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Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

568 Words3 Pages

Unlike many forms of media about war, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a realistic depiction of war. The novel describes soldiers having fears and weaknesses. The soldiers in Alpha Company suffer and go through plenty of trauma-involving situations while in Vietnam. The war was very dehumanizing for the troops. The war was also mentally taxing on the soldiers who had to carry the burdens of deaths they encountered in the war. The war in Vietnam was dehumanizing, and The Things They Carried vividly portrays it. In “Night Life”, Rat Kiley goes crazy. O’Brien states, “Definitely not the old Rat Kiley. His whole personality seemed out of kilter” (210). In the story, Alpha Company could only move at night. Sleeping during the day and humping at night caused the soldiers …show more content…

Eventually he completely lost it and shot himself. In “The Man I Killed”, O’Brien details the Vietcong soldier he killed. He says, “His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other was a star-shaped hole” (118). In the chapter, O’Briend uses gory and crass details to describe the dead. It paints a picture of what war can do to someone. On one side it shows what can physically happen to a soldier, and on the other side it shows the mental toll a death can have on a soldier. O’Brien feels guilty for killing the soldier. The war in Vietnam was both physically and mentally dehumanizing for the soldiers in the war. Throughout the novel, Alpha Company places blame on themselves for the deaths of their fellow soldiers in Vietnam. Lieutenant Cross carries the burden of Ted Lavender’s death with him. O’Brien states, “Lavender is dead. You couldn’t burn the blame” (22). Lieutenant Cross was so infatuated with his “girlfriend” Martha that he was not able to be a good leader. His inability to lead well caused the death of one of his soldiers, Ted

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War is one of the most complex yet completely understood subjects to read or write about. Tim O’Brien has captured the true essence of being drafted into a war. “The Things They Carried” is a novel composed of multiple short stories; Each taking the reader through the perspective of the narrator showing his multiple landscapes, situations, and changing feelings from being drafted into the Vietnam War to surviving it. These stories really help one understand the effects of war on someone’s mind as well as body. Tim O’Brien is the main character and protagonist in this novel.

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In “The Man I Killed”, the story begins with a list of physical attributes and possible characteristics of the man whom O’Brien killed with a grenade in My Khe. O’Brien describes the wounds that he inflicted. The man’s jaw was in his throat, he says, and his upper lip and teeth were missing. One eye was shut, and the other looked like a star-shaped hole. O’Brien imagines that the man he killed was born in 1946 and that his parents were farmers; that he was neither a Communist nor a fighter and that he hoped the Americans would go away.

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The Vietnam War was full of grief, heartache and tragedy, no one experienced this more than the soldiers who fought in it. Tim O’Brien shows the trauma the war has caused him in his book The Things They Carried. The story focuses on the character Tim, a member of Alpha Company, who tells his stories of the war. Many of these stories circle around guilt, and each character in the book has a different way of coping with it. One character, Kiowa, acts as the glue that holds Alpha Company together.

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Upon the death of Lavender and Lt. Cross putting the blame upon himself, he had decided to burn his distraction (which was told to be the reason for Lavender’s death-it could have been prevented) alongside disregarding his good luck pebble from Martha, a symbol O’Brien had used to depict classification for Cross. Thus, in this sequence, as Cross had “renewed” himself from distraction, it can be relatable to O’Brien as he represents Lt. Cross not with a pebble nor Martha, but rather a man who rehabilitated himself in response to the death of one of his men. Furthermore, throughout the story, O’Brien begins to categorize his fellow soldiers through the listing, indicating a weak relationship between everyone. However, as the story progresses after the death of Lavender, a conversing style of writing emerged (about Lavender’s death and how the soldiers were grateful to be alive), indicating emotional connection between O’Brien and the company amplified, such as when Kiowa noticed the Lieutenant being “…in some deep hurt [indicating]… The man cares.” Additionally, O’Brien, from there forth, begins to characterize the Alpha Company through their personal traits with phrases identical to, “For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity” or the general reactions and responses the soldiers produced before, during, and after a firefight including embarrassment and apprehensive sentiment to die and the jokingly conversing subsequent to the battle.

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The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien, illustrates the experiences of a man and his comrades throughout the war in Vietnam. Tim O’Brien actually served in the war, so he had a phenomenal background when it came to telling the true story about the war. In his novel, Tim O’Brien uses imagery to portray every necessary detail about the war and provide the reader with a true depiction of the war in Vietnam. O’Brien starts out the book by describing everything he and his comrades carry around with them during the war. Immediately once the book starts, so does his use of imagery.

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The story describes in detail the physical equipment each soldier carries, as well as the emotional baggage related to each item. One day, while soldier Ted Lavender is taking a bathroom break, he is shot and killed. Cross proceeds to blame himself for Lavender’s death as he was preoccupied with thoughts of Martha at the moment he was shot. The morning after, Cross digs a foxhole to put Martha’s letters and photos in and burns them. He believes he must let go of these desires to be as great a leader as possible for his troops.

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Through his stories, Post-traumatic stress disorder, survivor’s guilt, hallucinations, and depression are represented in many interesting ways. Rat Kiley, a young medic

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In providing this glimpse, we see that O’Brien is stuck somewhere in the middle. He is unable to escape the past of the war, unable to completely re-emerge himself back into society. He is forced into writing as a release for the war, unable to progress fully back into a normal role in society. Additionally, the nature of his writing furthers the entrapment which the veterans feel toward the war. Professor, Robert Steven Kaplan claims “Each time we, the readers of The Things They Carried, return to Vietnam through O'Brien’s labyrinth of stories, we become more and

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Lavender was dead. You couldn’t burn the blame” (O’Brien 22). This quote is important because it tells about why LT. Cross burned the letters and what other

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The Things They Carried written by Tim O’Brien is a collection of made up memories featuring stories from soldiers before, during, and after the Vietnam War. O’Brien compiled the stories together in order to bring a larger audience to the Vietnam War and although readers of the story will never be able to relate to the rates of the war, it will allow readers to understand how soldiers felt upon returning from the war. Interestingly, O’Brien presents the book as a “work of fiction” because through his writing he has a way of distinguishing the surreal aspects of the war through fiction and nonfiction. The stories of Ted Lavender, Curt Lemon, and Norman Balker are examples of soldiers reacting to the unsettling circumstances during the war and the effects of the war on them. Ted Lavender, the first to die in the Alpha Company, dealt with ironic circumstances as he was the most scared member to face death but became the first to fall into death’s hands.

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Psychological Warfare in ​The Things They Carried Unless you have been in war or have read ​The Things They Carried​, you can't fully understand the psychological toll on a person's mind and body, you can't understand the psychological hardship soldiers go through in war. However, ​The Things They Carried​, by Tim O'Brien, is written to where it shows the overall psychological effects of war on soldiers in and out of Vietnam; as shown throughout the story, the recurring themes of trauma, love, and guilt give the clear psychological implications of war.

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“He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war ” (O’Brien 16) This showed the guilt felt by Lieutenant Cross when Lavendar died. He knew he loved Martha so much but he realized she didn’t share the same affection. Cross knew he would carry this weight with him for his life just as O’Brien does with the killing of the young Vietnamese soldier. “His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman’s, his nose was undamaged, there was a slight tear at the lobe of one ear, his clean black hair was swept upward into a cowlick at the rear of the skull, his forehead was lightly freckled, his fingernails were clean, the skin in his left cheek was peeled back in three ragged strips, his right cheek was smooth and hairless, there was a butterfly on his chin, his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny and it was this wound that had killed him” (O’Brien 118) shows the guilt O’Brien felt during that moment realizing he may or may not of killed this man who held similar aspects to O’Brien in that he too represented a normal man who loved his family and his life before the war.

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“That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future ... Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story” (36). The Things They Carried is a captivating novel that gives an inside look at the life of a soldier in the Vietnam War through the personal stories of the author, Tim O’Brien . Having been in the middle of war, O’Brien has personal experiences to back up his opinion about the war.

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