“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”*This novel strikes me with the contradictory yet complimentary natures of simplicity and complexity. Trudging, slogging, tearing though the countryside and battlefields of the Vietnam War, it all comes down to those things that they carried. The hundreds of ammunition rounds, the machine guns, assault rifles and grenades, the mortars and shells, the radios and maps, these are all humped through the stretching hot days along with the rations and water, the extra pairs of socks, the illustrated bibles and love letters, the trinkets from home, and, so often, each other - through an environment alive with menace, both manmade and natural. They carried the awareness of the limitless danger inherent in a war that no one understood, most of all, themselves. They carried the very human ability to die for a flimsy and misguided cause simply because they were afraid not to.
And those who survived, those who walked away, continue to carry it all within the intricate folds and glimmering visions of memories. A map, a photograph, the rising cadence of a voice, may bring certain scenes back - events that truly happened or those flashing moments existing on the border of near-truth and myth. These men remain haunted.
Written in the guise of interconnected short stories, Mr. O'Brien blends quiet intimacy with the rumbling thunder of the universal. No one goes untouched within War's reach, and those who hiked the steaming jungles and fields of that far-off country carry their scars of knowledge - of those terrible things that one man can do to another.
*excerpt from novel
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