Derek C. Maus Teaching O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Duong Thu Huong’s Novel Without a Name Fifteen years after its publication, The Things They Carried is a staple of undergraduate literature course syllabi. Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq early in 2003, O’Brien has frequently been invoked in commentaries on this new conflict, usually to harness what are seen as his credentials as an “anti-war” writer. Although O’Brien has spoken out against the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq – often noting its similarities to the Vietnam War – the cultural discourse into which his comments (and quotes from his earlier books) have been introduced is a relatively impoverished one, a condition that I believe severely hobbles examination of O’Brien’s writing. The war in Iraq has exacerbated the polarization of discourse in the United States into “pro-war” and “anti-war” camps that leaves little room for nuanced analysis of conflict, either contemporary or historical. It should not be surprising that students who have been steeped in such an over-simplified rhetoric echo its language when they first encounter O’Brien’s fictions about war and its participants. The discernment of fine distinctions is generally estimable in the study of literature, but strikes me as especially important in dealing with O’Brien’s fiction, which presents its readers with thematic, structural, ontological, and emotional challenges at every turn. A common strategy for enhancing students’ awareness of the complexity of O’Brien’s work has been to pair him with thematically similar writers. While the most common comparisons have included O’Brien among either other American writers of war fiction (e.g., Ernest Hemingway, Robert Olen Butler) or with other non-American “soldier-poets” (e.g., Erich Maria Remarque, Wilfrid Owen), I have found that students’ discussions of the works in such linkages are generally vigorous but nevertheless tend to remain proscribed by received notions