Anyone who picks up a copy of "The Things They Carried" may wonder why this year's Go Read one-city, one-book experience revolves around Vietnam and an old war fought in a distant place.

Tim O'Brien can explain.

After all, he wrote the book.

"It's not the standard war book," he said by phone the other day from his home in Austin, Texas.

"Most of the letters I get come from women, none of whom have ever served in combat. Some of the letters are from the children of veterans, or the wives or the mothers. Some say they began the book thinking, 'Oh, God, a war book' and ended up realizing it was much more than that."

And, though the Go Read selection committee chose O'Brien's book before we went to war in Iraq, the parallels between the two wars are likely to be part of the conversation on Nov. 13. That's when O'Brien comes to town for a public discussion that wraps up this year's community reading experience.

"The two wars aren't identical by any means," he said, "but they're similar enough to make 'The Things They Carried' a good choice.

"Like Vietnam," he said of Iraq, "it's a frustrating war. We're having problems with language and culture. It's hard to find the enemy. Who do you shoot back at when you find them? And there's a component of anger, of course, over the Twin Towers and the desire for revenge, both of which some of us in Vietnam felt as men died."

O'Brien, who served in Vietnam in the infantry, said "jumpy" is a good way to describe how he felt there. "When you get jumpy, you start shooting back at whatever is around. That can get you into a lot of trouble."

Then there's the question of dej? vu. "Things do tend to repeat themselves. Violence. Bellicosity. Unwillingness to look at your own mistakes. Things that repeat themselves. At the same time, all you can do is keep writing."

Which is exactly what O'Brien does. His "Going After Cacciato" won the National Book Award. "In the Lake of the Woods" was Time magazine's novel of the year. "The Things They Carried," published in 1990, won France's best foreign book award and, in this country, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

"The Things They Carried" is about a lot more than the experiences of a platoon of soldiers in Vietnam. "Although it's a Vietnam novel on the surface," O'Brien said, "it's also about the things all of us carry through our lives."

And Vietnam veterans aren't the only people lugging that stuff around. "We all have fears, loneliness, guilt. And we all know those emotions, so I'm hoping that people will find ways with which to identify, even though it's a book about a war that took place a long time ago and a long way away.

"It seems to me our heaviest burdens are emotional, spiritual and moral. They, for me at least, far exceed all the burdens of physical stuff, which is transitory. Which is why the book is organized as it is. It begins with physical things but very soon moves on to the emotional baggage of a man who's been in a war."

Was that man Tim O'Brien? Well, it's a logical question, considering we're talking about two Tim O'Briens: the writer and the character in "The Things They Carried."

The writer's answer? "I evade the question. I say someday I'm not going to be around to answer that question, and the book will have to do its own talking. The book is its own answer to that question. The book says, essentially, it doesn't matter."

What does matter? "It's got to feel real. It's got to ring emotional bells in your heart. That's the kind of reality that matters, not whether anything really happened or not, in the long run.

"That's one of the points I make in the book, that I'm not sure it does matter whether the book really happened or not. You don't read 'Huckleberry Finn' thinking this never happened, this never happened, this never happened. The novel takes on a kind of truth that goes beyond mere happening. It's universal."

Sometimes, the story is truer than the reality. "A good example would be the chapter called 'On the Rainy River,' the story of the Tim character heading up to the Canadian border and deciding whether to go across. That never happened. I didn't do that."

What really happened? "I played golf and worried about the draft."

Oh.

"That's a very bad story. While it's true, it doesn't begin to get at the emotions I felt or the issues of conscience about the right thing to do. All that stuff was happening inside me, but by telling the truth of the summer you can't have people participate in the emotions. So I made up a story that people can participate in. They can feel something that I felt, something kind of bobbing between two worlds, discomfort at having to make a really tough moral decision."

That's how fiction writers work. "That's the way novels always operate," he said. "They're not necessarily directly connected to the real world we live in. Nonetheless, these books carry emotional truths. That's why we tell stories, not to aim at our heads so much as our hearts and our tear ducts and our spines and our stomachs. I hope 'The Things They Carried' squeezes some hearts in Richmond."

The question "What is real" leads to the question at the heart of O'Brien's book: "What is truth?"

"You can say it's true that it's now 10 minutes past 12." And, indeed, that's what time it was in Austin, where O'Brien was talking. But the person on the other end of the line was in another time zone.

"So it's not true where you are, and it's not true in Tokyo or on Neptune. And so a component of truth is related to time. But, then, truth can evolve and change. A person can say 'I love you' one day and 'I hate you' the next."

Truth can also be contradictory. "You can say it's true America's a great country, and that's true, but you can also say America's a country of slavery and of genocide against the American Indian, and those statements are true. And they're utterly contradictory.

"We tend as Americans to be very simple-minded about it and accept capital-T truths about the world, when in fact it's not that easy a world, it's more ambiguous and fluid and contradictory.

"So I wrote the book partly to go after the whole notion of truth itself.

That's why, in "The Things They Carried," we read the same story from different points of view. "You see the same event four or five times, and truth depends on one's angle of vision. If you don't see something happen, then it didn't happen, and that's true. If you did see it happen, then it did happen.

"The truth can happen in different ways, based on what your job is. If you're a general, you see a battle in one way. If you're a private on the ground, you see it in another way. If you're back home watching the news, you see it in still another way. So each person walks away with a different rendition of what's true."

So can you ever answer the "what is truth?" question? "No, except to say it's complicated, ambiguous, blurry and fluid. Part of what the book is about is to go after this simplistic, simpleminded, black-and-white notion of truth that junior high school students have."

O'Brien sees talking about those perceptions as part of his role in the Richmond discussion. "That's why they're having me there," he said. "It gets them asking questions. It may not change minds. But it gets people thinking. You give them examples, like the ones I've given you about time. If you start giving examples, it makes people think.

"The whole object of this is not to persuade people, it's to get these people to think. I love talking to high school and college students for that reason. It's part of education."

At the moment, O'Brien is teaching a semester of creative writing in the master of fine-arts program at Texas State University in San Marcos. "I don't teach much. You shouldn't make much of it. I teach once every two years. Just one semester every two years and just one class."

What can you teach young writers? "A lot. You can't teach talent, but you can teach a lot. You can teach sentence by sentence. You can teach the same way an editor teaches me: when to slow things down and other issues of pacing, how to keep your eye as a writer on the central story and not forget it, to trust your story and not to artificially decorate it, but really to trust it."

What else? "You can reinforce tenacity and stubbornness and perseverance, which is a big thing."

Not all aspiring writers understand that it's hard work. "People will say to me 'I've got a novel idea, I've got an idea for a story,' but they don't keep the seat of their pants down in front of the typewriter for hours on end."

Which is pretty much what O'Brien does. "I get up at 7 and work until 4 or 5 in the afternoon. It's like a job, only I do it every day. I do it on Saturday and Sunday, on my birthday, on my wife's birthday. I'm just very disciplined and regular about it.

"You kind of have to be. Even if you leave a novel or a story for just a few days, it's tough to get back and find your place. Why did I like this so much, and why was I passionate about it? It's a little bit like a dream. If you wake up from a dream, it's hard to get back into it. Often, you can't."

Right now, O'Brien's just getting started on his next project, so he says he's not sure where it's going. "I'm just in the early pages. I'm only up to Page 30 or so, so it's hard to know for sure. I'll know more in three or four months."

When he writes, he's not sure where his characters will take him. "I kind of follow my dream. I get a set of characters, put them in motion and watch them for 60 pages and find out what the central story is, then go back and begin over again.

"I just put Huckleberry on the raft and let him float down the river."

He'll temporarily beach Huck to visit Richmond, a trip he looks forward to. "For an author to have the whole community read your book and start talking about it, it's flattering and honoring. Very few new ideas are good, and this is a really good one. It binds a community together.

"But it's also great just for books. To have people reading and talking about a book is a great thing. It's pretty rare in this day and age where television is the common reference point.

"It's nice to have a book for a change."

Write Jann at P.O. Box 85333, Richmond, VA 23293; call (804) 649-6820; fax (804) 649-6836; e-mail jmalone@timesdispatch.com.