The Things They Carried

Tim O’Brien is the author of the collection of short stories, The Things They Carried. A renowned American writer, William Timothy O’Brien became famous for writing Vietnam War centered novels. Aside from The Things They Carried, many recognize O’Brien for Going after Cacciato. (Herzog 10) Born in Austin, Minnesota on October 1, 1946, O’Brien spent most of his childhood in Worthington. Being there provided him with a chance at developing both his imagination and artistic sensibility.

(Herzog 10) Furthermore, the location became a model for some of the stories in The Things They Carried. One of the main reasons he wrote this collection of short stories was due to the ignorance he considered existed among the general public about the Vietnam War. With most of the characters being semi-autobiographical, O’Brien provides some basis for understanding of what the Vietnam War was really like and thus demonstrating the sense of uncertainty both in the Vietnam War and in his own life during that time.

The main argument for O’Brien and his work in The Things They Carried is that war is nothing like what people imagine it to be, it is far worse and the uncertainty of everyday life in war, is what makes it so horrible. If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home is Tim O’Brien’s autobiographical account of his tour of duty in Vietnam during the war.

Published in 1973, the memoir takes readers through an average day for a soldier in the Vietnam War. Just like in The Things They Carry, O’Brien describes a small number of ‘grunts’ he encounters and the psychological effects of the war. Spending his time in Alpha Company, he mentions the horrible effects of the various mines encountered and the maiming and disfigurement of both civilians and combatants.

(O'Brien 125-126) He gives another example of an accidental shelling of a lagoon village Alpha Company tried to protect as well as a brief moment of the My Lai Massacre when he is airlifted away. The Charlie Company in the story are under investigation for the massacre. (O'Brien 136) These scenes promote a sense of the tragedy and insanity that was the Vietnam War, educating the public on the true horrors of war in general.

Kaplan discusses in a 1993 article, the uncertainty of the narrator in The Things They Carried. Additionally, Kaplan reinforces the ignorance of the Vietnam War and the terrifying truth of it.

“The Vietnam War was in many ways a wild and terrible work of fiction written by some dangerous and frightening storytellers…the United States decided what constituted good and evil, right and wrong, civilized and uncivilized, freedom and oppression for Vietnam…” (Kaplan 43) Elaborating further, Kaplan describes the uncertainty of the Vietnam War, stating yes was no longer yes and so forth.

That uncertainty of the status of everything in the war, whether people lived or died, morality and the effects of immorality, it all matched the uncertainty expressed in the authors of books revolving around this subject. Tim O’Brien created a world within these short stories that mimicked the environment he felt when he was in Vietnam. By providing such an uncertainty in the narrator and the setting, it continues to push the image of what an American civilian had of the Vietnam War.

No longer are there impressions of good guys versus bad guys, and obedient soldiers. It is expressed both in The Things They Carried and If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. Such images of blown up body parts and rogue soldiers, death, grief, it provides that fear and awakening to the reality of war.

Aside from revealing the truth of the war through reality-based experiences, O’Brien also used his imagination much like he did in his childhood to further provide that sense of uncertainty.

“…takes the act of trying to reveal and understand the uncertainties about the war one step further, by looking at it through the imagination.” (Kaplan 44) By utterly destroying the fine line that divides fact from fiction, more so than he did in Cacciato, he makes good on his effort to eliminate ignorance of the events of the Vietnam War. A good example of this is a description O’Brien makes of a man who experienced an explosion. “He fell on his back.

His rubber sandals had been blown off. He lay at the center of the trail, his right leg bent beneath him, one eye shut, his other eye a huge star-shaped hole.” (O'Brien 127) Such descriptions he may have encountered in his real life experiences of the war. Or, he may have just imagined a scenario based on the situations he went through. That kind of scene brings uncertainty, but the uncertainty reveals so much for not just the reader, but reveals something about the writer.

Going back to that scene, it feels like the person is not real. The star-shaped hole, the rubber sandals. These words feel juxtaposed with each other. Almost as if, one part of it was real and the other was part of an action movie. But that is often how soldiers experience war. Some of the elements do not feel real. Perhaps it could be shock or a surreal moment, the memory of events like this, remain both real and imagined.

O’Brien does a great job of providing real and imagined scenarios that bleed into each other. O’Brien does a great job of demonstrating to the reader that soldiers are people. The fears personalities and feelings of these soldiers add to the uncertainty such as the uncertainty of whether someone will live or die and provides further reinforcement of the brutality of war. “Some carried themselves with a sort of wistful resignation, others with pride or stiff soldierly discipline or good humor or macho zeal.

They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it.” (O'Brien 22) Use of ‘wistful’, of ‘stiff’, and ‘discipline’, again there is a juxtaposition of words inviting the reader to understand the complexity, the depth of emotion and existence among these characters. Readers may see soldiers as dolls, or numbers and platoons. In reality they are human, with the difference being, they chose to participate in the war. Revealing these personal details muddies the waters of expectation.

War in people’s minds means a soldier needs to be hard, void of emotion. “The military has capitalized on this dichotomy in its construction of the soldiering identity. .. discomfort, and by goading soldiers with the gendered expectation of stoicism, militaries enforce an expectation that soldiers will tolerate willingly…” (Taylor and Voorhee 46) Most of the horror in war is often masked, hidden from view, in particular when the war ends because it is almost expected of a soldier to simply deal with the aftermath stoically, quietly.

O’Brien narrates the “things” inside the soldiers and their need to keep it all within. “By and large they carried these things inside, maintaining the masks of composure.” (O'Brien 24) To maintain such dormant, intense feelings within the mind frequently leads to post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) because they express or feel their pain in the battlefield and off it. Such trauma provides the uncertainty within the narrator because perhaps the narrator himself feels unhinged from the events. Pain is universal.

Pain also brings a shift in what is real and what is not. O’Brien mentions how soldiers tolerated the cold rain and how difficult it was to sit there and bear it, not knowing whether they would live or what would happen to them. “How the rain never stopped. How the cold worked into your bones.

Sometimes the bravest thing on earth was to sit through the night and feel the cold in your bones.” (O'Brien 100) Simple things having nothing to eat, being in the cold rain, those can be some of the many slow and numbing horrors few discuss when they come back from the war or is widely known by the public. Numbing is a thought-provoking word because war numbs the person in such a way, it amplifies everything else when experienced afterwards.

It is as if the act of numbing produces a tidal wave of sentiments that remain for the rest of a soldier’s life as described by O’Brien. “I was bitter, sure. But it was so much more than that. The emotions went from outrage to terror to bewilderment to guilt to sorrow and then back again to outrage. I felt a sickness inside me.

Real disease.” (O'Brien 37) The horror seen in Vietnam and in other wars linger and fester in the minds of the soldiers that fought them. The uncertainty of the narrator is an expression of the pain and despair experienced. It is a reminder to the reader, that war is real. War has lasting effects that cannot be simply pushed away. In terms of literary technique, The Things They Carried is a combat novel more than a set of short stories. “…yet it is not a combat novel.

It is also a blend of traditional and untraditional forms—a collection, Gene Lyons says, of ‘short stories, essays, anecdotes, narrative fragments, jokes, fables, biographical and autobiographical sketches, and philosophical asides.” (Jarraway 695) All these various approaches to writing provide enhanced uncertainty, almost as if O’Brien is not sure of what approach he wants to take with the characters, the setting, and the central message of the stories.

Could this be to mimic the mind of a soldier after war? Some soldiers during the Vietnam War endured torture. Torture techniques like sleep deprivation among others were common. “…he restricts real ‘harm’ to a narrow class of physical interventions that exclude the use of electric shock, prolonged forced kneeling, light deprivation, deprivation of sleep, hooding, and systematic confusion as to day and night.” (Sherman 132) When soldiers suffer and endure torture, it can produce confusion.

Perhaps this varied writing style provides yet another clue to the horrors of war through the psychological damage often encountered, the kind that leads someone lost and confused. Even more significant, the reader is led to question the reality of many, if not all, of the stories in the book.

The narrator insists that the story of Curt Lemon's death, for instance, is "all exactly true" (77), then states eight pages later that he has told Curt's story previously - "many times, many versions" (85) - before narrating yet another version. (Calloway 252) Confusion makes up a large part of the feeling, the atmosphere of these short stories. They show that nothing was ever certain when experiencing the war.

In doing so, it provides a uniqueness and authenticity that illuminates not only the plight of the soldiers, but of the author. Such language and uncertainty makes the short stories worthwhile. The words on the pages make someone feel like they are.