This modern classic and New York Times best seller was a finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award and has become a staple of American classrooms. Hailed by The New York Times as "a marvel of storytelling", The Things They Carried’s portrayal of the boots-on-the-ground experience of soldiers in the Vietnam War is a landmark in war writing. Now, three-time Emmy Award winner Bryan Cranston, star of the hit TV series Breaking Bad, delivers an electrifying performance that walks the book’s hallucinatory line between reality and fiction and highlights the emotional power of the spoken word.

The soldiers in this collection of stories carried M-16 rifles, M-60 machine guns, and M-79 grenade launchers. They carried plastic explosives, hand grenades, flak jackets, and landmines. But they also carried letters from home, illustrated Bibles, and pictures of their loved ones. Some of them carried extra food or comic books or drugs. Every man carried what he needed to survive, and those who did carried their shattering stories away from the jungle and back to a nation that would never understand.

This audiobook also includes an exclusive recording “The Vietnam in Me,” a recount of the author’s trip back to Vietnam in 1994, revisiting his experience there as a soldier 25 years before, read by Tim O’Brien himself.

The Things They Carried was produced by Audible Studios in partnership with Playtone, the celebrated film and television production company founded by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, and producer of the award-winning series Band of Brothers, John Adams, and The Pacific, as well as the HBO movie Game Change.

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Listening Length	7 hours and 47 minutes
Author	Tim O'Brien
Narrator	Bryan Cranston
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com Release Date	October 15, 2013
Publisher	Audible Studios
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B00FFHK3B4
Best Sellers Rank	#983 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #1 in Literature Anthologies #1 in Historical Fiction Anthologies #1 in Historical Fiction Anthologies & Short Stories

Customer reviews

5 star		73%
4 star		15%
3 star		7%
2 star		2%
1 star		3%

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Top reviews from the United States

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llr

Unfortunate

Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2019

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Written to be a seller, but the incidents do not reflect my experience with the Army in Vietnam.
So I have to wonder about what the author reported as happening. But it plays to what many want to believe, thus it must sell well.
I couldn't force myself to continue reading what I never saw or heard of happening in the four areas I was in, in what was expected to be a truthful book.

141 people found this helpful

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james beck

First few chapters.

Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2019

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After reading the first few chapters I closed the book and will not read any more of it. In just the first few chapters they killed a puppy with a claymore and tortured a baby water buffalo. I wa in the war but the senseless killing of animals is where I draw the line. I had to give one star to be able to enter my review.

117 people found this helpful

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DocUSMC68

Horrible book

Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2019

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If you fought in Vietnam, do not waste your time with this book.

73 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Pure Dishonesty

Reviewed in the United States on July 19, 2020

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This is possibly the most dishonest book ever written."You don't know what it was like over there. You don't understand. I do. Let me tell you." We kicked corpses, shot dogs, destroyed wells, cut off thumbs, blew up puppies, fished using "a crate load of hand grenades," painted our bodies and wore scary masks, played catch with smoke grenades, took a half hour to shoot up a buffalo, had Buddhist monks clean our weapons, we drowned in mud, and sang "Lemon Tree" while we took a GI's body parts down from a tree. A teen-age cheerleader from the heart of America sneaks into VN, gets to the field somehow where she joins a Green Beret unit untrained and ends up wearing a necklace of enemy tongues. Had enough nonsense? In a "platoon sized" ambush, he kills a solitary soldier with a hand grenade. Some ambush. His 9 year old school girl crush dies of a brain tumor after being mocked by other students. ( How did this get in here!?) A unbelievably elaborate and juvenile revenge plan is somehow worked out in the field. And a dumb old lady just doesn't understand what they've been through. He's probably still wearing a LRRP hat and wearing fatigues. This book is an insult to what VN veterans went through at times. Atrocities? Yes. But this exploits the traumas. Here is false poignancy, false sadness, false nobility, false guilt and false stories. The writing - despite awards and the press - is incredibly thin. Read Xenophon's The March Up Country, The Iliad (Pope's trans.),J. Caesar's Gallic Wars, Thucydides, Herodotus, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Naked and the Dead, From Here to Eternity, Johnny Got His Gun. This is very weak Hemingway. My DROS date was 6/22/68. VN Combat Veteran.

39 people found this helpful

Helpful

The Vietnam War novel that reads like war stories and essays about life as an American soldier

Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2016

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It’s called a novel, but it reads like a collection of war stories and essays about being an American soldier in the Vietnam War. That’s not a criticism. In fact, it’s part of the brilliance of this book. If it were thoroughly plotted, it might not feel so authentic. As war is disjointed, so is O’Brien’s book. Some of the chapters are tiny and some are lengthy. Some read more like essays than fiction, and others are clearly fictitious.

When I say that “some are clearly fictitious,” there’s always a doubt that it might just be a true story--because war is just that absurd. An example that springs to mind is one of the most engaging pieces in the work. It’s called “Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong,” and it’s about a wholesome, young girlfriend to one of the soldiers who [improbably] comes to live in the camp. The girl acclimates to the war, and soon she is going out on patrol--not with the ordinary infantry soldiers, but during the night with the Green Berets. Perhaps the moral is that some people are made for war, and it’s never who you’d suspect. As I describe it, the premise may sound ridiculous, but the way O’Brien presents it as a story told by a Rat Kiley--a fellow infantryman known to exaggerate—it feels as though there is something very true, no matter how fictitious the story might be. Before one reads “Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong” one has been primed by a chapter entitled “How to Tell a True War Story,” which tells one that truth and falsehood aren’t so clear in the bizarre world of war.

There are a couple chapters outside the period during which O’Brien (the character, who may or may not be the same as the author) is actively in an infantry unit. One early chapter describes his near attempt at draft dodging, and another talks of his time stationed at the rear after being injured. Both of these chapters offer an interesting twist in the scheme of the book overall. We find O’Brien to be a fairly typical infantry soldier, and it seems hard to reconcile this with his floating in a canoe and narrowly deciding not to make a swim for the Canadian shoreline. However, what is odder still is realizing how distraught he is to be pulled out of his unit, particularly when he realizes that he has become an outsider and the [then rookie] medic who botched his treatment is now in the in-group. This is one of the many unusual aspects of combatant psychology that comes into play in the book, along with O’Brien’s description of how devastating it was to kill.

There are 21 chapters to the book. As I said, they run a gamut, but at all times keep one reading. It’s the shortest of the Vietnam novels I’ve read—I think. When I think of works like “Matterhorn” and “The 13th Valley,” there seems to be something hard to convey concisely about the Vietnam War, but O’Brien nails it with his unconventional novel. O’Brien also uses repetition masterfully. This can be seen in the title chapter “The Things They Carried,” which describes the many things carried by an infantry soldier—both the physical items they carried on patrol and the psychological and emotional things they carried after the war. It’s a risky approach that pays off well.

I’d recommend this book for anyone—at least anyone who can stomach war stories.

150 people found this helpful

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Sing141

Just read it!

Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2017

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This book just grabs you and won't let go. When you're finished with it it won't be finished with you. I was in the Air Force during the war - C141 cargo transport. I was never stationed in Vietnam but flying in and out several times a month. In with things needed to fight a war. Everything from soldiers to mop buckets. Out with the results. Air Evacs full of wounded, or cargo of 140 coffins filled with human remains. First book I've read in years that I didn't want to put down, but I was glad when it emded.

58 people found this helpful

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Gabriel

I Can't Express It In Words

Reviewed in the United States on May 11, 2017

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This book has something that other books don't. The writing, the people, the words, the lack of words, a comma here or a period there. Every page is so magnificently done with a finesse of heartache, dark comedy, and raw, pure, genuineness that I've never experienced in any film or text. It's addicting yet painful to read which makes the experienced of reading it all the more powerful.

This book has something that other books don't.

53 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Ronnie

Thought-provoking.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 13, 2019

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When I commenced this 'Nam War story, given the unusual style of writing, I was far from sure I would stick with the author. I once worked in VietNam, way over 25 years ago, so many of the countryside descriptions came alive to me. Apart from the passages, or chapters, where Mr O'Brien talks about himself, the characters are fictional but the tales told were based on facts or events elsewhere in 'Nam over the whole period of that war. By the time I got half-way through his book, he had pulled me in,and having read a few stories set in other wars, and also in the same conflict, this one above all, brought home to me the horrors and the stresses and strains on extraordinary "ordinary" soldiers. The author almost became a draft dodger and even that tale left me thinking, as in, a lot. His phrase, too scared to be a coward, has stayed with me. This is an intellectual look at war and the stories which evolve from these wars, but this too was told for any human to understand. For once, the book reviews written and re-printed on the book's opening pages were absolutely accurate. This was one fine work. Thank you Mr O'Brien. Bigger thanks to all who served and continue to serve.

7 people found this helpful

Kublai

Immersed in the writer's war

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 15, 2016

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Tim O'brien can really write. It's refreshing after reading so many poorly written books to come across a writer like this. He uses language skilfully to evoke experiences of war and to give a kind of poetic meaning, or poetic void of meaning to the scenes he witnessed. The first chapter is really brilliant and many of the others are also very good.

However, I can't help but also feel there is a gap between an approach like this and the reality of the war itself. Time and again films and books will tell you that Vietnam was hell and pointless and seek to immerse you in the experience of it. Yet I have never once come across storytelling which honestly tries to consider the alternative argument. I mean, certainly it was a horrible experience and I don't want to disrespect that, but there were also reasons for the fight, however muddied they became or were perceived to be. Reading a book like this I get a sense of the writer's absolute self involvement, and wonder if it wasn't so much the war that was different to those preceding it, but the post-war generation who fought it who had lost their moral certainties.

Certainly worth reading and appreciating for O'brien's talent with the English language and the experience of Vietnam he captures.

8 people found this helpful

Calypso

The Fog of War

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 28, 2016

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The Things They Carried is a series of anecdotes by Tim O’Brien about his experiences in Vietnam, written many years after his return to the USA. The writing is elegant and engaging. The stories are written from a close point of view giving a real sense of being with the characters: of sharing their experiences in a vivid and thought provoking way. A theme of the book that I found particularly interesting was that of truth. The fog of war makes the truth difficult to see. There are no absolutes other than death or injury. The perception that each soldier has is determined by his involvement in the situation and the trauma involved.

A sobering and brilliant book.

5 people found this helpful

Lady Fancifull

There never will be wars to end wars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 14, 2013

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Tim O Brien, a Vietnam vet, has written a book of short stories about how a young man came into that war, various stories about himself and company members within the war, and what happened, to him, and to others, later - sometimes a whole generation later.

However, that is only one way of describing this book. Which is not only a superb anti-war piece, without polemic, but a kind of meditation on that - or any - war, its brutality, but also the nobility, not, absolutely not, of war itself, or of the abstractions with which the old marshall the young to make the ultimate sacrifice, but the nobility of what might have been. The nobility of the potential of those sacrificed lives had they not been sent to die and to kill. That potential was sacrificed whether the young came back to live and breathe amongst us, holding their damage, or whether parts of them were returned in body bags.

This is a book profoundly against war. But above all, O Brien is a writer, so because the profound experience of that war is what has shaped him, this is the subject of his writing. He writes, as he tells us, a story, which is a distillation of the truth. But the story, which he tells us `is not a game. It's a form' is there because `I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth'

`What stories can do, I guess, is make things present'

This is a story of compassion towards the young men who were made to do things young men should not have to do. It is full of patchwork surprises. Certain horrific images become recycled, and looked at in different ways. Rather than linear progression, and not even in `peeling off the layers of an onion' form, what O Brien does is to look from different angles, different viewpoints, to look immediately, to look through memory, to unpick images and put them together again in slightly changed context. It is a beautiful piece of revelation, but make no mistake, will never be able to be used by those who tell lies to young men about the nobility of what they are about to do.

`A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue,nor suggest morals of proper human behaviour, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it.If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue.'

There is absolutely no sentimentality within these pages, but there is beauty in the unflinching facing of horror.

9 people found this helpful

Inemac

Great read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 23, 2019

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Early into the book you read the synopsis of what you are about to read: "They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried." That says it all, and yet not enough.

2 people found this helpful

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