the things they carried

bio + history

Award-winning author Tim O'Brien is best known for his fictional portrayals of the Vietnam conflict. He was born in 1946 in Austin, Minn., and spent most of his youth in the small town of Worthington, Minn. He graduated summa cum laude from Macalester College in 1968.

The Things They Carried is a 1990 book by Tim O'Brien that deals with his experiences getting drafted into the Vietnam War, where he served from 1968 to 1970.

storytelling

• O’Brien believes that stories contain immense power, since they allow tellers and listeners to confront the past together and share otherwise unknowable experiences.

• Telling stories returns to the foreground of the narrative again and again. Mitchell Sanders, the Alpha Company’s resident storyteller, whose anecdotes range from the mythic (the story of six men who hear voices in the jungle) to the specific (the story of how Rat Kiley shoots himself in the foot and as a result is allowed to leave Vietnam), contends that truth and morality in a war story have little to do with accuracy.

• For example, after telling the story of the men who hear voices in the jungle, Sanders admits that he made up a few things in order to get his point across.

• Nevertheless, his story has resonance.

• The added details are only further proof of the universal truth: the eerie quiet of the jungle causes soldiers’ imaginations to run wild with fantastic images far stranger than anything they might actually encounter.

• O’Brien shows that storytelling is not just a coping mechanism for soldiers who are embroiled in the war but also a strategy for communication throughout life.

• Several of the stories in The Things They Carried are told from O’Brien’s point of view, twenty years after the war. With this distance, facts have become cloudy and all that remains of the experience are the lingering feelings and memories.

• He is aware of his omissions and exaggeration of detail, and in the case of “Good Form,” he even suggests that all of his previous stories are made up. Even if he did not actually kill a soldier in My Khe, the truth of his feelings about war is no less valid.

ambigous morality

• O’Brien’s stories show that the jungle blurs boundaries between right and wrong. The brutal killing of innocents on both sides cannot be explained, and in some moments of disbelief, the men deal with the pain of their feelings by pointing out the irony.

• “There’s a moral here,” Mitchell Sanders ironically points out again and again, each time stressing the actual immorality of the specific situation.

• After Ted Lavender is fatally shot by the enemy, for example, Sanders jokes that the “moral” of Ted Lavender’s accidental and tragic death is to stay away from drugs.

• Exposed to these horrors, the men’s notions of right and wrong shift and bend. After Ted Lavender’s death, for example, Cross evens the score and deals with his own guilt by burning the entire village of Than Khe.

• Similarly, Rat Kiley deals with his frustration about Curt Lemon’s death by brutally killing a water buffalo.

• Affected by the senselessness of war, even O’Brien—a college educated, peace-loving man—feels himself grow hard and callous, willing to wish others harm.

• Ironically, the moral or lesson in The Things They Carried is that there is no morality in war. War is ambiguous and arbitrary because it forces humans into extreme situations that have no obvious solutions.

lonliness

• O’Brien argues that in Vietnam, loneliness and isolation are forces as destructive as any piece of ammunition. In repeatedly emphasizing the impact of solitude on the soldiers, he shows that thoughts, worries, and fears are as dangerous—if not more dangerous—than the Vietnamese soldiers themselves.

• In “How to Tell a True War Story,” Mitchell Sanders’s story concerning soldiers made so paranoid by their experience on listening patrol that they hear strange noises emphasizes how the imagination can take over instantly in the lonely silence.

• In “The Ghost Soldiers,” O’Brien takes unfair advantage of the power of isolation when he attempts to frighten Bobby Jorgenson while Jorgenson is on night guard duty.

• In order to emphasize the evil intentions of his revenge plot, O’Brien reflects on his fear of being cut off from the outside world and the close relation between night guard and childhood fears of the dark.

• In Vietnam, isolation is synonymous with endless time to dwell on the unknown.

• Loneliness remains a strong presence enveloping the soldiers long after the war is over. Jimmy Cross, for example, feels bereft after the war because his hope for happiness in Martha is dashed by her rejection. Norman Bowker also feels empty and isolated after the war.

• In “Speaking of Courage,” he aimlessly drives around a lake in his hometown, thinking that he has no one to talk to.

• He even attempts to converse with an A&W employee, but no one will offer him consolation.

• O’Brien himself realizes that if he didn’t have writing to work through his trauma, he might be in as abject a place as Bowker.

• The character O’Brien’s narration—and, in effect, the author O’Brien’s The Things They Carried—is an attempt to combat the destructive isolation that the Vietnam experience fostered.

carried things

• A central motif in the collection's titular story is the act of carrying. Teeming with lists, "The Things They Carried" reads like an itemized chronicle of the tangible and intangible things that the soldiers in Alpha Company carry with them through Vietnam.

• The tangible items include tools, weapons, rations, bandages, and tokens that have sentimental or superstitious meaning.

• The intangible items include responsibility, emotional baggage, secrets, fear, and memories.

• Beyond physical items, the soldiers also carry immense emotional weight, such as guilt, grief, anxiety, and trauma.

• Lieutenant Cross, for example, carries guilt for the death of Ted Lavender, believing his love for Martha distracted him from his responsibilities.

• The men shoulder the emotional cost of fear—both of dying and of appearing weak in front of their comrades—which shapes their actions and inner lives.

• Memory plays a major role in what they carry, as past experiences, deaths of friends, and imagined futures stay with them long after battles end.

reading/writing

• Already in the first story, it becomes clear that reading and writing are important to the soldiers in Alpha Company.

• The power of the written word, both for those writing it and for those reading it, becomes a central motif in the collection.

• In "The Things They Carried," the narrator runs through the personal items that individual soldiers consider to be "necessities or near-necessities."

• For three of the soldiers, these include books: Norman Bowker carried a diary.

• Rat Kiley carried comic books.

• Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father, who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

• These items symbolize how the soldiers attempt to maintain their identities in a dehumanizing and disorienting war environment.

• Writing (like Bowker’s diary) offers a sense of control or permanence in a world full of chaos, death, and randomness.

• Reading (like Kiley’s comics or Kiowa’s Bible) provides emotional comfort, nostalgia, or moral structure amid the psychological turmoil of combat.