The Emotional Feelings Carried by the Soldiers in "The Things They Carried"

In the story, “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien tells the story of a company in Vietnam. With his own experiences, O’Brien conveys the hardships and fear that characterizes the soldiers lives and the weight of the war. Everything the soldiers of the company carried had a physical and mental impact on them causing them to emotionally or physically break down in one way or another. Pain, loss, and fear were probably the most challenging emotional, and psychological feelings for them to carry.

The story’s main character, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, the company’s leader, is the main character of the story. The rest of the soldiers are mostly defined by the objects they choose to carry. There are some items the soldiers have to carry and there are somethings they willfully choose to carry. For example, the average soldier is required to carry: “a standard M-16 gas- operated assault rifle,” however Lieutenant Cross also chooses to carry letters from the woman that he loves, at the bottom of his pack.

In this way, O’Brien uses detail to portray each soldier as an individual establishing characterization.

In the “The Things They Carried”, O’Brien has a very interesting non-linear format when writing about the death of Ted Lavender. The death of Ted Lavender was an unexpected event that could have shocked the reader but the casual reference to Lavender’s death immediately disregards the importance of the event and tells us that there is a bigger purpose to the piece.

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An example: “Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April.”

If O’Brien did format the plot of “The Things They Carried” in a linear fashion, the characterization in this story would not happen as it does. For example, in the beginning of the piece, O’Brien places great importance on the objects the men carry and their actual weight. As the story progresses, he talks about the emotional burdens the men carry and how it effects them. The death of Lavender causes a kind of guilt in Lieutenant Cross over the loss of his soldier and this causes a shift on O’Brien to talk about the emotional burdens that the soldiers had to carry.

Although all of the soldiers don’t act like they have given into weakness and wear hardened masks to impress each other, O’Brien reveals that their greatest wish is to step aboard the freedom bird that will take them home. Each soldier in vietnam wanted to be free and take the intense weight off of their shoulder that they were forced to carry.

Tim O’Brien’s decision to stress character over plot has created a story that is both unique and powerful. This is important because O’Brien is attempting to portray the Vietnam War’s unnecessity. We see the burdens each man must carry, and how the physical weight turns into an emotional atrocity. Despite the promise of the “freedom bird,” it doesn’t seem likely that they will come back home.

The themes in The Things They Carried include physical burdens caused by war, and emotional pain. The amount of truth in storytelling is little and we find this out after O’Brien tells us in one of his chapters dedicated to this specific purpose. Physical burdens caused by war were present in the novel through the physical horrors the soldiers experienced in the Vietnam War. Death, love and killing in the war affected the soldiers greatly and put emotional burdens on them throughout the book. Lieutenant Cross is constantly reminded of Martha and O’Brien does a great job with imagery using descriptive language concerning his love for her. Each soldier is unsure how to deal with deaths around them and killing other men.

The main theme in the book is the amount of truth in storytelling. O’Brien, in this book, is known for “inventing incidences” and “making up certain truths” in order to convey his message on the truth and fiction in war stories. O’Brian refuses to tell the Vietnam War as a history book and in doing so, he tries to tell his stories to attract the reader and create ways in which the soldier will connect with his readers.

The soldiers that fought in the Vietnam War had to endure many incredibly horrifying experiences. It was these events that led to great human emotions. It was those feelings that were the things they carried.