Stress Disorder In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder seems far more prevalent in Vietnam War veterans than in those of other wars: fifteen out of one hundred Vietnam Veterans have combat-related PTSD as compared to one out of twenty World War II veterans (“How Common is PTSD”). Although it is nearly impossible to pinpoint the root cause for the rise in PTSD in this generation of veterans, there are many factors that could have contributed to this rising issue. Many used to believe that these veterans were simply young, immature boys dragged into the war by the draft and were unable to cope with the pressures of combat: the average age for a soldier in Vietnam was nineteen and in World War II it was twenty-six (Roark 838). However, every war has its nineteen-year-olds

The tactics used in Vietnam had never been seen by the U.S. military prior to this conflict. Combat patrols, although it had been used before, were much different in Vietnam, as shown in Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried.” In this story, the company of soldiers move with a “kind of inertia,” with “no sense of strategy or mission,” searching “villages without knowing what to look for, not caring” (O’Brien 1306). The Vietnam War, at least to the troops, did not have much of a significance. Unlike in World War II, when the goal was to prevent fascist dictators from taking control Europe, Africa, and Asia; troops in the Vietnam War had no idea what they were doing there; they were just pulled into the conflict without much drive to succeed or sense of duty to defeat the enemy. To them, Vietnam was just a small country in the middle of nowhere that posed no threat to the United States or world peace; because of this they moved from “village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost” (O’Brien 1306). However, when the soldiers in this story lost a comrade with nothing to show for it, everything became pointless. A study showed that there are “strong associations between combat loss and psychological maladjustment in analysis of NVVRS ” (Currier). This is seen in “The Things They Carried”

It is hard to imagine being in a war where the troops with the most advanced weapons cannot easily overcome the enemy, but this is what made the Vietnam War so traumatic for the troops. The soldiers in “The Things They Carried” show their concerns about not having the tools necessary to win the war or even to stay alive. In the story, the soldiers carry a mine detector although it is “often useless because of the shrapnel in the earth, but they carried it anyway, partly for safety, partly for the illusion of safety” (O’Brien 1303). Now, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War had mines and useless detectors, but they had a clear enemy. They could see either a German uniform or an ally uniform, or a North Korean uniform or a South Korean uniform. But in the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese did not wear uniforms; they often hid amongst villages with uninvolved citizens, sometimes they would attach bombs to children and send them to groups of American troops; at night, during guard duty, North Vietnamese guerillas would sneak up on a US soldier and slit his throat and then the next one to take that position would find the other dead. Because conditions like these, the American soldiers deployed in Vietnam had to