Things They Carried Literary Analysis

A Thousand Pounds of Burdens

A soldier must carry a multitude of equipment: rifle, knife, helmet, body armor, grenades, and many more. In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien begins with a litany of the physical gear soldiers in Vietnam carry; with each listed item, the total weight of a soldier’s equipment slowly grows into a massive number. Assumably, the equipment would prove to be a soldier’s largest burden in the battlefield. Although soldiers in Vietnam certainly carry backbreaking amounts of equipment, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, Rat Kiley, and Norman Bowker manifest the weight of intangibles -fear, grief, and longing- and how these emotional and psychological burdens far outweigh their physical gear, tormenting them during and even after

There are times when even the soldiers, marked by society as fearless, “cover their heads and sa[y] Dear Jesus … and cringe and sob and beg for the noise to stop” (18). In part, this fear stems from the instantaneity of death. One moment, a soldier could be lightheartedly joking with friends, while the next, he or she could be on the ground, lifeless. Kiowa describes Ted Lavender’s sudden death as “Boom-down … Like cement” (6). Lavender feels the mundanity of “just another day” one moment and is dead the next. His death comes as a shock to all his fellow soldiers, who find it difficult to express emotion other than surprise and are just “pleased to be alive” (17). From the deaths of those around them, the soldiers recognize the fine line between life and death. Rat Kiley exemplifies how a soldier’s fear of death can finally build to a psychological bursting point. As a medic, Rat is constantly exposed to agony and horrifying injuries. He experiences the traumatic death of his “best friend” (75) early in the book. During a break deep in the jungle, Rat and Curt Lemon have begun goofing off, tossing around smoke grenades. “A nature hike, they [had] thought, not even war” (66). The next moment, the war has become real as Lemon steps on a landmine, his body blowing into pieces and hanging on surrounding trees. Although Lemon’s death is traumatic for all soldiers, it especially affects Rat Kiley, who feels responsible for the death. The weight of this emotional burden takes on physical form when Rat vents his feelings on an innocent baby water buffalo, repeatedly shooting it in non-vital regions “[not] to kill.. [but] to hurt” (75). Eventually, Rat’s exposure to the horrors of war as a medic manifests his own fear of death. Whenever he sees the living, “he’d start to picture how they’d look dead … he couldn’t shut off the pictures” (211). Soon, he