Who is ignorant in the things they carried

He attended Macalester College and served as an infantryman in the Vietnam War from to He completed graduate studies at Harvard University and worked briefly as a reporter at The Washington Post before launching his literary career with the publication of If I Die in a Combat Zone in This straightforward memoir about the despair and futility of being a soldier established him as a leading writer of the Vietnam generation.

All are in part based on his war experiences, but most are novels, rather than memoirs. The Things They Carried , published in , stretches both categories. It is neither quite classifiable as fiction nor non-fiction, neither quite a novel nor a collection of short stories. In the work itself, O'Brien distinguishes between "story-truth" and "happening-truth. O'Brien argues that the latter is more powerful. Which Tim O'Brien is featured in his stories?

It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. You stare out at tracer rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons.

You crouch in ambush as a cool, impassive moon rises over the nighttime paddies. It fills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity if absolute moral indifference — a powerful, implacable beauty — and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly.

There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Behind me, in the jeep, my daughter Kathleen sat waiting with a government interpreter, and now and then I could hear the two of them talking in soft voices.

They were already fast friends. Neither of them, I think, understood what all this was about, why I insisted that we search out this spot. It had been a hard two-hour ride from Quang Ngai City, bumpy dirt roads and a hot August sun, ending up at an empty field on the edge of nowhere.

The war was as remote to her as cavemen and dinosaurs. How can you. Popular pages: The Things They Carried. Take a Study Break.