New Student Orientation
Common Reading Program
Twenty yards. I could’ve done it. I could’ve jumped and started swimming for my life. Inside me, in my chest, I felt a terrible squeezing pressure. Even now, as I write this, I can still feel that tightness.
And I want you to feel it ~ the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You’re at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You’re twenty-one years old, you’re scared, and there’s a hard squeezing pressure in your chest.
What would you do?
Common Summer Reading 2008 Choice
The Things They Carried
by Tim O’Brien
They carried 28-pound mine detectors, Bibles, dope, love letters, malaria tablets, and each other. And if they made it home, they carry their own testaments of the Vietnam War and all of the decisions they made along the way.
What an incredibly exciting way to enter into new kinds of learning--with other JU people you really want to get to know! You will be coming together during orientation with other Jacksonville University first-year students, faculty, administration, and upperclassmen to celebrate your NEW BEGINNINGS as part of the larger LEARNING COMMUNITY to discuss this unparalleled Vietnam testament.
As part of the Summer Common Reading Program YOU WILL BE RECEIVING A GIFT FROM JU: your own copy of THE THINGS THEY CARRIED to read, reflect upon, and consider. We want you to prepare for ORIENTATION where discussions will take place all over campus focusing on the 2008 Program THEME: WHAT WILL YOU CARRY?... DEFINING MOMENTS. The book selection will also be used in many of your first year courses, and it will provide the overall campus theme for a JU film series, as well as panel discussions, and service projects.
What does the author say about the book? In addition to being a powerful work of fiction about people and war, O’Brien believes “that it is equally a book about the things all of us must finally carry through life--grief, pity, terror, love, longing, doubt, embarrassment, great joy and great despair. In part, too, this is a book about storytelling itself, and about the power of stories to help us deal with our human burdens: to help us heal, to help us understand, to console us and to offer reassurance that we are not alone in our daily moral struggles.”
Your book will be coming later this summer. Watch for it! You will want to be ready to join with your new University friends and professors for Orientation and classroom discussions throughout your first year of studies. Come prepared to be a part of the Jacksonville University community of learners!
About Tim O'Brien
Tim O'Brien is from small town Minnesota. He was born in Austin on October 1, 1946, a birth date he shares with several of his characters, and grew up in Worthington, "Turkey Capital of the World."
He matriculated at Macalester College. Graduation in 1968 found him with a BA in political science and a draft notice.
O'Brien was against the war, but reported for service and was sent to Vietnam with what has been called the "unlucky" Americal division due to its involvement in the My Lai massacre in 1968, an event which figures prominently in In the Lake of the Woods. He was assigned to 3rd Platoon, A Co., 5th Batt. 46th Inf., as an infantry foot soldier. O'Brien's tour of duty was 1969-70.
After Vietnam he became a graduate student at Harvard. No doubt he was one of very few Vietnam veterans there at that time, much less Combat Infantry Badge (CIB) holders. Having the opportunity to do an internship at the Washington Post, he eventually left Harvard to become a newspaper reporter. O'Brien's career as a reporter gave way to his fiction writing after publication of his memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Send Me Home.
Tim O'Brien is now a visiting professor and endowed chair at Southwest Texas State University where he teaches in the Creative Writing Program.
Click on the links below to find out more about The Things They Carried:
Study Questions and background Info:
Background of the Vietnam War: