Books Like The Things They Carried: 11 War Novels

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is one of the defining works of American war literature — a collection of linked stories that blurs memoir and fiction to capture not just what soldiers carried into Vietnam, but the emotional weight they carried out. It is a book about memory, guilt, storytelling, and the impossibility of ever fully telling a war story. If it moved you and you want more literature that reckons with combat and its aftermath, the tradition O’Brien belongs to is one of the richest in fiction.

Here is a quick comparison, followed by where to start with each.

Books Like The Things They Carried at a Glance

Tim O’Brien’s Own Vietnam

The closest companion to The Things They Carried is O’Brien himself.

Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien

O’Brien’s National Book Award winner follows a soldier who walks away from the war, heading on foot from Vietnam to Paris, in a narrative that drifts between reality and imagination. It plays the same games with memory and storytelling, and is essential reading for anyone moved by The Things They Carried.

The War From the Other Side

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

A Pulitzer-winning novel narrated by a communist double agent, The Sympathizer tells the Vietnam War — and its aftermath — from a Vietnamese perspective, with dark wit and moral complexity. The perfect counterpoint to O’Brien’s American vantage.

Classic War Novels

These five form the literary tradition O’Brien writes within.

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

The definitive anti-war novel, following German soldiers through the horror and disillusionment of WWI. Its humane, unflinching portrait of young men destroyed by war is the clearest ancestor of The Things They Carried.

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway’s spare, devastating WWI novel of love and disillusion. The clean, unsentimental prose and the sense of war stripping away illusions will resonate with O’Brien’s readers.

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

Set during the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway’s epic of courage, love, and sacrifice asks what a single life is worth in wartime — the kind of moral weight O’Brien specialises in.

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

The classic account of a young Civil War soldier confronting fear and his own courage under fire. Brief, intense, and psychologically acute, it is war literature’s foundational text.

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

Mailer’s sweeping novel of a Pacific island campaign in WWII captures the brutality, boredom, and hierarchy of combat on an epic canvas.

War’s Absurdity and Trauma

Finally, three novels that confront war through satire, science fiction, and the wounded mind.

Regeneration by Pat Barker

Set in a military hospital treating shell-shocked WWI officers, Barker’s masterpiece examines the psychological cost of war — the trauma O’Brien’s soldiers carry home.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Heller’s savage satire turns the absurdity and bureaucracy of war into black comedy. For readers who felt the surreal, illogical edge of O’Brien’s Vietnam, this is essential.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut’s time-shattered account of the Dresden firebombing blurs fact, fiction, and trauma exactly as O’Brien does. A short, unforgettable companion piece.

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

Written by a Vietnam veteran, this science-fiction classic reimagines the alienation of the returning soldier across centuries of interstellar conflict — Vietnam in disguise.

Where to Start

For more O’Brien, read Going After Cacciato. For the definitive war novel, go to All Quiet on the Western Front. For war’s absurdity, read Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse-Five. And for the other side of Vietnam, read The Sympathizer. Any of these eleven will give you what O’Brien does best: the truth that the hardest things soldiers carry can never be set down.

If you are reading chronologically through the literature of war, these eleven map a rough arc — Crane’s Civil War, Remarque and Hemingway and Barker on the First World War, Mailer and Vonnegut on the Second, O’Brien and Nguyen on Vietnam, and Haldeman projecting it all into the future. Read in that order, they become a single long argument about what combat does to the people sent to fight it, and how each generation finds new forms to tell an essentially untellable story. But you need not be systematic: any one of them stands alone as a masterpiece. Start with whichever war or approach speaks to you most, and let The Things They Carried be the doorway into one of fiction’s most profound and necessary traditions.