When you pick up a war book, there are a few things you can expect. You can easily expect glorious battles, valiant commanding officers leading daring charges, faceless hordes of the dehumanized enemy, near death and high adrenaline encounters for individual characters, and, always, victory at the conclusion. The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien, presents the exact opposite, but still manages to fall into the war story genre.

O'Brien doesn't deliver any glorious battles in The Things They Carried, in fact most of the characters' time is spent in "the kind of boredom that caused stomach disorders" (Spin). In Spin, O'Brien even compares the Vietnam war to a game of checkers, describing how restful and reassuring the patterns of a strict grid and knowing where you stand were. Checkers is "orderly," O'Brien finishes his description of the games by saying: "There were rules." The entropic picture of Vietnam that he subtly paints by contrast doesn't qualify as glorious by any account; rather, it's seen as a dirty (excuse the cliche) quagmire, fought in rice paddies, shit fields, and mine fields, never grand expanses or noble terrains.

One of the most striking features about O'Brien's story, The Man I Killed, is the extent to which he seeks to humanize and give life to his victim, and his overwhelming regret. The description of the man's remains is repeated a number of times, and a theorized life is built around it. O'Brien's namesake, Tim O'Brien, sits staring at the dead man, not gook or dink, for long enough for it to bother his comrade Kiowa. Another feature of O'Brien's break from the traditional war genre is his focus on the soldiers lives as well, not as archetypal "tough guys," or "wise guys," but as actual people who feel the effects of the war both during and after. When I read The Things they Carried, the story of one of O'Brien's brothers-in-arms who returned to his sleepy middle America town, found nothing, and killed himself poses not only the question of the traditional view of the valor of war, but also the cost it exacts on those who fight.

What's an exciting war story without the enemy bullet just flying by the hero's head, or the tense and active atmosphere of this "noble" exercise of war? It's certainly not The Things They Carried. The somber, all-important air of a war story is lost in the "aggressive" boredom, "curiously playful atmosphere," and "childlike exuberance to it all," as described in Spin. 'Nam also isn't that honorable in The Things They Carried, O'Brien remembers, aside from the playful pranks and joking among his unit:
"The damp, fungal scent of an empty body bag.
...A red clay trail outside the village of My Khe.
A hand grenade.
A slim, dead, dainty young man of about twenty.
Kiowa saying 'No choice, Tim. What else could you do?'"