Douglas MacArthur once said, “The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war” (“Douglas MacArthur Quotes”). The wounds and scars that soldiers are left with are not all visible to the naked eye. War can impact the human mind more than most people realize. War changes how a person acts, how they think, and who they are. While someone who has not experienced the nightmares of war might see the physical effects of war as the greatest threat, it is actually the psychological effects of war that leave the deepest scars. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms are novels whose purpose is to inform the reader on the negative effects …show more content…
“The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near-necessities were… These items weighed about between 12 and 18 pounds… By necessity, and because it was SOP, they all carried steel helmets that weighed 5 pounds” (O’Brien 2). O’Brien’s restatement of the things the soldiers carried being only “necessities or near-necessities” shows how war breaks soldiers down into the lists of equipment that they carry. More specifically, O’Brien talks about the “steel helmets” and other “items” that “they all carried” to show that the soldiers all become the same person and carry the same things. He does this to prove that war doesn’t care about who or what someone was before. Instead, all individualities of the person are left behind as they are now titled as a soldier and lose their personal identity among their horrific memories of the war. “The catalog of objects carried, the accumulating weight of things, extends in steady, numbing procession. Gradually the repetition of weights and measures acquires meaning. This is what their lives have become, step after step, ounce after ounce” (McCarthy 2). O’Brien uses the “numbing procession” that is felt through his restatement of the “accumulating weight of things” the soldiers carried to share that these things also had an emotional weight. Throughout the novel, O’Brien shows that the many things carried by the soldiers gradually acquire more meaning and eventually redefine their lives as “step after step, ounce after ounce” of doing the same pointless actions over and