The Things They Carried is a book about war, written by Tim O'Brien. The book consists of several war stories, which all tie into one, making the book a first hand account of the Vietnam war. The book goes into graphic detail about the war, the men and friends of the soldiers of the Vietnam war who died. The book also goes into graphic detail about what went through the soldiers mind, and how the war took a major toll on most of them.
This book was rather gruesome, and it disgusted me in parts. Some of the things they did were completely wrong, and they didn't need to be done. I think that they got so sick of the war that their emotions were overcoming them, causing them to do things. Like in one part of the book, a soldier goes crazy, and he kills a baby water buffalo, which was not necessary at all. I don't agree with these things. There are other things they could've done to express their anger. In the book, Tim O'Brien uses many example to express how much the war took a toll on the soldiers. For example, when Kiowa slips into the "sewage" field, his fellow soldier who tried to save him, Norman Bowker, feels responsible for the death of Kiowa. After he gets home form the war the memories of Vietnam haunt him and he ends up hanging himself.
In the book it gives similar facts to the casulties of the war such as the chart below:
Type of Casualty
Number of Records
Hostile, Killed in Action 38,502
Hostile, Died of Wounds 5,264
Hostile, Died While Missing 3,524
Hostile, Died While Captured 116
Non-Hostile, Died from Other Causes 7,458
Non-Hostile, Died of Illness or Injury 1,978
Non-Hostile, Died While Missing 1,351
Total
58,193
Several of the soldiers returning from the war, committed suicide. They had the war flashbacks when they got home, and couldn't deal with it. Some of the statistics say that there were over 150,000 suicides from the vietnam war. I don't know if this is true, it seems like kind of a high number of suicide rates. They suffered from something called post traumatic stress disorder.
I really liked this book. It gave a lot of good history facts, and the way it's written doesn't bore you to death. The end of the book is sad, because several of the soldiers have committed suicide and throughout the book, they seem fine. But it lets you know when they got home how much of their lives were spent going through the horrible flashbacks of the war, and the things that they did.
This book is an eye opener of what really happened during the Vietnam war, because it was sort of a first hand account of it. This book is really graphic though, and the things they did were completely uneeded.
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