The Soldiers In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

In the story, “The Things They Carried,” the soldiers in war carry many burdens, from the objects they carry to the grief, stress, and fear the war causes them. To ease the burdens that follow, each soldier has a different means of evading and coping with the war, like religion, dreaming of a loved one, using drugs, or the ultimate escape through death. In the end, they all want to find some meaning behind their experiences, but some things remain unexplainable or unjustifiable. Thus, the burden of the soldiers extends beyond the length of their military service and is something they carry their whole lives.

To begin with, there are many burdens the soldiers bear in war. There is more meaning behind what they carry with them as well as

“There’s a moral here, said Mitchell Sanders” (O’Brien). They want their war experience to teach them something or to mean something. Meaning gives their lives purpose, but Tim tells us throughout the story that morals and meanings are not always present in true war stories. Those unexplainable and unjustifiable things the soldiers couldn’t identify are sometimes never found making it difficult to search for their meaning or purpose. The things that cannot be explained are also altered in the war story they experienced, making it become a story truer than the one they were apart of. A more believable truth to ease the trouble minds trying to recover what they lost in Vietnam. “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth” (O’Brien 179). Soldiers experienced things that can only be experienced in the flesh and opening up to the truth can be troublesome to achieve. O’Brien was expressing how sometimes it is easier for the soldiers to tell their stories with less of the burden of remembering the damaging effects of the war. Other times, soldiers would change or reshape them as funny or ironic. “The war was

The soldiers physical and emotional beings were weighed down by unexplainable and unjustifiable meaning for their lives, becoming tortured by their own imagination of horror in Vietnam. All these burdens they picked up through the war never left their lives, and extends beyond their military service, becoming something they will carry for the rest of their existence. In the end, the one thing that seemed to bring the soldiers together were telling stories, whether it was about grieving for the dead or remembering who they are now and how they will survive. “We kept the dead alive with stories ... bringing body and soul back together” (O’Brien 69). This explains that stories were used to keep the dead alive, and were possibly life-saving for the dead and the