Using the memories of American soldiers and their experiences in the Vietnam War, Tim O’Brien uses The Thing They Carried as a way to alleviate his guilt that has burdened his whole life.
William Tim O’Brien was born in Austin on October 1, 1946 and lives in a small town in Minnesota. He was against the war, but reported for service and served in the US Army for two years (1968 – 1970) during Vietnam War. After returning to the United States, O’Brien began his career as a novelist with some works such as Going After Cacciato (1978), In The Lake Of The Woods (1994), etc and especially The Things They Carried which is considered as A Work of Fiction that skillfully described the experiences of American soldiers in Vietnam (Chenes 123, 124). The Things They Carried won the 1990 Chicago Tribune Heartland Award and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize (Chenes 4). Each chapter is written as separate short story “puts readers in the shoe of an American foot soldier tramping through the jungles of Vietnam” (Chenes 127). His stories come from his own experiences in “the relationship between fact and fiction, the creation of what he called “happeningness”, the way language is incommensurate with reality form shapes belief” (A Conversation With Tim O’Brien 1). Talking about history, people should know about it with honesty and unprejudiced judgment. Therefore, knowing what people think about the Vietnam War through both sides: the war under American eyes and Vietnamese eyes in order to understand what really happened in the past. Why did America fight the Vietnam War? Basically to hold the line against the spread of world Communism. America paid for the war the French fought against Communist Vietnam as a part of the Truman Doctrine (1947) “to protect free peoples…” and because of the fear that if Viet Nam were to become communist, it would produce a "domino effect" in which other countries such as Laos, Burma, India, Cambodia, Thailand in the area would also fall to...