Before reading The Things They Carried, I hadn't read any novels related to war and have seen maybe one movie that involves war in its plot; those kinds of books and movies were just never my thing. My ideas and opinions about war have come soley from what I've learned in history classes over the years. The Vietnam War in particular is always addressed due to the difference between it and the other wars fought by our country in the last couple hundred years. I knew that there were many casualties and that we didn't win or lose that war. The Things They Carried didn't help me learn much about the war as a whole, and its effect on our nation, but it really made me see what a soliders in Vietnam faced. This book probably is different than many other books written about war because the themes focused on weren't the battles, the military, and even the dying aspects of the war; it went much deeper.
The things I got most out of the book was the emotion that seeped from the pages of every different story told and what it means to find truth in within those stories. This war was not glory; the country went into the war blindly with vague goals.This caused so much non-legit killing of innocent citizens no matter the sex or age. It drove people insane. It made them lose sight of themselves and of life in general. The book captured the emotional response of Vietnam wonderfully. The other thing I liked most about the book is the idea of what truth in stories was. I really think Rat Kiley was right saying that sensation dictates truth of a story instead of the other way around, the way that most see it.
