The Things They Carried is a tour de force of a book, about war and love and truth and the power of stories. O'Brien chews over his experiences with an infantry platoon in Vietnam from the distance of 20 years, writing about his own moral weakness, the deaths of his friends, and carrying the weight of your life up and down those Indochina hills.

O'Brien chews over war stories, and the difference between the "truth" and his own memories of what happened, if there's a moral lesson to be extracted from the random deaths at the hands of boobytraps, snipers, and American firepower that defined his life, and his career as an author.

I wish I had the words to review this book properly. But I don't. O'Brien is and always will be the first author of the war.