Focus on The Things They Carried: Author Biography

Biography In Context

Born in 1946, O'Brien was raised in small-town Minnesota, his father an insurance salesman, his mother an elementary school teacher. As a child, O'Brien was lonely, overweight, and a professed "dreamer," and he occupied himself by practicing magic tricks. For a brief time, he contemplated being a writer, inspired by some old clippings he'd found of his father's - personal accounts about fighting in Iwo Jima and Okinawa that had been published in The New York Times during World War II. When O'Brien entered college, however, his aspirations turned political. He was a political science major at Macalester, attended peace vigils and war protests, and planned to join the State Department to reform its policies. "I thought we needed people who were progressive and had the patience to try diplomacy instead of dropping bombs on people."

He never imagined he would be drafted upon graduation and actually sent to Vietnam. "I was walking around in a dream and repressing it all," he says, "thinking something would save my ass. Even getting on the plane for boot camp, I couldn't believe any of it was happening to me, someone who hated Boy Scouts and bugs and rifles." When he received his classification - not as a clerk, or a driver, or a cook, but as an infantryman - he seriously considered deserting to Canada. He now thinks it was an act of cowardice not to, particularly since he was against the war, but in 1969, as a twenty-two-year-old, he had feared the disapproval of his family and friends, his townspeople and country. He went to Vietnam and hated every minute of it, from beginning to end.

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