Mental Changes In The Things They Carried

The Vietnam War, fought between Vietnam and the United States of America, caused a lot of people’s lives to become mentally altered. Whether or not the people got affected positively or negatively was up to the person. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried comprises a series of short stories about different types of people departing for the Vietnam War. When all of the people returned home, they embodied different people than they were before they traveled to the war. War affects everyone mentally, but only those that are there on their own accord got affected positively, those that do not want to be there are affected negatively.

Tim O’Brien has nothing but negative thoughts about the war, which resulted in him returning from the war and

In another chapter from The Things They Carried titled “Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong”, Mark Fossie is inviting his girlfriend Mary Anne to visit him for some time in Vietnam during the war. At first, Mary Anne is embodying a feminine persona, wearing pink, jewelry, and makeup. As time passes on, Mary Anne expresses more interest in the war and even starts participating in war-like activities. A passage in “Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong” writes, “Once or twice, gently, Mark Fossie suggested that it might be time to think about heading home, but Mary Anne laughed and told him to forget it. ‘Everything I want,’ she said, ‘is right here’” (O’Brien 95). When Mary Anne laughs at Fossie’s suggestion of departing, she is acting as if the suggestion represents a joke and that the idea itself was hilarious. Telling him to “forget it” is displaying that she never desires to consider leaving. Mary Anne’s use of the word “everything” to pronounce to Fossie what she was gaining by remaining with him in Vietnam is suggesting that Mary Anne does not care that she is leaving her friends and family back at home. All she requires to be happy is her boyfriend and the war. Undeniably, Mary Anne want’s to be a part of the war and is in Vietnam on her own terms. Later on in “Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong”, the reader learns that to Mary Anne, “Vietnam had

Jimmy Cross, a college student, is carrying a great burden by representing his group of soldiers. A chapter from The Things They Carried titled “In the Field” states, “Jimmy Cross did not want the responsibility of leading these men. He had never wanted it … he had signed up for the Reserve Officer Training Corps … because it seemed preferable to letting the draft take him” (O’Brien 160). The use of the word “never” to describe Cross’s want for being a lieutenant displays that at no point in his life had he ever desired to lead a band of men in the war but it appeared to be a better option than being drafted into the war. On account of this, it is noticeable that Cross was not participating in the war because he wanted to. It is because what he was doing was more preferable than being drafted, even though what he was doing was not something he had ever wanted to manage. When Cross first joined the war, he embodied a boy madly in love with a girl named Martha. A chapter titled “The Things They Carried” is making it evident that Cross’s feelings about Martha have been modified enormously. “He hated her. Yes, he did. He hated her. Love, too, but it was a hard, hating kind of love” (O’Brien 23). Another word for hate is resentment so furthermore, Cross’s feelings towards Martha has gone from love and always thinking about her to hatred and resentment,