Yes, The Things They Carried Is Banned!

The Things They Carried is Tim O’Brien’s collection of linked short stories about a platoon of American soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War. Drawing on his own experience as a drafted infantryman, O’Brien blurs the line between memoir and fiction, using the technique he calls “story-truth” to capture the emotional reality of combat. The book catalogs the physical and psychological weight soldiers carry: weapons, letters, guilt, fear, memories. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee, and is widely considered one of the greatest works of American war literature.

The book was banned from George County Schools in Mississippi in 2002 for profanity. In 2006, over 1,000 people attended a late-night meeting at Northwest Suburban High School District 214 in Arlington Heights, Illinois, to debate removing it (along with eight other titles) from the curriculum; the book was ultimately retained. The Troup School District in Texas challenged it as “vulgar,” “complete garbage trash,” and “filled with sexual content and profanity.” A parent in Utah’s Jordan School District challenged it in 2018. The objections consistently target the soldiers’ language and a few scenes depicting violence and sexuality.

Why You Should Read This

O’Brien wrote the most honest book about war that most Americans will ever read. He didn’t sanitize the language or soften the violence because that’s not what war does. His soldiers swear constantly because they’re 19 years old and terrified. They tell crude jokes because humor is the only thing standing between them and a breakdown. Stripping that out to make the book “appropriate” would be like colorizing a war photograph.

The story “How to Tell a True War Story” contains one of the clearest explanations of why literature matters ever written. O’Brien argues that a true war story is never moral, never instructive, and never the clean narrative people want it to be. It just shows you what happened and lets you sit with the weight of it. That’s what the book does, chapter by chapter, death by death.

The people who call this book “garbage” haven’t reckoned with what it costs to send 18-year-olds into combat. O’Brien did the reckoning for them. The least we can do is let kids read it.