What Are The Similarities Between The Things They Carried And Komunyakaa

Those involved in war must pay a physical, emotional, and psychological tax. In the Vietnam War, this tax was greater than ever and weighed more once the war was over. The impact is not easily forgotten and though attempts are made to heal, war haunts the psyche of those who survive it. In the case of Tim O’Brien and Yusuf Komunyakaa, it took nearly two decades to put pen to paper and write about the experience. Luckily, their time in Vietnam eventually lead to powerful work such as O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” and Komunyakaa’s “Facing It”.
“The Things They Carried” describes a portion of the Vietnam experience through the eyes of 24- year-old Jimmy Cross, a lovelorn Lieutenant responsible for a team of young men. O’Brien’s work in

The strongest example of this is in O’Brien’s description of the antagonist, Ted Lavender “…who was scared, carried 34 rounds when he was shot and killed… went down under an exceptional burden…plus the unweighed fear” (2). The eventual death of Lavender greatly impacts the story and stability of the team. Instead of processing the loss, they soldier on into a local village and “. . .[burn] everything. They shot chickens and dogs, they trashed the village . . .watched the wreckage” (O’Brien 5). In the case of our protagonist, Jimmy Cross, he breaks under the psychological weight of the loss of a man under his protection. It is clear that he feels personally responsible due to his distraction with a woman named Martha. To Cross he “. . . had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead. . .”(O’Brien 5). The impact of this thought is only emphasized by the realization that “. . .this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war” (O’Brien 5). Though he must find a way to process and grieve

Where O’Brien’s story is set against the backdrop of war zones, Komunyakaa’s persona is placed at the Vietnam memorial created in 1982 (7 years after the Vietnam War ended and 6 years before the poem was written). One of the profound similarities between these two pieces of literature is the emotional response to death that each writer has created for the reader. Though different in methods of expression, the grief described in “Facing It” resembles that of Lieutenant Cross’ in “The Things They Carried.” Clearly Komunyakaa is as haunted as O’Brien’s Lieutenant Cross when he says, “I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap’s white flash” (554). This is not a new experience, as it was for Cross in “The Things They Carried”, but a flashback of what Komunyakaa’s persona has survived and avoided thinking about. Each of these characters struggles to carry these emotions. Though Komunyakaa and O’Brien did not fight this war together, they have articulated similar traumas, which have impacted the remainder of their lives. In the same way that Lieutenant Cross has sacrificed his sense of peace to the war, Komunyakaa’s persona has sacrificed the same. As the persona “ . . . goes down the 58,022 names, half expecting to find [his] own in letters like smoke” it feels as though he may be as lost as the names on the memorial (Komunyakaa 553). Like Lieutenant Cross, this persona has been