The standout works that followed the war share an acute sense of reflexivity, a sharp bent towards the subjective voice, and a vested interest in telling stories. While the predecessors of such works as Al Santoli's Everything We Had, Michael Herr's Dispatches, and Neil Sheeham's A Bright, Shining Lie surely are Owen, Crane, Hemingway, and specifically Orwell, the Vietnam War works are postmodern. In this sense, the Vietnam War genre is postmodern because of a hyper-self-awareness of form within literary form. O'Brien, Herr, and Santoli are obsessed by storytelling, and their writing is frequently about writing and the generation of stories themselves.
A sense of postmodernism is created through the interaction of three main similarities present in the Vietnam War literary genre. First, clearly delineated definitions of fiction and non-fiction are abandoned. In The Things They Carried, O'Brien fuses these modes of discourse. Second, verisimilitude becomes secondary to the interplay of form and style. Third, a highly self-aware, subjective (anti-)hero is the protagonist. The Things They Carried is, then, by definition a postmodern Vietnam War narrative. Because of its postmodern the Vietnam War genrequalities, it is at once a collection of stories and a novel, a piece of fiction and an autobiography (non-fiction), and war narrative and a Vietnam War narrative.
