Quickly now: 'The Things They Carried' is a great book and I feel bad for people who can't read it. 'On the Rainy River' is obviously the masterpiece of interiority and willpower, but throughout there are great artistic representations of a Vietnam-war specific humanity. Implicit in its plainness and strange sense for literary ambition is a hatred for having had to deal with this war as an active participant and all the political theories that don't accept that.