Repetition In The Things They Carried

40% of the males in the baby boomer generation served in the Vietnam War, as seen in the New York Times article “The Baby Boomer War.” Many of these people came home from the war feeling responsible for the death of someone. In his novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien employs repetition to create the effect that almost all people involved in war feel guilty for someone’s death, even if it was beyond their control. The chapters “The Man I Killed”, “Ambush”, and “In the Field'' work together to produce this effect.
Through the use of repetition in the chapter “The Man I Killed,” O’Brien conveys a motif of guilt. This is first seen when O’Brien kept saying how the man he had killed might have done something with his life and did not want to be in the war: “He wanted someday to be a teacher of mathematics. At night, lying on his mat, he could not picture himself doing the brave things his father

In this chapter, O’Brien described how a lot of people that he fought with felt guilty for Kiowa’s death. One of these people is Azar, who said “[he] felt sort of guilty almost, like if [he]'d kept [his] mouth shut none of it would've ever happened. Like it was [his] fault" (O’Brien 168). The author included this in this story because it shows that people other than O’Brien feel responsible for people’s death, even if they had nothing to do with it. Another example of someone who felt guilty for the death of Kiowa is Lieutenant Cross: “He would explain this to Kiowa's father. Carefully, not covering up his own guilt” (O’Brien 162). Lieutenant Cross was put in a difficult situation after Kiowa died because he felt like it was his fault. He said that he needed to write the letter to Kiowa’s father in a way where he told the truth about what happened, but did not make it seem like Cross was not to blame. This chapter shows that not just O’Brien feels guilty for someone's