Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

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. He is always there for his fellow soldiers. In the novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien uses the character Kiowa’s connection to culture, sympathetic nature, and lasting impact on the Alpha Company to highlight the theme that everyone manages the

He helps them remember who they are. Throughout the novel, Kiowa helps other members of Alpha Company cope with their guilt. Kiowa acts as a therapeutic presence for his friends, he is always there to comfort them in hard times. One example of this is in “The Man I Killed”, when Kiowa is comforting Tim after he kills the Vietnamese man. Kiowa says, “I'm serious." Nothing anybody could do. Come on, stop staring” (O’Brien 120). Kiowa was trying to get through to Tim that he did the right thing and that everyone would have done the same. Kiowa is just there to help Tim, since he can undoubtedly see that Tim is struggling with the reality of what he has done. Kiowa later says “So listen, you best pull your shit together. Can’t just sit here all day” (O’Brien 123). He stayed with Tim to comfort him and this comes up many times in this chapter, chapters prior and chapters after. Kiowa means everything to Tim, he is the only thing keeping him from falling apart during the war. Kiowa also comforts Jimmy Cross at the beginning after Ted Lavender dies. “Kiowa admired Lieutenant Jimmy Cross's capacity for grief. He wanted to share the man's pain” (O'Brien