Despite his personal difficulties and despite his intention to cease writing after completing In the Lake of the Woods (1994), O'Brien continues to produce works that illuminate the human response to war and articulate the strain associated with veterans (like O'Brien himself) reconciling what they saw and did during the Vietnam War with the values and mores they had learned prior to Vietnam.
O'Brien maintains that The Things They Carried "is meant to be about man's yearning for peace. At least [he] hopes it is taken that way." For O'Brien, through his own writing career and through the veteran characters he has conceived, this "yearning" is partially satisfied through the act of storytelling, getting at the truth of an idea or event by retelling and embellishing it. In this way, The Things They Carried is a culmination of O'Brien's earlier works and is a culmination of themes — courage, duty, memory, guilt, and storytelling — present in all his works.
