Tuesday, January 06, 2015

I Never Thought I’d Read This Book With My Daughter

                                    By Sheila Curry Oakes | Monday, January 05, 2015|Off the Shelf


 “Mom, were you alive during the Vietnam War?” My middle school daughter often “fact checks” history versus my existence. At least asking about Vietnam wasn’t as far off base as when she once asked me if I was around for Prohibition. She brought up Vietnam because she was reading The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. I remember reading the book and I consider it a book I would recommend if someone asked me about it. The problem was, when I tried to remember specifics, apart from remembering that one of the things carried was a photograph, I couldn’t come up with much else. 
My excuse is that I read it a long time ago, but still.… 

It was time to get to my bookshelf and find my old copy. As I began to read, it’s like a new book and an old book at the same time. I’ve definitely been to this corner of the Vietnam jungle before, and the members of Alpha Company are looking more and more familiar, but it’s like a half-remembered dream that somehow suddenly comes into full consciousness. And it’s not really a nice kind of dream either. It’s a sweaty, feverish, disjointed dream -  More

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