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Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

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The story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O'Brien is about First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross in the Vietnam War, struggling to balance his love for a young girl named Martha and his duties as the Lieutenant. Throughout the story his love becomes an obsession which he cannot control. In the story the narrator keeps naming everything the soldiers carried(tangible and intangible) and tells the reader how much they weighed. By the end of the story we, as readers, realize that the soldiers are carrying all of their gear, but the most important things they are carrying is the fear, memories, and thoughts of loved ones. In “The Things They Carried” Tim O’Brien is trying to tell us that the heaviest things we carry are the ones which weigh nothing. From …show more content…

On page 3 he says “Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried 34 rounds when he was shot and killed outside Than Khe, and he went down under an exceptional burden, more than 20 pounds of ammunition, plus the flak jacket and … plus the unweighed fear.”.The soldiers would rather die than be embarrassed, they didn’t care about the honor or glory of being a hero. The narrator mentions on page 12 that “They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed and died because they were embarrassed not to.” They didn’t want to be there, but they could not take the easy way out and be called a coward, they had to fight through it until they got to go home. When they finally got to leave it was a huge weight lifted off of them. They did not need to have the fear weighing on their minds anymore. The war puts a huge burden on the soldiers mind, and affects their mental state significantly. The unweighted things they carried were fear, thoughts of loved ones, and the actions of war. With the war comes terrifying memories which could lead to PTSD. Tim O’Brien was trying to warn us about the weight of the actions of the war on each soldier and that it leads to PTSD which is the heaviest thing that the soldiers carried. Jimmy could potentially have PTSD from the stress of leading his platoon and the guilt of having someone

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The True Weight of War “The Things They Carried,” by Tim O’Brien, brings to light the psychological impact of what soldiers go through during times of war. We learn that the effects of traumatic events weigh heavier on the minds of men than all of the provisions and equipment they shouldered. Wartime truly tests the human body and and mind, to the point where some men return home completely destroyed. Some soldiers have been driven to the point of mentally altering reality in order to survive day to day. An indefinite number of men became numb to the deaths of their comrades, and yet secretly desired to die and bring a conclusion to their misery.

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The things these men carried were solid with weight and are able to be transported from one place to another by physically moving the object. However, the reader soon discovers it also refers to an emotional weight. As Kaplan states, “Obrien introduces the reader to some of the things, imaginary and concrete, emotional and physical, that the average soldier had to carry through the jungles of Vietnam” (2/8). In the Army there is a saying, “Go to war, or go to jail”. During the time of the Vietnam War, a majority of the men were drafted.

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In the story, "The Things They Carried" a narrator describes the life of soldiers during the Vietnam War. The narrator lists what some of the soldiers carried during their experience in the war, emotional and tangible. Tim O'Brien presents the character of Ted Lavender, an obviously frightened soldier, in order to be a spokeperson to symbolize obvious stress within soldiers during their journey. He presents the character of Kiowa, a devoted Baptist, in order to represent how some of the soldiers cope with the exorbitant amount of stress. Tim O'Brien characterizes Ted Lavender as stressed and frightened in order to portray fright during the war within soldiers.

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