Tim O’Brien emphasizes the objects that every character carries in the novel: The Things They Carried. The items they carry are intended to illustrate aspects of their personality. However, in the course of the novel, the soldiers are not only carrying physical objects, but also abstract ones. The soldiers carry their emotions, their honor, their dead comrades, guilt, shame, and a lot of other emotions. Rat Kiley is the medic of the Alpha Company, it is written that he was carrying comic books, but also the weight of the deaths of all of the Alpha Company. Norman Bowker carried a diary, but also the guilt of the death of Kiowa. Dave Jensen carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and soap, and the weight of Lee Strunk’s life. Everyone has something that they are carrying. Some are heavier than others, but everyone tries to move and continue with all the weight. Some move forward by escaping from their reality by using illegal substances, and others can’t progress and take their own life.
Everyone in the Alpha Company relies on Rat to save their backs. He saved a lot of lives in Vietnam, but also he felt responsible for the deaths of his platoon. As the medic, he was in charge of the health of his platoon, but sometimes he could not save his comrades. He saw too much death, and the mission they had did not help at all. They had to walk in the night to be undetected by the enemy. The platoon called it “the night life”. They tried to sleep during the day and walk in the darkness of the night. There was only darkness surrounding Rat and his thoughts. He started to visualize his thoughts which later would become hallucinations. His hallucinations consumed him, picturing things like, “Sometimes he’d stare at guys who were still okay, the alive guys and he’d start to picture how they’d look dead” (O’Brien 211). Rat snapped, he’s seen so much death in the war and now, in the darkness, he can’t escape from his thoughts. The darkness leads him to the point of madness. He was alone with his thoughts, and when he couldn’t see another soldier he pictured himself dead. Even when he has seen all this death as a medic, he can not understand how people die and how quick death is, “how crazy it was that people who were so incredibly alive they’d look dead” (O’Brien 212). People around him died instantly and without a warning. How can someone that was just breathing be seen so lifeless? Rat couldn’t fit in his mind how a living thing could easily be his life stolen. This led to madness; he wanted to escape. He shot his foot to escape Vietnam. No one blames him for doing it. The whole company sympathized with him and understood what he was going through. They felt pity for him, and that how such a great guy would descend to madness. The intangible weight of his thoughts becomes too much for him. He felt guilty about the deaths of his comrades just as Norman Bowker with the death of Kiowa.
Bowker felt culpable for Kiowa’s death. He returns from Vietnam tortured with guilt. He hides this guilt under the regret that he didn’t win the Silver Star. He “remembered how he had taken hold of Kiowa’s boot and pulled hard, but how the smell was simply too much, and how he’d nacked off and in that way had lost the Silver Star” (O’Brien 146). He tried to speak about what he felt after the war but he couldn’t. He pictured himself having a conversation with his father about what happened in Vietnam, but it was only his own rational side. He was lonely. He felt he did not belong anywhere. He asks O’Brien to write a story about “a guy who feels like he got zapped over in that shithole. A guy who can’t get his act together and just drives around town all day and can’t think of any damn place to go and doesn’t know how he gets to get there anyway. This guy wants to talk about it, but he can’t,” (O’Brien 151). Bowker asks O’Brien to write about how he felt because he couldn’t put it in his own words. His guilt is so big that he can not express his emotions. He could not fit in with society. It was like a time bomb. Every day that passed, he would be more consumed with guilt until the bomb exploded and he hanged himself. He wanted to run away, get rid of the blame, but the guilt already consumed him too much to the point he took his life so that he could not feel culpability anymore. The immense weight of guilt that he carried was too intense. He just wanted to get rid of the weight not knowing how. The solution for him was his life. He felt culpable for his friend just like Dave Jensen.
Dave Jensen carried the responsibility of his friend’s life. He became friends with Lee Strunk after Strunk broke his nose because he stole his jackknife. Strunk was consumed by his thoughts with the idea of Jensen taking his revenge. He snapped and broke his own nose to be equal to Jensen. Jensen thought he was crazy and became good friends with Strunk. They made a “pact that if one of them should ever get totally fucked up —a wheelchair wound—the other gu would automatically find a way to end it,” (O’Brien 62). They signed it and brought people to be witnesses of their pact. Months later Strunk stepped on a rigged mortar round, taking out his right leg. He was panicking, he did not want to die, and when Jensen came to see him, Strunk repeatedly said to Jensen to not kill him, don’t kill him. Jensen said he won’t, and he didn’t do it. Later he “heard that Strunk died somewhere over Chu Lai, which seemed to relieve Dave Jensen of an enormous weight,” (O’Brien 63). Strunk was facing death and he preferred living disabled rather than dying. His need to live overcomes the pact he did with Jensen, and when Jensen hears the news of Strunk’s death he is relieved. Relieved that he has no obligation to kill him anymore. The weight he felt of having the responsibility of his friend’s life vanished.
All the characters had something they carried. Rat was carrying all the deaths he’d witnessed, Bowker was carrying the guilt of Kiowa’s death, and Jensen the responsibility of killing Strunk. Everyone in the Alpha Company was carrying their emotions and the deaths of their comrades. War is something that will drive anyone mad. Taking the life of people and witnessing a lot of death is horrible. The moral weight that every soldier that kills someone in cold blood is something that they will carry for the rest of their lives. Every soldier will carry their remorse, emotions, and their own weight to the graves.
Vietnam War
