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PTSD In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

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In November of 1955, the United States entered arguably one of the most horrific and violent wars in history. The Vietnam War is documented as having claimed about 58,000 American lives and more than 3 million Vietnamese lives. Soldiers and innocent civilians alike were brutally slain and tortured. The atrocities of such a war are near incomprehensible to those who didn’t experience it firsthand. For this reason, Tim O’Brien, Vietnam War veteran, tries to bring to light the true horrors of war in his fiction novel The Things They Carried. The novel focuses on coping with the death and horror of war. It also speaks volumes about the true nature of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the never-ending struggle of dealing with it. In the …show more content…

One event that seems to haunt him constantly is the death of his friend Kiowa. Years after the war, Norman continues to struggle with the images and atrocities of war. He even reaches out to O'Brien in a letter exclaiming, “the thing is,’ he wrote, ‘there’s no place to go. Not just in this lousy little town. In general. My life, I mean. It’s almost like I got killed over in Nam… Hard to describe. That night when Kiowa got wasted, I sort of sank down into the sewage with him… Feels like I’m still in deep sh*t’” (150). Norman is unable to find words to describe his struggles and therefore can’t move on from the war. This just shows that the horrors don’t stop, even after the war. Norman is desperately grasping for a way to understand everything but he is unable to. Because of this, Norman, unlike Roy, is unable to cope and eventually takes his own life to escape his own mind. Additionally, Tim O’Brien himself has been greatly afflicted by the psychological aspect of war. Even after all these years, O’Brien is still unable to get the images of Vietnam out of him head, specifically of the man he killed. In the novel, he repeats the description of the man numerous times, almost to the point of excess, saying,“he was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay with one leg bent beneath him, his jaw in his throat, his face neither expressive nor inexpressive. One eye was shut. The other was a star-shaped hole” (124). This quote epitomizes the trauma caused by war. O’Brien is trying to cope, mostly through writing these war stories but has yet to put it behind him. He feels guilt, grief, and responsibility, even making up possible scenarios about the life of the man he killed and the type of person he was. This

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Those involved in war must pay a physical, emotional, and psychological tax. In the Vietnam War, this tax was greater than ever and weighed more once the war was over. The impact is not easily forgotten and though attempts are made to heal, war haunts the psyche of those who survive it. In the case of Tim O’Brien and Yusuf Komunyakaa, it took nearly two decades to put pen to paper and write about the experience. Luckily, their time in Vietnam eventually lead to powerful work such as O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” and Komunyakaa’s “Facing It”.

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He also wrote this book because coming home after war is no celebration because his brother Norman, after war, killed himself because he couldn't handle what he saw and did. No one could understand what happened, only his brothers who were with him at war , could understand. The viewpoint O’brien express is that during war, as a soldier, you learn to deal with things that come at you. Everything you face is war: people, weather, death. The things They Carried is a eye witness and and true story that can also be considered false.

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His coping mechanism that he uses is through his writing about the Vietnam War. He is writing because he is trying to deal or understand what happened in the war. In the chapter “The Lives of the living Dead”, explains that through O’Brien’s writings, he able to come to peace at what he observed and did in combat. He may not understand why events had happened because he has not remembered the most traumatic experiences clearly. Even if his friends are dead, he will be able to remember them and his surviving platoon, through his stories to immortalize them.

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O’Brien tells many stories about death, friends, and times during the war. These stories are all fiction because in the novel O’Brien is his own main character making the novel a fiction due to the changes in the stories and people. O’Brien consistently reminds his readers that the stories in his book are fiction, but explaining that stories

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Sadly, PTSD is common with veterans from traumatic wars like this and Tim O'Brien address this occurrence in the book. In the chapter "Speaking of Courage" Norman Bowker returns to Iowa on the Fourth of July. He thinks about the unfulfilled dreams that could of happened between him and his high school sweetheart Sally and reminisces about his dead friend, Max Arnold, wishing to have another conversation with him and it seems that he is stuck in the past. He now only finds comfort in driving his fathers Chevy around his old neighborhood,this makes him feel safe and gives him comfort. He talks about how his father only cared about what Medals he got and how he could of gotten a silver star.

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People often reminisce about the decisive victories and suffering defeats of war, but the overwhelming horrors and tragedies of the actual soldiers are often overlooked. Because of this harsh truth, Tim O’Brien sheds light on the physical and psychological burdens on the life of a common soldier through his autobiography, The Things They Carried. Despite all the atrocities found in the Vietnam War, O’Brien still manages to appreciate life and all the people around him. Through all of this, everyone who reads this book can learn something new about the world around them in addition to something about themselves. Ultimately, The Things They Carried should stay in the curriculum because it truly shows the terrors and hardships of war, exemplifies

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A similar guiltiness is displayed by Norman Bowker, after he feels that his lack of courage resulted in the grotesque death of Kiowa. The feeling of not doing enough to save a friend haunts many war veterans. For Bowker, his inability to save Kiowa and other experiences of Vietnam left him directionless in his life after the war, ultimately leading to his suicide a few years down the road. Unlike Tim, who uses his ability to create stories that capture the complicated emotions of war to cope in his life back in America, Norman feels alone since he is unable to share his inner feelings from Vietnam that still haunt

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Nobody can understand this feeling if they have not been to war themselves. After the war Norman struggles to find himself, he always feels trapped almost like he may have made it home but emotionally a part of him will always be at

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The everyday life in the forests of Vietnam are always a battle, from village to village the Alpha Company lived and committed atrocities with the power of warfare. Although O’Brien seems to dislike the forms of force used against the Vietnamese he is aware that any Vietnamese in sight becomes an enemy. Despite that he is scarred with everything he lives as a soldier from shooting someone with an M-16 to his own unit members thrown into pieces by a grenade. War life like it is presented by O’Brien is not like any kind of life: from the successful ambushes, to losing half of the unit, or not knowing who would or wouldn't come back became a fear that because they were soldiers they were forced to cover. And many times they covered it through showing their “masculinity” by taking advantage of woman from the villages taking them by force or from canteens.

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PTSD is an underlying topic in the book. There are many people in the novel who have problems dealing with the things they have done or seen during their time in the war. One man shot himself in the toe to get sent home, another killed himself after the war was over. Tim O’Brien himself said “I’ll never die. I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dar and come down thirty years later, I realize it as Tim trying to save Timmy

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In the book The Things They Carried, people experienced serious mental trauma. Not only did some, if not all, of them come back home with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but they also came back to a nation full of hate and uneasiness towards the veterans. These veterans came back home riddled with guilt and visions flashing before their eyes every time they closed them, people’s worst nightmares put into real life, and yet these veterans are dishonorably discharged, with statements saying that they must not have been good enough for the war. Tim O’Brien, the author of this book, decided to tell us all of the war stories he will never be able to forget, in order to help us picture the unimaginable horrors that all of these veterans went through.

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Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in The Things They Carried During the turbulent times of the Vietnam War, thousands of young men entered the warzone and came face-to-face with unimaginable scenes of death, destruction, and turmoil. While some perished in the dense Asian jungles, others returned to American soil and were forced to confront their lingering combat trauma. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried provides distinct instances of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and reveals the psychological trauma felt by soldiers in the Vietnam War. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD for short, is the most common mental illness affecting soldiers both on and off the battlefield.

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