. They refer to a napalmed Viet Cong nurse as a crispy critter and a dead baby as a crunchie munchie .

Men are shot, blown up and drowned. The moment of their death is often described in detail. Mutilated and dismembered corpses are described in detail. Alpha Company burns the village where Ted Lavender was shot. A soldier kicks a boy’s corpse and cuts off the corpse’s thumb. Soldiers shoot and deliberately torture animals. A soldier uses an anti-personnel mine to blow up a puppy. A girl makes a necklace out of dried human tongues. Soldiers deliberately wound themselves, shooting off their fingers and toes. Soldiers make a pact to kill each other if one of them is seriously wounded. A soldier deliberately breaks his own nose with his pistol. Without provocation, Tim kills a Vietnamese recruit.

Sexual Content

Jimmy Cross wonders if Martha is a virgin. He remembers kissing her goodnight. He fantasizes about tying her to a bed and touching her knee. He also fantasizes about sleeping inside her lungs, breathing her blood and being buried together in a cave-in with her tongue in his mouth. Jimmy loves Martha, but she never marries and becomes a Lutheran missionary.

Soldiers carry condoms. A soldier wears his girlfriend’s pantyhose wrapped around his neck as a good-luck charm. A soldier suggests bringing several Vietnamese women to their base to use as prostitutes.

After a soldier defects, his life is described as being about “nookie and new angles.” A soldier’s girlfriend swims in her underwear. A soldier thinks his girlfriend is sleeping around, but actually she’s on night patrol with the Green Berets. Azar pretends to dance erotically. A soldier jokes that Jane Fonda boosts his “morale.” On Halloween, Curt Lemon goes “trick-or-treating” naked in a Vietnamese village.

Discussion Topics

Additional comments.

Subjective truth: Tim blurs the lines between fact and fiction, stating that some stories that actually happened are less true than stories that didn’t actually happen.

Substance use: Soldiers smoke dope and cigarettes, pop tranquilizers and drink alcohol.

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Writing Near the Lake

Book Review: The Things They Carried by Tom O’Brien

[ I’ve read many good books in the past few months. I’m reviewing some of them in a series of blog posts. So, if you’re looking for a summer read, maybe you’ll find a book to enjoy in one of my book review posts. ]

Why did I read this book?

I’m a writer, and I’m always trying to improve my craft. So, I take classes about writing, I read about writing, and I listen to other writers talk about their writing. Many, many times I’ve heard writers and writing teachers reference The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien . But I’d never read it, so I kept promising myself that I’d get a copy and read O’Brien’s collection of short stories. It seemed that to be a short story writer but to not have read The Things They Carried would be like training to be a surgeon, but skipping the class on suturing.

Then a few weeks ago, I walked into a bookstore and The Things They Carried was on display. It was destiny. I bought the book and carried it home with me. O’Brien’s book was triaged to the top of my to-be-read pile of books, and I began reading it that night.

What’s this book about?

The Things They Carried is a collection of related short stories with recurring characters set during the Vietnam War, but some of the stories occur before and after the narrator’s time in Vietnam. These are the stories of young men who go to a war in a hot, humid jungle, so unlike any place they grew up; who don’t understand what they’re fighting for; who fight against what they often can’t see; who watch friends die horrible deaths; who die horrible deaths themselves. These are the stories of soldiers who survive, sometimes broken in body but always broken in spirit to some degree, with some of them permanently alienated from their former lives. The Things They Carried is an unvarnished war story without heroes and romanticism.

What makes this book memorable?

O’Brien’s beautiful, but haunting prose gives life to the torrid heat, claustrophobia, and disorientation soldiers faced in the jungles, swamps, rice paddies, and mountains of Vietnam. His prose gives life to the emotions of the soldiers: their fear of dying, their uneasy boredom, their numbness, their guilt over killing and their guilt over surviving. His beautiful but haunting prose helps readers through the horrific events that happen to the soldiers in his stories. And the horrific events he writes about are an integral part of the stories. It sounds like a paradox, but without O’Brien’s beautiful prose and story-telling skills, it would be difficult to digest the heartbreaking stories of the American soldiers in the Vietnam War; a war, which killed over 58,000 Americans and between two and three million North and South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, and left countless survivors wounded and emotionally destroyed.

As a writer I will read O’Brien’s book again. I have to because the first time I read it, I was caught up in the characters and their stories, important stories that have so much to say about the human cost of war. The next time I will read the stories as a writer, paying attention to O’Brien’s writing techniques, hoping to better understand what makes his stories so powerful.

[To read excerpts or listen to a complete interview of Tim O’Brien from February 2021, click here: Fresh Air NPR .]

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5 thoughts on “ book review: the things they carried by tom o’brien ”.

That book was assigned in one of my first writing classes about twenty years ago. A masterpiece. Thanks for refreshing my memory!

Like Liked by 1 person

I used to teach the short story. Lists; repetition; sentence length.

Many classes/workshops I have attended in the past usually referred to this book for one reason or the other. I read it years ago and after reading your blog, think I will pull it out for another fresh eye read. Thank you!

I plan to reread it again in a couple of months.

Thank you for the compelling review. I will read it now, too. I do not know the feelings of soldiers like the writing you describe by this author.

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The Things They Carried : Book summary and reviews of The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

Summary | Reading Guide | Discuss | Reviews | More Information | More Books

The Things They Carried

by Tim O'Brien

Critics' Opinion:

Readers' rating:

Published Jun 1990 233 pages Genre: Short Stories Publication Information

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About this book

• Reading Guide

Book Summary

A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.

The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O'Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. Taught everywhere - from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing - it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• In the title story, soldiers carry things both tangible and intangible.  Which do you think were heavier? Which items spoke most powerfully to you?  Did any surprise you? What do you think specific items might reveal about the individuals carrying them and the experience of going to war? What do you carry around with you every day, materially and emotionally? If you had to go to war, what might you take with you?
• In what ways do you feel a soldier's experience of war is different today than it was during the Vietnam era?
• Although The Things The y Carried is a work of fiction, why do you think that the author chose to disguise the book as memoir? What impact do you think this choice had on you as a reader? How do you think...

You can see the full discussion here . This discussion will contain spoilers! Some of the recent comments posted about The Things They Carried: According to O'Brien, what responsibilities does—or should—the storyteller bear? Do you agree with him? I think the storytellers responsibility, is to engage the reader. If that includes adding details that make the story more interesting, then go ahead and add them, but I think the storyteller must also be honest and let the reader know that there ... - beckys Do you consider the narrator(s) in the book reliable? Do you think anyone's point of view is omitted from the book, and if so, what might we infer from their absence? Even though the book is listed as fiction, I felt there had to be a basis in fact. If the author didn't "live" events, it seems to me that he most certainly was told about them, either while he was in Vietnam or after he returned home, either ... - BuffaloGirl Does there seem to be a clear sense of what is right and what is wrong throughout the book? No there wasn't..that was one of the big problems of the Vietnam War is that the idea you were raised with of what is right, wasnt what you were told to do when you were at war. Such a conflict of ideas and total discourse with the inherent urge to... - beckys Following O'Brien's instructions in "How to Tell a War Story", can we say whether O'Brien's own stories are "true war stories"? Yes they are true war stories. Perhaps not factual. - normar How do the stories in this collection compare to other "war stories" you have read? Why do you think O'Brien says that the stories he tells are love stories and not war stories? It’s been a very long time since I read this but remember how much it affected me. I was still reeling from all of the reports about the Viet Nam that was going on at that time. - sandrah

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Media Reviews

Reader reviews.

"The best of these stories...tell us not where we were but where we are, and perhaps where we will be...It is an ultimate, indelible image of war in our time, and in time to come" - Los Angeles Times " The Things They Carried is as good as any piece of literature can get ... It is controlled and wild, deep and tough, perceptive and shrewd." - Chicago Sun Times "With The Things They Carried , Mr. O'Brien has written a vital, important book--a book that matters not only to the reader interested in Vietnam, but to anyone interested in the craft of writing as well." - New York Times, "Books of the Century" "By moving beyond the horror of the fighting to examine with sensitivity and insight the nature of courage and fear, by questioning the role that imagination plays in helping to form our memories and our own versions of truth, he places The Things They Carried high up on the list of best fiction about any war." - New York Times Book Review "Tim O'Brien is the best American writer of his generation." - San Francisco Examiner "The integrity of a novel and the immediacy of an autobiography ... O'Brien's absorbing narrative moves in circles; events are recalled and retold again and again, giving us a deep sense of the fluidity of truth and the dance of memory." - The New Yorker "Rendered with an evocative, quiet precision, not equaled in the imaginative literature of the American war in Vietnam...O'Brien has it just right." - Washington Post "Powerful ... Composed in the same lean, vigorous style as his earlier books, The Things They Carried adds up to a captivating account of the experiences of an infantry company in Vietnam... . Evocative and haunting, the raw force of confession."- Wall Street Journal "O'Brien has written a book so searing and immediate you can almost hear the choppers in the background... The Things They Carried leaves third-degree burns. Between its rhythmic brilliance and its exquisite rendering of memory...this is prose headed for the nerve center of what was Vietnam."--The Boston Globe "Simply marvelous ... A striking sequence of stories that twist and turn and bounce off each other...O'Brien has invented a tone of voice precisely suited to this war...Wars seldom produce good short stories, but two or three of these seem as good as any short stories written about any war...Immensely affecting." - Newsweek "Consummate artistry ... A strongly unified book, a series of glimpses, through different facets, of a single, mysterious, deadly stone ... O'Brien blends diverse incidents, voices, and genres, indelibly rendering the nightmarish impact of the Vietnam experience."- Philadelphia Inquirer "O'Brien has brought us another remarkable piece of work ... The stories have a specificity of observed physical detail that makes them seem a model of the realist's art"- Miami Herald "O'Brien's stunning new book of linked stories, The Things They Carried , is about the power of the imagination...Nobody else can make me feel, as his three Vietnam books have, what I imagine to have been the reality of that war."- USA Today "I've got to make you read this book... In a world filled too often with numbness, or shifting values, these stories shine in a strange and opposite direction, moving against the flow, illuminating life's wonder, life's tenuousness, life's importance."- Dallas Morning News "O'Brien succeeds as well as any writer in conveying the free-fall sensation of fear and the surrealism of combat." - Time "Throughout, it is incredibly ordinary, human stuff-that's why this book is extra-ordinary... . Each story resonates with its predecessors, yet stands alone. The soft blurs with the hard. The gore and terror of Vietnam jungle warfare accumulate into an enormous mass." - Houston Chronicle "Just by imagining stories that never happened, and embroidering upon some that did, O'Brien can bring it all back. He can feel the terror and the sorrow and the crazy, jagged laughter. He can bring the dead back to life. And bring back the dreaming, too." - Entertainment Weekly "His characters and his situations are unique and ring true to the point of tears. His prose is simply magnificent... . Unforgettable ."- Minneapolis Star Tribune "A powerful yet lyrical work of fiction." - The Associated Press "O'Brien's new master work. .. . Go out and get this book and read it. Read it slowly, and let O'Brien's masterful storytelling and his eloquent philosophizing about the nature of war wash over you... . The Things They Carried is a major work of literary imagination." - The Veteran "O'Brien's meditations--on war and memory, on darkness and light--suffuse the entire work with a kind of poetic form, making for a highly original, fully realized novel... . Beautifully honest ... The book is persuasive in its desperate hope that stories can save us." - Publishers Weekly "The prose ranges from staccato soldierly thoughts to raw depictions of violent death to intense personal ruminations by the author that don't appear to be fictional at all. Just when you thought there was nothing left to say about the Vietnam experience ... there's plenty." - Booklist "Brilliant... O'Brien again shows his literary stuff... . An acutely painful reading experience, this collection should be read as a book and not a mere collection of stories. Not since Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five has the American soldier been portrayed with such poignance and sincerity." - Library Journal

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Tim O'Brien Author Biography

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Tim O'Brien was born in Austin, Minnesota October 1, 1946. When he was ten, his family, including a younger sister and brother, moved to Worthington, also in southern Minnesota. O'Brien earned his BA in 1968 in Political Science from Macalester College, where he was student body president. That same year he was drafted into the United States Army and was sent to Vietnam, where he served from 1969 to 1970 in 3rd Platoon, Company A, 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry Regiment. Upon completing his tour of duty O'Brien went to graduate school at Harvard University, and afterward received an internship at the Washington Post. O' Brien is the author of a critically acclaimed collection of short stories, The Things They Carried . He is also known for his work, Going After Cacciato , that won ...

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The Things They Carried

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“O’Brien has written a vital, important book–a book that matters not only to the reader interested in Vietnam, but to anyone interested in the craft of writing as well.”–Michiko Kakutani, New York Times A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. Taught everywhere–from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing–it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. The Things They Carried won France’s prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

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The Things They Carried Paperback – October 13, 2009

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• Print length 233 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Mariner Books Classics
• Publication date October 13, 2009
• Reading age 14 years and up
• Dimensions 5.31 x 0.62 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 0618706410
• ISBN-13 978-0618706419
• Lexile measure 880L
• See all details

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TIM O’BRIEN received the National Book Award for Going After Cacciato . Among his other books are The Things They Carried, Pulitzer Finalist and a New York Times Book of the Century, and In the Lake of the Woods , winner of the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. He was awarded the Pritzker Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military writing.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The things they carried, houghton mifflin harcourt, chapter one.

Excerpted from The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien Copyright © 1990 by Tim O'Brien. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books Classics (October 13, 2009)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 233 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0618706410
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0618706419
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 14 years and up
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 880L
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.2 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 0.62 x 8 inches
• #28 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
• #38 in War Fiction (Books)
• #112 in Classic Literature & Fiction

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About the author

Tim o'brien.

TIM O'BRIEN received the 1979 National Book Award in fiction for Going After Cacciato. His other works include the acclaimed novels The Things They Carried and July, July. In the Lake of the Woods received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was named the best novel of 1994 by Time. O'Brien lives in Austin, Texas.

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Book Review: The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien horrifically recalls Tim’s time during war, in what he calls “A true war story that isn't real”. This book recreates the experiences O’Brien went through during wartime, and is written in a very grotesque manner. The story jumps around from timeline to timeline, in a way that a lot of the time you aren't sure what perspective you’re reading from. While written very well, O’Brien has a habit of making every character seem like a horrific person and puts himself on kind of a metaphorical pedestal, in what seems to be an attempt to reconcile with the guilt he faced from the atrocities committed by him and his platoon. I would definitely recommend this book to others, despite its faults, but I believe the most important thing to know going into this book is that the events described are so grotesque they seem like made up fantasies or true stories that have been modified to seem worse than they actually are, which is part of O’Briens intention of telling the story the way he remembers it happening, not the way that it actually happened.

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By Robert Pinsky

• Nov. 4, 2007

In 2003, when Gen. Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, was making the case to the United Nations Security Council that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction, Elizabeth D. Samet, in a literature class for first-year students at West Point, was teaching Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby the Scrivener,” with its central character who stubbornly, enigmatically, declines to do as he is told. The syllabus for that week also presented the students with Ambrose Bierce’s “One Kind of Officer,” in which young Captain Ransome, with (in Samet’s words) an “aggrieved literalness,” continues firing on his own side, in stubborn, rebellious, mad, destructive and self-destructive obedience to orders he knows are wrong.

To her great credit, Samet does not draw easy conclusions in “Soldier’s Heart.” By writing a thoughtful, attentive, stereotype-breaking book about her 10 years as a civilian teacher of literature at the Military Academy, she offers a significant perspective on the crucial social and political force of honor: a principle of behavior at the intersection of duty and imagination.

Honor is a reality: people have been known to live by it and die for it. As Samet points out, it has been invoked as a reason to continue sending troops to Iraq. It has also led some of her students, former students and colleagues to question the nature and conduct of that war. Normally, honor and loyalty re-enforce each other; in bad times, they can come suddenly into conflict.

Like love and art, honor comes from the imagination as a force that determines the fate of individuals and nations. And like love and art, honor has also attracted a thick enveloping tonnage of baloney, an encrustation of lies and exploitations. The lies and exploitations, in turn, have attracted debunking counterforces: the acids of doubt and the harsh illumination of exposure. A literature teacher at the academy deals with the imaginative forces of lofty aspiration and earthly truth-telling in an especially germane, intensified community — all the more so in a time of war.

In the historical rhythm of that dynamic, the great English war poetry of Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen responded to the Great War by exposing their culture’s delusory, poetic idea of war as chivalric, noble or glamorous. A few decades ago in our own culture, Joseph Heller in “Catch-22” invented a comic medium — infectious and disinfectant — that rectified the tight-lipped, heroic efficiency and unreal, upstanding know-how of World War II movies.

But these works of imagination are not skeptical about honor itself — on the contrary: otherwise, there would be no meaning to Heller’s rage at the dishonorable military entrepreneur Milo Minderbinder, or Owen’s rage at propaganda that made trench warfare resemble chivalric combat. The target is unreality, in particular falsehood about war, valor, wounds and death. If those generations resisted the idea that war is noble or glamorous, it seems possible that our graphic, exciting video games will require works of art correcting the idea that war is simply fun. Falsehood, in one form or another, has its appeal. Truth is honorable.

Samet’s version of that principle, as she applies it to her students, should be heeded by journalists and politicians:

“Our national fondness for celebrating the physical heroism of soldiers — the apparent readiness with which they sacrifice their lives to larger causes — eclipses the far less romantic displays of moral and intellectual fortitude that also distinguish so many of them. In turning them all into heroes, we have lost a sense of the individuality they also fight to preserve.”

This straightforward observation by a teacher belongs next to a passage — about the art of fiction, all fiction, though a historical anger couches it in terms of war writing — that she quotes from Tim O’Brien’s book “The Things They Carried”:

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest proper models of human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.”

O’Brien echoes the concluding lines of Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” with its title from Horace and its description of a soldier who was so exhausted he failed to get his gas mask on in time:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, — My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

It is far from incongruous that this poem, too, is part of the West Point curriculum. The academy concerns itself deeply with truth and excellence. Profoundly concerned with history, as it must be, the institution includes Owen and O’Brien on its reading list along with the “Iliad” and Thucydides.

As to the academy’s own history, Samet notes that when Adams and Jefferson authorized its founding, they were “deeply suspicious of the military’s apparent affinity for kings.” Every American should be grateful to those two founders for their determination that the academy should instill “a sense of civic responsibility.” As with George Washington’s achievement in creating a presidency that was civic, not regal, West Point needed to establish an inspiring, romantic ideal of self-sacrifice and loyalty, with an object other than the fatal, antidemocratic glamour of royalty.

Consistent with that need to give the nation’s officers an emotional alternative to “King and Country,” the culture of West Point, richly and elaborately ritualized, takes for its most revered, almost cultic heroes not embodiments of success and probity like Washington, Eisenhower and Bradley. They are certainly respected, Samet convincingly declares — but “all the love goes to the arrogantly defiant MacArthur, the renegade Patton and above all to the man the historian Bruce Catton calls ‘the courtly Lee.’ ” That is a disturbing constellation — not everyone’s ideal defenders of the Constitution or democracy. But in another way the emotional attachment to these rebellious leaders resembles the uncensored curriculum; the rigorous demands of engineering studies, the extensive, arcane, elaborate customs and dialect, even the emphasis on poetry and history — all these contribute to the intricate, difficult and noble goal of humanely educated officers, an elite ready to die for a democracy. (Samet includes the failures of that effort. Cheating, misogyny, rape and other forms of brutality have played a role at West Point, though possibly no more than at Harvard or Berkeley.)

What effect does the volunteer Army have on the academy and its mission? Even more urgently, in the era of the Iraq war, the Guantánamo prison and the “rendition” of suspects away from due process, what about West Point’s mission of ethical and moral leadership? (At the academy is the Center for the Professional Military Ethic.) Samet describes a general, lecturing at West Point, who shows a slide with the headlines “My Lai,” “Tigris Bridge,” “Pat Tillman,” “Haditha” and “Abu Ghraib.” The point of his lecture — Samet describes him as “outraged” — is the responsibility of officers to speak out against negligence, abuse and criminal conduct: bound by their honor.

West Point — unlike many campuses where the English department has dwindled away from such notions — adheres to the idea that the general’s project has some relation to the student of Samet’s who reads Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Idea of Order at Key West” while on active duty in the Iraqi desert. The title “Soldier’s Heart” refers to an obsolete term ascribing actual cardiac disorder to what was later known as shell shock, then battle fatigue and then post-traumatic stress disorder. We depend on the literal and figurative hearts of Elizabeth Samet’s students, young men and women prepared to die or be maimed for the United States. Her job is to offer them a context for valor. In one of the texts she teaches, a surviving Warsaw Ghetto fighter says of a Polish police officer who risked his life to help Jews, “He was a human being — and that wasn’t a simple thing in those days.”

SOLDIER’S HEART

Peace and war at west point..

By Elizabeth D. Samet.

259 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $23.

Robert Pinsky’s new book of poems is “Gulf Music.”

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