Pebble In The Things They Carried

“He was a soldier after all,” many people believed that soldiers should be tough and shouldn't show their emotions. Tim O’Brien tells what items the soldiers carried in the most physical sense. However, in The Things They Carried by Tim O’brien, miniscule items have tremendous meanings. Sometimes certain items remind us of loved ones whether good or bad. Jimmy Cross carried a pebble on him at all times. This pebble was “a simple pebble, an ounce at most”(O’Brien 7). However, this pebble was very meaningful to Jimmy. This pebble was sent to him by the love of his life Martha, also included with the pebble was a letter which stated:
“she had found the pebble on the Jersey shoreline, precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where

So in essence this pebble is also a reminder of the thought that haunts him every night. One night when the troops are on a mission to destroy tunnel complexes, Jimmy’s head trails off into thinking about what would happen if the tunnels collapsed on to him and Martha. While he is spacing off into some imaginary world one of his soldiers Ted Lavender gets shot and killed. “On occasion he would yell at his men to spread out the column, to keep their eyes open, but then he would slip away into daydreams, just pretending, walking barefoot along the Jersey Shore, with Martha, carrying nothing.” O’brien is not only showing that Jimmy would go off in another land, but is also showing how in Jimmy's mind when he is with Martha he's not carrying

Although the order came from a higher officer, Jimmy knows that setting up camp on that river bank was very dangerous and he shouldn't have done it. He writes a letter to Kiowa’s dad about how good of a soldier he was. The point of the letter, however, was not to inform Kiowa’s dad or family of his death, nor to tell how good of a soldier he was, the point of that letter was to help Jimmy Cross cope