The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

“The worst affected from corruption is the common man” Kailash Kher. In a collection of short stories, Tim O’Brien writes about his horrific experiences during the Vietnam War in The Things They Carried. He recounts the graphic details of morbid ordeals he and his platoon encounter. They are forced to undergo extreme situations where they murder hundreds of Vietnamese and suffer loss. Overtime, the soldiers suffer mentally and face the consequences of their actions. War is the opposite of purity where corruption evolves soldiers into dehumanized reflections of themselves. The nature of war shows how dehumanizing it is, turning soldiers into savages as seen in the story, “How to Tell A True War Story”. War stories, as told by Tim O’Brien,

War is dangerous because it is able to corrupt innocence and never return it. When purity is introduced into war, it becomes tainted. Mark Fossie has his girlfriend flown in from America into Vietnam where over time she becomes numb and addicted to the chaos of war. She goes missing but eventually returns with the Greenies. Fossie and Rat Kiley see her for the first time since she had disappeared, “In part it was her eyes: utterly flat and indifferent. There was no emotion in her stare, no sense of the person behind it. But the gesture part, he said, was her jewelry. At the girl’s throat was a necklace of human tongues” (105). Fossie’s girlfriend was lost to the war because she was curious. Her eyes witnessed the ugly, brutal, and destructive nature of war and she became desensitized to the ordeal. The human tongues do not faze her because she is numb and depraved. When she arrives, she is a metaphor for innocence, but she is contaminated by the war, demonstrating how dehumanizing it truly is. Dehumanization is a process that happens over time. Rat interprets the affair in his own words, “You come over clean and you get dirty and then afterword it’s never the same” (109). Fossie’s girlfriend was innocent and curious but the war tainted her pureness. After she arrives, she wants a rush, a thrill, a way to get the same effects of taking a drug because it is the rebellious thing to

Soldiers become so corrupt that they cannot incorporate themselves into society again. Norman Bowker survived the war but not as the same person. He killed himself and Tim O’Brien writes about how he tried to help himself, “At one point he had enrolled in the junior college in his hometown, but the course work, he said, seemed too abstract, too distant, with nothing real or tangible at stake, certainly not the stakes of a war” (149). Bowker did not see the point in trying to go back to school because what he was receiving was not visible results. The stakes of his classes were not as thrilling or demanding as murdering the Vietnamese back in Vietnam, The consequences were not extreme as he was used to. He was barbarized by the war and hence he was unable to integrate himself back into society. He no longer had any humanity to try to be a member of society because the war deprived him of any civil interactions. Norman Bowker did not have a life outside of the war. Before he took his life, Bowker wrote to O’Brien stating how he felt back in the United States, “‘The thing is,’ he wrote, ‘there’s no place to go. Not just in this lousy little town. In general. My life, I mean. It’s almost like I got killed over in Nam… Hard to describe. That night when Kiowa got wasted, I sort of sank down into the sewage with him… Feels like I’m in deep shit’”