Women's Role In Vietnam In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

The Role of Women in Vietnam

Women have always played a powerful role in many wars, from mass producing bullets in the second World War to taking up jobs that men could not do in the first World War. But with the Vietnam War, the women were unspoken hero's. One does not have to be in a war physically in order to contribute to war effort, and for a plethora of women who had significant others in Vietnam, they helped the soldiers mentally . In the novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien uses a similar idea when introducing female roles. He uses women as metaphors for the changes the men undergo, as metaphorical objects, and how they affected soldiers fighting in Vietnam.
To begin with, although the war traumatized many men, some used the

The constant war zone does not only weaken the physical state of soldiers, it can also take away the stability of some men’s mentality. Although O’Brien does not directly state that the other characters in the novel are mentally unstable, he uses the women, who are close to the soldiers, as mirrors of the soldier's emotions. As an example, O’Brien uses his daughter to convey how the fighting in the Vietnam war and how reminiscing on Vietnam has changed him mentally. O’Brien tells a story twice, one time telling it truthfully and the other time “story-truth”(179). He comforts himself through the entire chapter because of this, telling one story and stating that it was untruthful, but it does not become apparent to the reader until the daughter asks, “‘Daddy, tell the truth,’ Kathleen can say, ‘did you ever kill anybody?’ And I can say, honestly, ‘Of course not.’ Or I can say, honestly, ‘Yes’”(179). In this quote O’Brien is reflecting on how he interacts with other people, and how he resists telling the truth, a habit he developed while reminiscing about his past in Vietnam. O’Brien uses his daughter to express the struggle he has between truth and dishonesty when storytelling about the war. In conclusion, O’Brien uses women as metaphors for the mental changes the soldiers go through after fighting in the Vietnam