The Things They Carried: In-Class Essay

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In the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien readers experience the horrific scenes of Vietnam during the war.  The soldiers carry with them, not just the items needed to survive, but mental, emotional, and physical burdens.  While men are at war the absence of emotion and sense of self makes it difficult for the soldiers to pack away these feelings, so they carry them.  In this novel the soldiers physically and figuratively carry war alongside them.  Along with themselves the soldiers carried their stories, death, and most importantly love as they endured the very worst of war, driven by fear and embarrassment.

When soldiers left the war, but also when they were still fighting, they carried with them their stories.  Stories of friendships, stories of experiences, and stories of war itself.  Stories were a way for the soldiers to talk and a chance for someone to listen.  Tim O’Brien was saved by his stories, he carried them with him and shared them so that he was able to defeat fear.  As he reflects on how alive death feels sometimes he says, “But this too is true, stories can save us”(O’Brien, 213).  In Tim’s memories he kept with him the happy stories and the sad, as well as the horrific ones.  His stories that he carried shaped his life following the war.  The use of ‘but’ at the beginning of the sentence shows O’Brien’s authority in making his point heard.  Stories were among the many things the soldiers carried, often times even about love.

War is dark, graphic, and lacks the emotion and feeling of love.  In a horrific landscape of war the men saw glimpses of beauty in love, carrying with them the hearts of women who allowed their hearts to stay alive.  The soldiers often reflected on the women in their past lives that they had loved.  The beauty and happiness they dreamed of gave them a break from the darkness of Vietnam.  Tim and Azar were sitting outside of the hootch listening to tapes of Mary Hopkin.  As they sat and absorbed the woman’s voice, Tim shares, “That’s another thing Nam does to you.  It turns you sentimental”(O’Brien, 199).  The men were ‘sentimental’ because they craved love, a balance of both death and beauty.  The love they carried with them was not the love they felt before the war.  It was a love they ached for, but a love that was long past them, leaving them to dream deeper into it.  The opposite of love, hate, brought the very hatred of death in this novel.

In the midst of all else they carried, death ate the minds of all.  The soldiers carried horrific  memories of those brothers they had lost.  Death during war is so frequent the men become silenced to the toll it takes on their emotions.  Each death is just the same as all the others, a routine that had become consistent in Vietnam.  Death was that one second of fear, that one moment of embarrassment.  It was the different between being listened to and being silenced.  Mitchel Sanders said it so concisely, but so perfect, “Death sucks”(O’Brien, 230).  Following a battle Sanders and O’Brien were issued to go remove the dead bodies.  O’Brien remembered vividly this story of death.  He said, “I remember swinging the bodies up.  Mitchel Sanders took a man’s feet, I took the arms, and we counted to three, working up momentum, and then we tossed the body high and watched it bounce and come to rest amongst the other bodies”(O’Brien, 230).  The soldier’s stories of death stuck, like Curt Lemon stuck to that tree.  They carried the stories of death because it happened so much, they didn’t know how not to.  The bodies ‘came to rest amongst the other bodies’ and that was it, but death never “went to rest” in the minds of the soldiers.  Twenty years later and Tim O’Brien vividly tells that story to readers.

It wasn’t just the comic books, the tranquilizers, or the cigarettes the men carried.  It was the last minute of their dead friend’s life, the very last breath.  Death made the soldiers feel alive, while love gave war a beautiful dream, but the stories told experiences.  The men strapped on the required equipment at the beginning of each day, but surrounding them and within them was an invisible nature of stories, love, and the very vivid memories of death that they carried.