In March 2010, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt brought out the twentieth anniversary edition of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist The Things They Carried, marking with this decision the book's status as Tim O'Brien's most accomplished and significant work – a remarkable compliment indeed, if one thinks that his earlier Going After Cacciato had won the National Book Award in 1979. With its publication some six months before President Obama declared the end of the war in Iraq and set July 2011 as the deadline for the beginning of the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, the twentieth anniversary edition of this seminal text about the war in Vietnam has rekindled comparisons between the conflict in the Southeast Asian peninsula, and the more recent American military interventions in the Middle East. Echoing O'Brien's epistemological insecurity of two decades ago, Joseph Peschel declares that ‘the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity’, regardless of one's stance on ‘the moral and political validity of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan’. On his part, having drawn his own explicit comparison between these conflicts and Vietnam, O'Brien focuses on the human and emotional cost of warfare, on the soldiers as well as their families and, by extension, on society as a whole:

Thirty-five years after the fall of Saigon, the shedding of ‘certain blood for uncertain reasons’ (IID, 167) still remains, sadly, a topical subject. In spite of the renewed relevance of his writing to the contemporary global political scene, O'Brien is not very well known outside the United States; moreover, even in his own country, he is generally perceived – for reasons that are all too obvious – as a niche artist, the breadth of whose work, no matter how sharp in its insights and skilful in its execution, is confined within the realm of war literature, rather than being judged against the parameters of great literature tout court.