I have never been moved so much as I was while reading Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, a compilation of essays / war stories about his tour of duty in Vietnam.
The hard cover was first published in 1990. At the time, O'Brien says he was a 43-year-old author, a Vietnam veteran, a Harvard graduate school alumnus, and the father of a 9-year-old daughter whom he took back to Vietnam in 1975, twenty years after he served there.
Apparently, MarinerBooks is coming out with a new soft cover edition, and that's the edition I read.
Yellow River, Christie
It's an incredible book. It can be read in one or two sittings, assuming the reader can handle it emotionally. The best chapter by far was his story of deciding whether to report for induction after receiving his draft letter, or fleeing to Canada. That story is absolutely incredible. I wonder if that essay was ever a stand-alone essay in some magazine; it certainly could have been.
The most intriguing chapter was titled "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong." It is so outrageous it can only be true. It would spoil it for everyone if I even wrote what the subject entailed.
Please, please, please -- if you were a male who just missed being called up for Vietnam, please, please read this book. I am about as conservative as one can get when it comes to the US military and I served in the US Air Force for 30 years, but I have a whole new understanding for those who fled to Canada.
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