Starred Review "In the end . . . a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen." In Tim O'Brien's world, a war story is all that d more. The author of the National Book Award winning Going after Cacciato offers fiction in a unique form: a kind of "faction" presented as a collection of related stories that have the cumulative effect of a unified novel. The "things they carry" terally e prosaic things: amphetamines, M-16s, grenades, good-luck charms, Sterno cans, toilet paper, photographs, C-rations. But the men in O'Brien's platoon rt Lemon, Rat Kiley, Henry Dobbins, Kiowa, and the rest so carry less tangible but more palpable things such as disease, confusion, hatred, love, regret, fear, what passes for courage; in short, the prototypical psychological profile the youthful Vietnam vet. There are 22 pieces here in all, some of which were previously published in such diverse literary arenas as Playboy, Granta, GQ, and Esquire. The prose ranges from staccato soldierly thoughts to raw depictions of violent death to intense personal ruminations by the author that don't appear to be fictional at all. ("On the Rainy River," O'Brien's account of the time he almost fled to Canada after receiving his draft notice, is particularly moving.) Just when you thought there was nothing left to say about the Vietnam experience . . . there's plenty.