One Book, One Chicago Fall 2003
Introduction
Tim O’Brien in Vietnam
I’m grateful, honored, flattered and a little daunted to learn that Chicago has adopted The Things They Carried for its citywide reading program. Although on the surface the book certainly focuses on the multiple tragedies of the Vietnam War, which to many might seem a distant and unapproachable topic, I have always believed that it is equally a book about the things all of us must finally carry through life—grief, pity, terror, love, longing, doubt, embarrassment, great joy and great despair. In part, too, this is a book about storytelling itself, and about the power of stories to help us deal with our human burdens: to help us heal, to help us understand, to console us and to offer reassurance that we are not alone in our daily moral struggles. In the end, for a book to succeed, it must ultimately relate to the reader’s own experience of the world, whether one is a soldier or a student or a housewife or a teacher—whatever. It’s my hope that the people of Chicago will find emotional and spiritual meaning in the pages of The Things They Carried.—Tim O’Brien
“They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture.”