You can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

— The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien

November 02, 2011, 10:51pm / 38

True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis. For example: War is hell. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true, and yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can’t believe it with my stomach. Nothing turns inside. It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.

— The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien

November 02, 2011, 12:24am / 72

They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They did so as not to die of embarrassment. They crawled in tunnels and walked point and advanced under fire. Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move. They endured. They kept humping. They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell.

It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.

— The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien

July 04, 2011, 2:42pm / 100

Some carried themselves with a sort of a wistful resignation, others with pride or stiff soldierly discipline or good humor or macho zeal. They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it.

They found jokes to tell.

They used vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased they’d say. Offed, lit up, zapped while zapping. It wasn’t cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors. When someone died, it wasn’t quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had their lines memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and because they called it by other names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of death itself. They kicked corpses. They cut off thumbs. They talked grunt lingo.

— The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien

July 03, 2011, 12:54pm / 37

They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.

— The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien

February 20, 2011, 1:38am / 41