Loyalty In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross faced a conflicting dilemma of love versus duty in Tim O’Brien’s short story, “The Things They Carried.” Jimmy Cross exhibited a loyalty to both the woman he loved, Martha, and to the men that he served in separate incidents in the narrative. In the beginning of the narrative, Cross found time to place himself in a state of day-dreaming about Martha because thinking about her provided an escape from reality. Because of the circumstances that Cross later found himself, his loyalties needed adjustment. He decided to place his men and his duty as their leader above anything or anyone else in the final paragraphs in order to protect his men, even at the expense of making life more difficult for himself and his men. First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross changed his character because he made his men his number one priority and decided to live in reality rather than fantasy. The first paragraph of “The Things They Carried” focused on Jimmy Cross’s pseudo relationship with his crush, Martha, and at that moment in the story, Cross’s goal was to liberate himself from the horrors of Vietnam. Thinking

The distractions included Martha, the good-luck pebble that she gave him, which Cross considered using Lee Strunk’s slingshot to discard, the daydreams, and the sloppiness of the platoon that had been occurring with notice but without punishment. Cross eliminated his fantastical thoughts and decided to think realistically. Cross admitted, “This was not Mount Sebastian, it was another world, where there were no pretty poems or midterm exams, a place where men died because of carelessness and gross stupidity” (1003), which reflected a change of attitude in Cross; in the first paragraph of the short story, he only wanted to daydream about Martha on Mount Sebastian, however, after the death of Lavender, Cross got the zap that he needed and came back to reality where his men needed