Things They Carried By Tim O Brien: An Analysis

On March 16, 1968, U.S soldiers reportedly massacred over 400 unarmed civilians, including women and children, in the village of My Lai. This atrocity caused an uproar across the world and further solidified Americans' already substantial opposition to the Vietnam war. In addition to murdering innocents, subsequent reports accuse soldiers of gang-raping and abusing the women, which exponentially increased the despicableness of the already ignominious event. This leads many to question how U.S soldiers, who were representing the United States's ideals, could commit the very same atrocities they had traveled overseas to prevent. However, upon close analysis of the conditions the soldiers were subjected to in Vietnam as presented in Tim O'Brien's

This is evidenced by when he says, “I declared my intention to have no part of Vietnam. With delightful viciousness, a secret will, I declared the war evil, the draft board evil, the town evil in its lethargic acceptance of it all” (O’Brien, 21). Having been forced into the war by the draft, many other soldiers shared his sentiment, and this was purveyed through their actions and general outlooks on the war. Seasoned soldiers, who had perfected their craft, slept through their watches during ambushes, and the entire company ended up faking more ambushes than they actually engaged in. According to O’Brien, “Phony ambushes were good for morale, best game we played on LZ Minuteman” (O’Brien, 106) Rather than fighting to win the war, this mentality lead the soldiers to simply focus on surviving long enough to be pulled off of the front lines and re-assigned to a job in the rear guard. “...all those soldiers walked on and on and on, waiting, and the mines finally got them. Were they wise to keep walking? The alternative... I thought, was to sit on a single splotch of earth and silently wait for the war to end” (O’Brien, 139). As O’Brien implicitly hints in this quote, regardless of which option the soldiers chose, in the end, they were simply waiting for their

Uncertainty over whether the person in front of their weapon was a civilian or an enemy, uncertainty over whether there was any difference between the two, uncertainty over whether the war would ever end, and uncertainty over whether they’d live long enough to see the end of the war, to name a few. This uncertainty translated into paranoia and frustration for the soldiers, as the tactics employed by the Viet Cong turned the battles from traditional warfare to psychological warfare. Rather than two armies in uniforms emblazoned with their country’s insignia on opposite sides of a designated battlefield fighting each other, the Vietnamese instead used their advantage of home ground by planting traps everywhere possible and blending in with the civilians to ambush the Americans. When detailing his solitary instance of contact with Vietnamese soldiers in a firefight, O’Brien says, “It was the first and only time I would ever see the living enemy, the men intent on killing me” (O’Brien, 97). The rest of his time in Vietnam he spends chasing shadows, “[n]o enemy soldiers to shoot back at, only hedgerows and bushes and clumps of dead trees” (O’Brien, 118). As evidenced by these quotes, for the majority of the war, the US soldiers were tasked with trying to fight an invisible enemy. Instead of traditional warfare, their situation was parallel to that of