Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses the physical and emotional weight of the Vietnam War on a group of soldiers.

Tim O'Brien first emerged on the literary scene with his starkly moving portrayals of men involved in the Vietnam War. When his award-winning novel Going After Cacciato was published, John Updike wrote  felt, moving experience of the war, published almost a decade later, may well be that masterpiece. At first critics did not know how to view The Things They Carried—as a collection of short stories or a novel? Neither, says O'Brien, who prefers to look at it simply as a work of fiction. In truth, it stands as a unified narrative, made up of chapters that can work on their own, but...