“The things they carried is about not only the things carried during the war, but also the weight that is carried after the war.

There is a woman in Florida who wakes up every night and says, “Where’s my baby?”

Her son was my best friend over there, a black kid from Florida. He’s been dead for forty years. The war’s not over for her.

The mothers and fathers and lovers and children have to be counted among the casualties, too.”

-Tim O’Brien, Butler University Visiting Writer Series, March 2014