The Things They Carried

This is one question from Tim O'Brien's, author of The Things They Carried, interview in the book section of the SF Chronicle.

Chronicle. If one updated the contents of their rucksacks-the things they carried--it seems the soldiers you wrote about could in many ways be serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. What parallels. would you draw?

Tim O'Brien's Answer. They're carrying cell phones, and they're in much greater contact with the outside world than we ever were. I felt utterly isolated from anything having to do with family, civility, decency, events in America. However, the soldiers' combat experience in Vietnam seems eerily similar to what the men and women are doing in Afghanistan and Iraq. They're civil wars, who's your enemy, who do you shoot at, who do you kill? No front, no rear, no uniforms, inanimate land mines blowing you up. And then there are the echoes that are more meaningful to a fiction writer, the echoes of some mom In Dubuque holding her dead kid's clothes in her arms as she watches him go into the grave. Is it worth that? What is being accomplished that is worth that Mom's grief?