The Things They Carried is a collection of stories that Tim O'Brien published in the 1970s and 1980s after his return from the Vietnam War. The stories are interrelated and structured such that the collection reads more like a novel than as a set of discrete stories.

As a collection, the stories make up the reflections of "Tim O'Brien," a character sharing traits and personal history with the real O'Brien, but one who is careful to highlight the mediated, fictive nature of his writings. A key premise of the novel is that stories are true whether or not they relate "actual" events. In one story, we learn of a character's guilt over allowing a fellow soldier to die, and then we learn that it was actually the narrator who let the character die. After telling us about a man he killed with a grenade, the narrator later tells us he watched the man die but did not kill him, then follows that with, "Even that story is made up." Each of the stories recounts incidents from the war that try to find perspective in the events and to humanize the men who were involved with the purpose of rescuing them from their deaths. In many ways, the point of The Things They Carried is to examine the nature of storytelling itself and to discover how we use narrative to construct our understanding of events that would otherwise seem random, pointless, and cruel.

Themes that inform the novel include cruelty, death, gender, grief, guilt, heroism, innocence and experience, spirituality, and violence.