Vietnam’s Biceps

The Vietnam war was full of horrific experiences for everyone involved, and Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried details the effects of these experiences from his perspective as a veteran. While Tim writes mostly fiction in this novel, he uses this storytelling to reflect his thoughts on the war, and highlights many negatives in the culture surrounding the war, before, during and after the fighting. Among these negatives is a problem that has always existed and continues to exist in society: toxic and hyper masculinity. The definition of toxic masculinity is a set of attitudes and ways of behaving stereotypically associated with or expected of men, regarded as having a negative impact on men and on society as a whole. These attitudes are usually associated with demeaning or discriminating against women, men with perceived feminine traits, and bottling up one’s emotions as not to show “weakness”. The men in this novel enforce these hyper masculine values by refusing to show their feelings naturally, saying ridiculous or horrible things to portray themselves as tough, and refusing to see women as equals. 

One common effect of a hyper masculine environment is that the men in the environment avoid showing their feelings or keep their emotions inside of them. However, men still obviously have emotions and so keeping their emotions from showing can lead to outbursts or irregular behavior in order to cope with avoiding expressing normal human emotions like sadness. For example, a medic in Tim’s unit, Rat Kiley, loses his good friend Curt Lemon. Instead of going through a normal process of grieving, speaking to his other friends, or expressing himself in any way. He decides to take his anger out on a baby water buffalo:

  “Curt Lemon was dead. Rat Kiley had lost his best friend in the world. Later in the week he would write a long personal letter to the guy’s sister, who would not write back, but for now it was a question of pain. He shot off the tail. He shot away chunks of meat below the ribs. All around us there was the smell of smoke and filth and deep greenery, and the evening was humid and very hot. Rat went to automatic. He shot randomly, almost casually, quick little spurts in the belly and butt. Then he reloaded, squatted down, and shot it in the left front knee. Again the animal fell hard and tried to get up, but this time it couldn’t quite make it. It wobbled and went down sideways. Rat shot it in the nose. He bent forward and whispered something, as if talking to a pet, then he shot it in the throat. All the while the baby buffalo was silent, or almost silent, just a light bubbling sound where the nose had been. It lay very still. Nothing moved except the eyes, which were enormous, the pupils shiny black and dumb. Rat Kiley was crying. He tried to say something, but then cradled his rifle and went off by himself”. (O’Brian 75)

 This scene embodies the idea of hyper masculinity perfectly. Rat is not described as grieving in any other way prior to this, and suddenly has a violent outburst directed towards an innocent creature. Then, at the end of the scene he is in tears, finally letting everything out. However, he tries to speak but stops himself, and walks away. All together, this is a scene of a man letting all his bottled up emotions out, directing all his feelings towards an innocent creature, but in the end he still cannot actually bring himself to say his feelings out loud. However, that passage also tells us that he whispered something to the buffalo. While we don’t know exactly what he may have said, he may have apologized before doing what he was about to do, or even expressed his remorse at his friend’s passing to the water buffalo. He may have briefly made the water buffalo the sole witness to his emotions. Then, he shoots it directly in the throat, silencing it forever. His ability to have an outburst to this level also speaks to the culture of the war. While obviously men get violent very often in domestic settings, you rarely hear about a man torturing a baby animal to death in America. Rat could only do this because he is in a warzone, where he has likely killed people and destroyed homes. The horrible freedom the war offers gives men with bottled up emotions a terrifying outlet for their rage. 

Another way that toxic masculinity is demonstrated is through the men’s attempts to minimize horrible things through acting like they are not affected when clearly they are through using apathetic or callous language.

A prime example of this is Azar. Azar does several horrible things throughout the novel, most notably being that he blows up a puppy.

Cotton Strong

A prime example of this is Azar. Azar does several horrible things throughout the novel, most notably being that he blows up a puppy. Throughout the book, he makes constant tasteless jokes about dead people or victims of the war. For example, he calls the man Tim kills “Shredded fuckin wheat”. This may make Azar seem completely emotionless; however, this is actually another method of hiding one’s emotions. Azar attempts to turn everything into a joke to avoid actually processing the real and serious things happening all around him. This is shown when one of his friends, Kiowa, dies and leaves Azar speechless for the first time: “Norman Bowker found Kiowa. He was under two feet of water. Nothing showed except the heel of a boot. ‘That’s him?’ Azar said. ‘Who else?’ ‘I don’t know.’ Azar shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’ Norman Bowker touched the boot, covered his eyes for a moment, then stood up and looked at Azar. ‘So where’s the joke?’ he said. ‘No joke’ ‘Eating shit. Let’s hear that one.’ ‘Forget it’” (O’Brian 166). When Azar finally has to think about one of his close friend’s deaths, while he can’t bring himself to express outright grief, he finally decides to show respect. This is significant because we finally get to see Azar care about something and process an event in a serious manner, showing that he is not a psychopath, he is simply somebody who has learned it’s easier not to deal with something terrible head on. This contributes to the culture of toxic masculinity because Azar would rather bottle up with his jokes than seek help or support from those around him. While Azar does show respect in this scene, the fact that such a basic step like not telling a joke upon seeing your deceased friend is surprising to Norman and the reader should be a sign that men bottling up their emotions has become a staple of society, and is amplified in a wartime environment. 

Another component of toxic masculinity is sexist language and attitudes. One of the most prominent examples lies in the story of Mary Anne’s transformation from a woman living a life of peace to a deadly green beret who ends up becoming essentially a horror story when she disappears into the land. In this story, Mary Anne finds a form of belonging in the war, so much so that she goes on to join the green berets in their ambushes. When she comes back, Mark Fossie is enraged that she went out without talking to him. They have a conversation that is not shown in the text, and then Mary Anne restricts herself back into traditional values:

 “Mary Anne’s hair was freshly shampooed. She wore a white blouse, a navy blue skirt, a pair of plain black flats. Over dinner she kept her eyes down, poking at her food, subdued to the point of silence. Eddie Diamond and some of the others tried to nudge her into talking about the ambush—What was the feeling out there? What exactly did she see and hear?—but the questions seemed to give her trouble. Nervously, she’d look across the table at Fossie. She’d wait a moment, as if to receive some sort of clearance, then she’d bow her head and mumble out a vague word or two. There were no real answers.”  (O’Brien 98)

Why does Mark Fossie try to restrict Mary Anne from doing something that all the men around her are doing constantly? Obviously, he did not bring her into the war expecting her to enjoy the darker parts; however, he’s also the one who dragged her into the war. The fact that he attempts to reel her back in from doing something that people all around her are doing demonstrates that he sees Mary Anne as unfit to do the things men do in war. Because of the end of the story, we know that she is totally capable of doing these things, as she not only goes out on more ambushes, but she becomes a sort of legend who scares even the green berets when they go out. The fact that Mark Fossie tries to pull her away from her potential can only be attributed to the fact that Mary Anne is a woman. The violence demonstrated by the green berets is extreme. Their ability to lie in wait for hours, days, to kill enemy combatants is daunting. However, because they are men in war, and are exhibiting resilience and apathy, they are seen as normal. This is a prime example of hyper masculinity at work. Traits like these exhibited to an unnatural extent in men are normalized. However, when a woman like Mary Anne also exhibits these traits, it is unacceptable to the men around her, showing how sexist war culture is.

In The Things They Carried, a lot of commentary is made on a lot of horrible things in the Vietnam war. One of these things is toxic masculinity. O’Brian demonstrates this in many different ways, by showing the horrors of the war from the perspective of the men in it. Hyper masculinity plays a large role in this book, and it’s enforced among the men  by refusing to show their feelings naturally, saying ridiculous or horrible things to portray themselves as tough, and refusing to see women as equals.