2. Research the anti-Vietnam War movement. What objections did the protestors have to the war? Find out what arguments they used against maintaining the war. What kind of rhetoric did they use? Research Vietnam veterans’ involvement in the anti-war movement. Compare their arguments to O’Brien’s objections to the war. Read other Vietnam veterans’ war narratives, such as Ron Kovics’ Born on the Fourth of July and Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk, and compare their impressions of the war with the fictional “O’Brien’s.”

3. Simulate the original literary form that O’Brien invented for The Things They Carried. Write a fictionalized version of an event similar to one you have experienced. Create a fictional protagonist who shares your name and write a narrative and descriptive passage about what “you” see and think and do. After doing this, write a passage about how you wrote the paragraph and why you wrote it, simulating O’Brien’s meta-fictive style.

4. Compare O’Brien’s novel (or The Soldier’s Sweetheart, a film based on the vignette, “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”) to films about the Vietnam War, such as Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. Do the novel and the films share similar qualities? What are these qualities? How do you think they differ from those of the classic combat film genre that depict World War II and the Korean War. Research the film references O’Brien makes in the novel: John Wayne, The Green Berets, Audie Murphy, The Man Who Never Was. How do these examples he offers speak to this difference? How is he critiquing these references, and to what effect?