Weight of the World

The soldiers of the Vietnam War from The Things They Carried bear a massive weight on their backs. This weight is not a heavy backpack, a poncho, or fifteen pounds of ammo. The weight is the trauma they have endured, the heart-wrenching guilt, and the regret that they did not try harder to save their comrade. The Vietnam war was a cruel war, with tactics that would leave soldiers constantly on edge, or burn them to the bone. 

There was no shortage of unnecessary deaths, and one such case almost cracked the character of Tim, even if he was not the bringer of death. He watched a man, who he deemed innocent get shot in front of his very eyes. “He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay with one leg beneath him, his jaw in his throat, his face neither expressive nor inexpressive. One eye was shut. The other was a star-shaped hole. “Talk,” Kiowa said” (O’Brien 124). In recalling the young Vietnamese man that was killed, O’Brien starts to make up the boy’s story in his head. He imagines him as someone studying math, who doesn’t want to go to war and who probably would have gone right by them. In doing this he compounds his own guilt to the point that he is unable to speak about it, even with the pleas by Kiowa to talk about it. He zips up his guilt and instead of trying to process it and numb the pain, he takes it all in deep inside, where it can haunt him forever, or pose the threat of breaking him. While Tim was not broken by his guilt, he did have a comrade who was. Norman Bowker suffered immensely under his guilt of not being able to save Kiowa from the dreadful muck. Kiowa is a character that everyone in the alpha company likes. He acts as a glue that helps to hold the soldiers together, keeping them from breaking as a group and keeping them from tearing themselves apart inside. When he dies, the guilt of his death is carried not just by Norman but by many other soldiers who all feel they caused it or that they could have helped him. However, in the case of Norman, he does not have the support necessary to deal with his regrets when he gets home. The only person he feels he can talk to has drowned to death, leaving him alone with his thoughts as he circles endlessly around the pond. Pondering what he is to do with his life now. Most of us wonder what our point of being here is. What we should pursue. Norman had that purpose figured out during the war. But when the war finished, he had no one left. This led to his downfall and ultimately his killing himself. Norman’s purpose had become the war, but there was another soldier who was willing to risk it all to leave the war, and that was Rat Kiley.

During the alpha company’s long night treks, all of the soldiers were impacted, but it was Rat Kiley who was broken. The bleak darkness set off all of the soldier’s nerves, making them imagine things that were not really there. The narrator O’Brien channels Rat Kiley’s discomfort in describing how “It made your eyeballs ache. You’d shake your head and blink, except you couldn’t even tell you were blinking. The blackness didn’t change. So pretty soon you’d get jumpy. Your nerves would go. You’d start worrying about getting cut off from the rest of the unit – alone, you’d think – and then the real panic would bang in and you’d reach out and try to touch the guy in front of you, groping for his shirt, hoping to christ he was still there. It made for some bad dreams” (O’Brien 209). The horror of the darkness, not the enemy was what was getting to the soldiers. It was becoming a burden on their shoulders, always fearful of what was hidden in the darkness, imagining the many cruel fates that could await them. This burden was taken a step farther for Rat Kiley, who was constantly exposed to the gore of injured comrades. As the medic in the company Rat Kiley has had to bear an extra burden, seeing the full extent of his friend’s injuries up close and personal, hearing their cries of pain, and imagining who could be next. With the addition of the traumatizing nights, it becomes too much for Rat. He started to hallucinate, imaging horrible things “But at night the pictures get to be a bitch. I start seeing my own body. Chunks of myself. My own heart, my own kidneys. It’s like- I don’t know – it’s like staring into this huge black crystal ball. One of these nights I’ll be lying dead out there in the dark and nobody’ll find me except the bugs – I can see it – I can see the goddamn bugs chewing tunnels through me – I can see the mongooses munching on my bones. I swear, it’s too much. I can’t keep seeing myself dead, ”(O’ Brien 212). As the chapter Night Life progresses you can see Rat Kiley’s descent into madness, up until the point he shoots himself in the foot in order to escape the war. He imagines himself dead on the ground getting torn apart ‘goddamn bugs chewing tunnels through me’ not only this but the dark makes him imagine his own organs on the ground. This all follows his descent into madness. The war has taken Rat Kiley’s sanity from him, the loss of his comrades and eventually his sanity is what he carries. 

Not one of the soldiers comes out from the war unscathed, and though these characters may be fictional, the feelings they have are not made up and were quite common in the war. Whether it be guilt, the loss of their sanity, or a feeling of no longer fitting in; each character has taken on a burden from the war, and each character has suffered from its immense weight.