Welcome to the Velshi Band Book Club. I'm MSNBC's Ali Valshi.

War has always served as a dark sort of inspiration for writers from epic poems of antiquity

like The Iliad and Beowulf.

Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms set in World War I to Richard Hooker's Korean

War Black comedy, MASH. Soldiers, confronted with their mortality and their morality on the

battlefield, have been immortalized and explored in literature for thousands of years. On a larger scale,

though, this tradition of wartime literature captures the societal changes that war leaves in its path.

There has not been a country or a culture unaffected by the brutalities of war. This episode of the

Velshiban Book Club will feature one remarkable example of wartime literature.

This novel stands at the forefront of the contemporary war literary canon.

It achingly captures what it means to be a soldier, a young man, and an American

in the midst of one of the most brutal wars in modern history, Vietnam.

I'm talking about the things they carried by Tim O'Brien.

Let's get into it.

Quote, taking turns, they carried the big PRC-77 Scrambleer Radio, which weighed 30 pounds with its battery.

They shared the weight of memory. They took up what

others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections.

They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese English dictionaries, insignia of rank,

bronze stars and purple hearts, plastic cards

imprinted with the code of conduct. They carried diseases, among them, malaria and dysentery.

They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds.

They carried the land itself.

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