The million-copy bestseller which is a ground-breaking meditation on war memory imagination & the redemptive power of storytelling The Things They Carried' is on its surface a sequence of award-winning stories about the madness of the Vietnam War; at the same time it has the cumulative power & unity of a novel with recurring characters & interwoven strands of plot & theme But while Vietnam is central to The Things They Carried' it is not simply a book about war It is also a book about the human heart
- about the terrible weight of those things we carry through our lives