War In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

People go through life experiencing both big and small events. The soldiers had to deal with fear, guilt ,and death at war. These things can change a person for the better, or for the worse, but it’s what they do after the events that make them who they are. For soldiers in war, this is what they have to deal with everyday when they were in Vietnam fighting. Tim O’Brien tells of these stories in The Things They Carried to show how war can change their mentality and their destiny in life. Lt. Jimmy Cross was just a young man that took on the role of leading the men. He carried the responsibility of trying to keep the men of his platoon alive. Whenever he had time he also thought about his love for Martha. For Tim O’Brien, he was just another

Jimmy Cross had to deal with the fact that martha was never going to love him like he loves her. He knew that he was never going to get over his love for her and he tried to get over her but he knew that it wasn't possible, “First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross crouched at the bottom of his foxhole and burned Martha's letters. Then he burned the two photographs” (O’Brien 21). For Rat Kiley he hated the war and seeing all the death around him. He finally couldn't take the fact that no matter what he did people were going to die and he hated that, “He said he’d done his best. He’d tried to be a decent medic. Win some lose some, he said , but he’d tried hard” (O’Brien 129). He next day after he was talking to Mitchell Sanders he shot himself in the foot after doping himself up and eventually he died. He thought that they only way to get out of the war and not think about the war was suicide. Tim O’Brien it was a different ending then it was for Rat Kiley. O’Brien never killed himself like Rat Kiley did but they both hated the war and having to see the death of people around them. O’Brien hated what happened in Vietnam, the death of his friends, the fear he had, and the guilt that he had about going to war. For Rat Kiley his was out of the war was death, for O’Brien the way he dealt with the war was that he wrote stories about the war. That was his little way of dealing with what happened while he was at war in Vietnam. He made a living about writing stories from the war and now he has a wife and