Veterans and The Things They Carried
On Memory, Literature, and the Quiet Work of Carrying What Remains
I have always found Veterans Day difficult to approach in writing. There is a reverence that feels required, a tone that must be held: solemn but not heavy, grateful but not sentimental. I am not a veteran, and that distance matters. My relationship to this day is one of reflection rather than remembrance. I write and teach history, which means I spend my life with stories of the past but always at arm’s length from the experiences themselves. What I know of war is not lived, but read and retold through the fragile medium of language and friendship. Perhaps that is why I return each year to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. It remains one of the most precise works ever written about the gravity of memory.
The opening story begins with the language of inventory. O’Brien lists what the men carried: “P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent.”1 The list feels mechanical at first, almost bureaucratic. Yet with each repetition the tone changes. The physical weight begins to reveal its emotional counterpart. “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing. These were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity.”2 The phrase “emotional baggage” has been flattened by overuse in modern speech, but O’Brien restores its original force. He gives weight to the intangible. Every item becomes a unit of feeling. The story is not about logistics or equipment but the unbearable arithmetic of survival.
That passage also reveals one of O’Brien’s most enduring ideas: that the things we carry are never fully our own. The soldiers carry objects, yes, but also expectations, reputations, and fears. “They carried their reputations. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained.”3 The sentence dismantles the easy binaries of courage and fear. What he calls “the common secret” turns bravery into something fragile and shared. Heroism becomes an act sustained by shame as much as by strength.
That tension becomes clearest in “On the Rainy River,” one of the book’s most haunting stories. O’Brien describes the moment before he leaves for Vietnam, when he considers escaping to Canada. He stands on the edge of the river, paralyzed between two futures. “I would go to the war,” he writes, “I would kill and maybe die because I was embarrassed not to.”4 The sentence feels plain, but its moral weight is enormous. It strips away the rhetoric of duty and exposes something rawer. Shame becomes a form of destiny.
As someone who teaches the Vietnam War, I have found this story indispensable. O’Brien’s internal conflict captures the cultural divide that surrounded the war itself. It was a war without clear front lines, fought in the midst of national uncertainty, where moral purpose became as contested as military success. His reluctance and fear are not individual failures; they are reflections of a generation’s confusion. When I discuss the shifting public consciousness of Vietnam, O’Brien’s words give that uncertainty human shape. He embodies the paradox of a war that demanded bravery without clarity, obedience without conviction.
O’Brien’s refusal to separate truth from fiction is another reason the book endures. “A thing may happen and be a total lie,” he writes. “Another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.”5 For anyone who teaches history, that line is a quiet provocation. The Vietnam War is one of the most documented conflicts in American history, and yet it resists simple narrative. There are after-action reports, journalistic accounts, film reels, and government briefings, but none of them convey what O’Brien calls “the weight of a memory.” His ‘story-truth’ and ‘happening-truth’ remind me that history is not just a record of what occurred, but an ongoing negotiation over what it meant.
Each year when I teach the war, I use O’Brien’s words to help students understand that the Vietnam conflict did not end in 1975. Its moral and cultural meanings continue to shift. It lives on in literature, film, and silence. O’Brien’s fiction, though technically invented, carries the emotional accuracy that official histories often cannot reach. He gives us access to what the documents omit: the interior cost of endurance.
When O’Brien writes, “They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it,” he transforms metaphor into theology.6 The sky is everywhere and weightless, yet in his sentence it becomes the heaviest burden of all. The soldiers carry not just weapons and gear but the invisible air of history itself. Every veteran carries a version of that sky. It follows them into every quiet moment that comes after the noise.
In “Speaking of Courage,” Norman Bowker circles a lake in his hometown, driving aimlessly in his father’s Chevy. “It was a quiet Sunday afternoon, mid-July, and the town seemed the same as ever. He drove slowly, feeling safe inside his father’s big Chevy. He was home.”7 The repetition of “he was home” does not comfort; it isolates. The world that should recognize him no longer can. O’Brien captures the silence that often follows service, the dissonance between the world one left and the one that no longer fits upon return. It is not the war that kills Bowker, but the absence of a listener.
Reading O’Brien each November alters how I understand remembrance. Veterans Day can drift into performance. The ceremonies, the polite gratitude, the flags, all of it necessary, all of it incomplete. Literature interrupts that routine. O’Brien’s stories make remembrance intimate. They insist that we see the veteran not as a symbol but as a person still negotiating the weight of memory.
“Stories can save us,” he writes near the book’s end.8 The line is simple but immense. Stories cannot undo loss, yet they can create a space where loss can breathe. They allow what is too heavy to be carried alone to be shared. When O’Brien tells the story of his childhood friend Linda, who died young, he extends the book beyond the war. “I keep writing about her because I still see her,” he says. “Her face, her eyes. She’s not the embodied Linda, but she’s real.”9 Through storytelling, O’Brien makes the dead visible again. He transforms narrative into a form of care.
Teaching the Vietnam War, I return to O’Brien not for chronology but for empathy. His stories remind me that truth develops over time, that understanding war is not an act of classification but of patience. Every decade reshapes how the conflict is remembered. O’Brien’s book teaches that memory itself is historical, that each generation must learn how to carry it anew.
Veterans Day reminds us that remembering is an active verb. It is not simply a pause; it is a practice. Reading The Things They Carried is one such practice. O’Brien honors veterans not through heroics but through honesty. His sentences make remembrance tangible. They teach us to hold the past with both hands, to acknowledge the weight without pretending to lift it entirely.
The Things They Carried endures because it keeps history alive in language rather than stone. Veterans carry the history that the rest of us inherit. Writers like O’Brien make it speak and our task is to listen, read carefully, and remember so we carry what remains.
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, p. 2.
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, p. 21.
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, p. 22.
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, p. 49.
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, p. 80.
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, p. 33.
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, p. 141.
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, p. 213.
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, p. 230.
Well said, Ethan, you are a credit to the profession. Bursting with pride in Henniker tonight.