We Can Be Podcast - The Heinz Endowments

“The Things They Carried” brought National Book Award-winning author Tim O’Brien fame, and the unparalleled poetic beauty and honesty of his novels, short stories and memoirs have cemented his status as one of our most revered contemporary writers.     Born and raised in southern Minnesota, Tim was a high school student body president who opposed the Vietnam War, and was drafted several weeks after graduation. He served in the area known as “Pinkville,” the location of two sites where American massacres of Vietnamese villagers occurred.    “When my life collided with Vietnam, I realized not only that I wanted to write, but that I had to write,” Tim says of his tour of duty in the early ‘70s. “It was my way of relieving the pressure on my spirit and my dreams, and it became a live-saving thing.”   Tim’s proposition that we all carry things with us — whether physical or in our memories — that affect how we move through the world informs his writing, from short story compilation “If I Die in a Combat Zone,