Fear In The Things They Carried, By Tim O Brien

From the boogeyman to death, everyone has fears lying beneath the surface. No one knows the harsh reality of these fears until someone unearths them; throughout the course of the Vietnam War many of these secrets were revealed as people had to come face to face with their deepest fears whether they wanted to, or not. In the novel, The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, the soldiers of the Alpha Company begin fighting during the Vietnam War. All soldiers carry the essentials of fighting in war, and one of those things is the fear to keep them going. The interview of, My Lai. Vietnamese woman, Kim Phuc, tells the story of how her clothes started melting into her skin during an American napalm bomb. Additionally, in the photograph, Struggling

Unfortunately, these soldiers are not superheroes, they are men, and men get scared. Soldiers try to fight through their fears because they do not want others to think they are not masculine. O’Brien depicts this fear with the line, “the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed and died because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to war in the first place, just to avoid embarrassment” (21). Blushing, getting all hot inside with your cheeks getting a slight rosacea. This was an unbearable reality to men who killed and got killed for their country; and more than, that it was the reason for all the killing. No man wanted to be seen as a priss, too afraid to do a “man’s job” to defend his motherland. No man wanted to be left at home for others to assume he was not “strong enough” to do just that. But the sad truth was that no man wanted the world to know the truth. The fear of embarrassment. It was life and death. Although fear was what pushed many soldier to go to war, it was also a motivating factor got them to attempt to escape it. Temptation (to escape the war) was an additional daily battle the men had to face. All men, “carried the common secret of cowardice… this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down” (77). Even though this was not an uncommon feeling, no man wanted to be the one

Men are waving down a helicopter scared that this might be their last chance to escape death. Since arriving in war, these brave men, have risked their lives day in and day out for their fellow soldiers, but on this day, they are ready to stop being scared. The face of one man looks up at the helicopter with fear in his eyes that even though he is alive, he died in Vietnam. Americans saw this photo during the nightly updates of the Vietnam War. As this photo was released, anti-war demonstrations were at an all time high, and people were terrified. Everyone just wanted their men