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A Soldier's Burden 'By Tim O' Brien

612 Words3 Pages

A Soldier’s Burden Tim O’Brien’s short story’s central theme is the burden of war all soldiers face. The story takes place in Vietnam, with Lieutenant Cross leading a small team of soldiers. Distracted by thoughts of home and unrequited love, Lieutenant Cross witnesses the death of one of his soldiers. The story follows Lavender’s death and the weight it places on his fellow men. O’Brien uses the soldier’s equipment and personal items to contrast the mental and physical baggage each man carries. The weight of each item and piece of equipment is used to further illustrate the toll the war takes on its participants. O’Brien mentions the weight of their gear early in the story. The narrator, Cross, lists the standard equipment every soldier carries …show more content…

Although they each share a common burden, they all bear their own personal burdens. Soldiers must deal with their mortality daily while in combat. Cross uses his letters and pictures to escape the battlefield. An escape to simpler times, with pictures being the most common keepsake. The narrator states, “almost everyone humped photographs,” carrying them wherever they went. Cross carries “the responsibility for the lives of his men,” another burden placed on his shoulders. His priorities are misplaced; he fails in his mission to protect the lives of his soldiers. This weighs heavily on his conscience. Eventually, he dispenses with his unneeded burdens to step up and properly lead his men. Cross trades one burden for another, placing the blame for Lavender’s death on his shoulders. Lavender’s death releases him from his burdens. O’Brien uses the imagery of the men scavenging his equipment to show the men taking on the burden of his death. Each man faces his death in his own way, some responding in anger and others in disbelief. Cross remarks: “He went down under an exceptional burden,” yet his burdens were meaningless once he

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Shame and self-hatred surface when Lieutenant Cross realizes “…Ted Lavender [is] dead because he [loves] her [Martha] so much and [cannot] stop thinking about her” (326). Furthermore, the pebble that once symbolized his affection for Martha is replaced with a figurative “stone in his stomach” (332), representative of his guilt. In order to begin to remove his distracting infatuation with Martha, Cross takes the following action: “On the morning after Ted Lavender [dies], First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross [crouches] at the bottom of his foxhole and [burns] Martha’s letters. Then he [burns] the two photographs” (336). Cross’ burning of Martha’s letters and photographs is a physical representation of the transformation in his personality and priorities.

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Costing him the life of his friend and brother in combat, Ted Lavender. He never would forgive himself for Lavender’s death, how could he? These men were his responsibility and he was more focused on a girl on the other side of the earth. He felt the weight of guilt crawl slowly up his back and make it’s home deep in his rucksack, never to be relieved. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross wanted to find a way to ease his grieving heart.

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“They carried shameful memories” (O’Brien 439). The symbolism used in this short story is the items the soldiers carry on their back. The items the soldiers carry is the psychological weight of war. “They shared the weight of memory” (436).

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O’Brien states, “Lavender is dead. You couldn’t burn the blame” (22). Lieutenant Cross was so infatuated with his “girlfriend” Martha that he was not able to be a good leader. His inability to lead well caused the death of one of his soldiers, Ted

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O’Brien used this to express the burden each solider had to carry on his back from one station to another. Having this repetition at the very front created curiosity to attract the reader in and also clarify the characteristic based on the thing they carried. O’Brien also lists these items weight to emphasize the physical burdens soldiers had to carry. Using a repetitive list of tangible items carried allows O'Brien to then put emphasis on the weight of the intangible - the psychological impact of war - that also troubled the soldier’s hearts and minds. Each soldier carried their personal values which shows, each soldier is a unique, individual person.

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The story describes in detail the physical equipment each soldier carries, as well as the emotional baggage related to each item. One day, while soldier Ted Lavender is taking a bathroom break, he is shot and killed. Cross proceeds to blame himself for Lavender’s death as he was preoccupied with thoughts of Martha at the moment he was shot. The morning after, Cross digs a foxhole to put Martha’s letters and photos in and burns them. He believes he must let go of these desires to be as great a leader as possible for his troops.

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The author was writing the story “The Things They Carried” expressed so many thoughts and feelings about what the soldiers had faced, they showed their feelings and duties, life or death, and overall fear and dedication. This story shows the theme of the physical and emotional burdens that everyone is going through in the war. By showing his readers what the soldier’s daily thoughts are and how they handle what is going on around them. Tim O’Brien expresses this theme by using characterization, symbolism, and tone continuously. In the story, physical and emotional burdens plagued several characters as they all had baggage weighing them down.

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Continuing To Be Affected Soldiers participating in a war they do not understand, suffer physical and mental anguish trying to cope with the horrors of it all. Tim O’Brien is both the narrator and protagonist of the short story “The Things They Carried.” He enters the war a scared young man afraid of the shame that dodging the war would bring him and leaves the war a guilt-ridden middle-aged man who tells stories about Vietnam in order to cope with his painful memories. Jimmy Cross’s character represents the deep effects responsibility has on those who are too immature to handle it. As a sophomore in college, he signs up for the Reserve Officers Training Corps because it is worth a few credits and because his friends are doing it.

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After the death of character Ted Lavender it was obvious that many of the men dealt with the loss in many ways. They coped by joking about the situation and discussing the event multiple times. Each of the men all had to deal with the death as well as the potentiality of their own death themselves. While the men were scared of death they also secretly longed for a release from the hellish situation of war that they were forced into. Throughout these grievances, the men still had to remain strong throughout the situation.

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Lavender was dead. You couldn’t burn the blame” (O’Brien 22). This quote is important because it tells about why LT. Cross burned the letters and what other

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He served in the army during the conflict in Vietnam. He saw things and experienced events that changed him internally. In "The Things They Carried", O’Brien creates a scenario that seems to have been close to his heart. He describes the death of Lavender a fellow G.I. and friend. Lavender takes tranquilizers and smokes marijuana to calm his already frayed out nerves.

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Lavender feels the mundanity of “just another day” one moment and is dead the next. His death comes as a shock to all his fellow soldiers, who find it difficult to express emotion other than surprise and are just “pleased to be alive” (17). From the deaths of those around them, the soldiers recognize the fine line between life and death. Rat Kiley exemplifies how a soldier’s fear of death can finally build to a psychological bursting point. As a medic, Rat is constantly exposed to agony and horrifying injuries.

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999 Words | 4 Pages

Over all, this story allows us to observe changes within the mentalities of army officers. First, the trauma of living in a war zone can add a significant amount of intangible weight into someone’s life. In “The Things They Carried,” we discover that Cross’s men “carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die (443).” Given that the majority of humans have experienced some form of trauma, we can understand how some men were driven to suicide and others into

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On page 3 he says “Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried 34 rounds when he was shot and killed outside Than Khe, and he went down under an exceptional burden, more than 20 pounds of ammunition, plus the flak jacket and … plus the unweighed fear.”. The soldiers would rather die than be embarrassed, they didn’t care about the honor or glory of being a hero. The narrator mentions on page 12 that “They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed and died because they were embarrassed not to.” They didn’t want to be there, but they could not take the easy way out and be called a coward, they had to fight through it until they got to go home.

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Tim O'Brien's “The Things They Carry,” tells a story about the lives of young men during war. The narrator tells his story from first person, marking all of his adventures and experiences of his companions. O’Brien crafts his piece through the use of repetition, symbolism, and metaphors to convey the idea of physical and psychological hardships of soldiers during war. Though the literary device of repetition, O'Brien portrays the physical and psychological hardships of a soldier.

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