In May 1974, O'Brien went to work briefly for The Washington Post as a national affairs reporter before his attention was fully diverted to the craft of fiction writing. He began and continues to publish regularly in various periodicals, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Esquire, and Playboy, frequently excerpting parts of his novels as autonomous short stories.
Of particular note is a piece O'Brien wrote for The New York Times Magazine about returning to Vietnam — his first trip back since his service there. In "The Vietnam in Me," O'Brien probes the intersection between memory, time, and witnessing the Vietnam War and his personal relationships. Usually guarded and self-conscious as a public subject — for example, it is rare to find a photo of O'Brien without his signature baseball cap — his article was intimate and highly personal. O'Brien made the trip back to Vietnam with a woman for whom he left his wife, and he makes this plain in the article. O'Brien also addresses other sensitive and personal subjects such as his own readjustment after serving in Vietnam: "Last night," he wrote, "suicide was on my mind. Not whether, but how."
