With War Comes Burdens Analysis

With war comes burdens: physical and emotional. “Grief, terror, love, longing- these were intangibles, but the tangibles had their own mss and specific gravity, they had tangible weight” (O’Brien 20). Portraying many variations of these burdens, O’Brien depicts his time during the war although some of these portrayals held fictional representations. Wanting to recreate his images the author communicates what he and his fellow comrades endured in their treacherous times. Writing about the emotional and physical baggage that accumulated from the war, O'Brien exemplifies emotional burdens from fear and guilt, through cowardice, their lives after the war, and connecting the relationship between physical and emotional burdens.

Fear poses as the

Long after they left Vietnam, many men carried their burdens, physical and emotional. “I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.” (O’Brien 58). Becoming a coward to people’s opinions rather than following his own, O’Brien shows that he’s not a coward in the war, but outside of it because he didn’t stand up for what he believed. Changing the mindsets and lives of the men in the war, fear created emotions that they carried with them as shown with Norman Bowker. Returning home to a non-fulfilling life, Norman Bowker became driven to a life of sadness. After searching the town and talking to the citizens Bowker couldn’t withstand the emptiness anymore. He was found dead hung from a jump rope in an Iowa YMCA. “The letter covered seventeen handwritten pages, its tone jumping from self-pity to anger to irony to guilt to a kind of feigned indifference. He didn’t know what to feel” (O’Brien

“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. The guilt from killing