These are the opening lines of one of the best stories I've ever read: Tim O'Brien"s 'The Things They Carried". The story is about soldiers, men, boys, human beings at war in Vietnam. I once had the honor to listen to him reading from his collection of stories with the same title at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago. A huge crowd had gathered to see him, we were so many people that they had to open up another large room, equipped with a big screen, and when he started to read in his low voice the whole crowd went silent.
" First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap his letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending."
