1. Tim O’Brien

O’Brien’s novel Going After Cacciato and his short story collection The Things They Carried could not have existed without his experience in the Vietnam War.

O’Brien was drafted in 1968, just two weeks after completing his undergraduate degree at Macalester College. By then, the war in Vietnam had reached its most horrific point in terms of American casualties. O’Brien served a 13-month tour in Vietnam as a foot soldier, being wounded twice and being promoted to Sergeant.

Here is just one great example of O’Brien’s writing on war from “How to Tell a True War Story:”

Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn't hit you until, say, twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you get to the end you've forgotten the point again. And then for a long time you lie there watching the story happen in your head. You listen to your wife's breathing. The war's over. You close your eyes. You smile and think, Christ, what's the point?

This one wakes me up.

In the mountains that day, I watched Lemon turn sideways. He laughed and said something to Rat Kiley. Then he took a funny half step, moving from shade into bright sunlight, and the booby-trapped artillery round blew him into a tree. The parts were just hanging there, so Dave Jensen and I were ordered to shinny up and peel him off. I remember the white bone of an arm. I remember pieces of skin and something wet and yellow. The gore was horrible, and stays with me. But what wakes me up twenty years later is Dave Jensen singing "Lemon Tree" as we threw down the parts.