2. "I didn't get into writing to make money or get
famous or any of that. I got into it to hit hearts,
and man, when I get letters not just from the
soldiers but from their kids, especially their kids,
it makes it all worthwhile."

3.  Born 1946 in Austin, Minnesota
 Graduated from Macalester College with a BA in
Political Science in 1968
 Drafted into the Army in 1968 as an Infantryman
 Served in Vietnam
 Stationed in My Lia a year after the massacre
 Purple Heart Recipient
 Studied Government at Harvard but never finished
 Did not plan on being a writer

4.  If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship
Me Home (1973)
 The Things They Carried (1978)
 In the Lake of the Woods (1994)
 July, July (2002)
 Going After Cacciato (1978)

5.  O'Brien's central theme is the theme of courage;
he equates courage with having moral integrity
and strength to take control of one's life and do
what he knows to be ethically right.
 All of his books deal in part with a character's
willingness or unwillingness to serve in
Vietnam and raise the question of which choice
is the most brave and decent (Taormina)

6.  Metafiction
 that storytelling truth is often truer than the “real”
truth and that people create and live their lives with
the help of memory and imagination.
“That's what fiction is for. It's
for getting at the truth when
the truth isn't sufficient for the
truth.” (O’Brien)

7.  National Book Award in fiction - Going After Cacciato
 France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger - The Things
They Carried
 Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize - The Things They Carried
 Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award - The
Things They Carried
 James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of
American Historians - In The Lake of the Woods
 Named best novel of the year by Time magazine - In The
Lake of the Woods

8.  National Magazine Award - short story: The
Things They Carried
 Included in The Best American Short Stories of
the Century edited by John Updike - short
story: The Things They Carried

9.  American Academy of Arts and Letters
 Guggenheim Foundation
 National Endowment for the Arts.

10.  "A true war story is never moral. It does not
instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest
models of proper human behavior, nor restrain
men from doing the things men have always
done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it.
If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or
if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has
been salvaged from the larger waste, then you
have been made the victim of a very old and
terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever.
There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb,
therefore, you can tell a true war story by its
absolute and uncompromising allegiance to
obscenity and evil. "