How Is Jimmy Cross Presented In The Things They Carried

Tim O'Brien because of his own experience in the war as a soldier depicts the Vietnamese war perfectly in his novel “The Things They Carried”. He's depiction is very rare and exceptional, for its feel and emotion that it delivers. Throughout his novel he lists all the different objects each of the soldier carries that characterizes the characters specifically, like Kiowa carrying the New Testament and Jimmy Cross carrying Marthas letters. But Tim suggests that the things they carried were far more than the objects they held literally while humping. “The things they carried were largely determined by necessity, they carried ghosts, they carried all they could bear and then some, including a silent awe for terrible power of the things they carried”

Jimmy cross is again the perfect example of a person taking responsibility to lead his partisans through this very important time that is war. "He preferred to view his men not as units but as human beings. and Kiowa had been a splendid human being, the very best, intelligent and gentle and quite-spoken" (164) from the book it’s clearly shown that Jimmy had never intended to these men in the war and only signed up for it for his friend back at college, so he obviously has to take this huge responsibility since they picked him to be the Lieutenant and the leader "there was no way lieutenant cross would allow such a good man to be lost under the slime of a shit field" (164) The soldiers of course also had responsibility to be courageous, to be brave. It doesn’t matter for who or what they were in the war for, but the fact that they were taking a part of it as being soldiers made them responsible for their lives and for the lives of all the soldiers around them. one small mistake would kill someone from their team. “In war the causes of death were immediate. A moment of carelessness or bad judgment, stupidity” (176) They were all responsible for being courageous and valiant "courage was not always a matter of yes or no. sometimes it came in degrees like cold" "all of us I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth bravely and forthrightly without thought of personal loss or discredit"