November 4, 2009
“ Lee Strunk carried tanning lotion. Some things they carried in common. Taking turns, they carried the big PRC-77 scrambler radio, which weighed thirty pounds with its battery. They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself - Vietnam, the place, the soil - a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.

Tim O’Brien - “The Things They Carried”

These past five or six years, I’ve been very drawn to war stories. To books that force you thick in to the middle of those places we work not to think about.  One winter I read All Quiet on the Western Front and Slaughterhouse Five back to back and those two together will almost certainly break a heart.  We have friends back from Iraq and those fresh from Afghanistan and I see the way they walk heavier now. How much harder it is to conjure enthusiasm for anything, really. I see the weight on their face of everything we don’t understand.  Stony gaps where ease and tenderness used to spread, a harder eye, a slower mouth. It kind of kills me that I can’t understand this metamorphosis for them.

This seems the least we can do, maybe, this fictional reading, this visit to a world like theirs.  For a few days even, I want to know what they carried, the heft of all that and the unbearable lightness of what they left back home. I want to understand why they carried it when I chose not to and what it cost them to do so.