In high school, The Things They Carried was required reading--I absolutely loved it. This is a bit from today's The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor:
"It's the birthday of Tim O'Brien, (books by this author) born in Austin, Minnesota (1946). His book The Things They Carried (1990) is a series of linked short stories about a group of soldiers in Vietnam, including a soldier named Tim O'Brien. The title story is one of the most anthologized short stories in contemporary American literature. It begins: 'First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.'"
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