Things They Carried by Tim

¶ … Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien [...]'s antiwar position and how this position relates to the era of unrest in the United States over the Vietnam War. The era of the Vietnam War was a difficult time in American history. Many Americans were against the war, and vocally protested our involvement in Southeast Asia. This book is a reflection of that unrest. The young men O'Brien portrays in his novel are just boys, really, and they show the horrors and the tediousness of war through their stories and their memories. The book is a clear antiwar statement, because underneath all the stories and the memories is the horror of war and the meaninglessness of war. The Vietnam War ended in defeat for the Americans and the South Vietnamese, and our being there did not change anything, we just lost many good young men like the ones in this story. This is the theme and the fiber that holds this book together; and what makes it such a strong and poignant message against fighting and war. O'Brien shows his antiwar theme by consistently showing just how war is "hell." By the end of the book, the reader understands just how war is hell, and why this book is such a strong statement against war and the horrors it creates on both sides of the fighting.

Author Tim O'Brien knows the Vietnam War because he fought there. It seems as if it would be impossible to write a book like The Things They Carried without having actually experienced the war. That is one reason the book is so vivid and so interesting. The author experienced many of these things first-hand. That is also why it is so disturbing. The author saw many of these things or things like them, and many of them are horrible. O'Brien notes that the book is fiction, and yet, many of the characters seem so real they must have existed, and the lines of reality blur even more when the reader realizes the narrator of these short stories strung together into a novel is named Tim O'Brien.

One critic, Catherine Calloway, notes "The relationship between fiction and reality arises early in the text when the reader learns the first of many parallels that emerge as the book progresses: that the protagonist and narrator, like the real author of The Things They Carried, is named Tim O'Brien" (Calloway 250). O'Brien attended college in Minnesota and protested the Vietnam War during his college years. Shortly after he graduated, he was drafted, and served in Vietnam. He believes the experience helped him as a writer, but he never talks about his service or his experience, he simply writes about it. Therefore, he clearly experienced things like the things he describes in this book. He fictionalized many of them, as he did many of the characters, but many of them are based in true experience. That makes the book even more interesting and disturbing. Another literature critic, Jim Neilson, notes, "The Things They Carried was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award" (Neilson 192). The book is a classic American war novel, and an even more classic American antiwar novel.

It is easy to think all the violence, bloodshed, and atrocities of war are made up. Knowing they could be true is more difficult. Knowing many of these incidents could be true also shows why O'Brien is so against war. It is clear from these stories that war is terrible. It is violent, it is deadly, and it changes people. It is also quite certain that none of the young men who returned from Vietnam were the same as when they left the United States. War changes people, and not in a good way. This war was worse than most, because it ended in defeat. These young men fought for nothing, and that had to affect them, too. That is one reason this book carries such a strong antiwar message. O'Brien does not want other young men to go through what he went through. Unfortunately, it does not seem like that is possible in our world.

O'Brien did not connect and plot the book like most fictional works. This book is more like a series of short stories woven together to make a book. Many of the characters, alive and dead, continue through many of the stories. Two characters are consistent throughout the stories - the narrator, who turns out to be O'Brien, and Jimmy Cross, the young lieutenant who always stays in touch with O'Brien. These two consistent characters help hold the book together and keep the characters from becoming disjointed and difficult to understand. At one point the narrator states, "But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget" (O'Brien 38), and this is an important aspect of the antiwar message of this book. The men who fought there cannot forget their experiences in Vietnam. They color the rest of their lives, and convince many of them that war is wrong and useless in the end. All it does is kill innocent people on both sides. Wars change people, and not for the better, and that is another message of this book.

There is another very strong fictional device that holds this book together, and that is the characters in each story. Even in such short sections, O'Brien creates characters that the reader comes to care about. He does this by making them real, and the situations they face real, too. For example, he opens the book with his friend Jimmy Cross. He makes him real by showing him longing for home. He writes, "He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there" (O'Brien 3). This opening also sets up another important aspect of the characters. Each of them "carries" something throughout the novel - from soap to drugs to a treasured Bible. That gives the novel its title, but it also gives the characters more "character." Author Leslie Adams writes, "The description of the items each man carried gives the reader some initial impression of the character's personality, but the items also represent the private anxieties of each soldier" (Adams 91). Critic Neilson continues, "Characters and incidents are repeated from story to story and are refracted through several literary modes and through the O'Brien narrator/persona's shifting self-interest and self-delusion" (Neilson 192). The characters are crucial to the reader's understanding of the novel, and how the characters delude themselves is crucial to the story and to the theme.

That is another very important antiwar theme in the book, that people often delude themselves into believing war is "good" or "necessary." For example, several times in the book the narrator and other characters refer to "true" stories and then say they aren't true, such as, "That's a true story that never happened" (O'Brien 84). This shows that the characters have lost the ability to understand the difference between reality and fantasy, and so, much of what they say in the book is suspect. The reader does not know what to believe and what not to believe. They do not want to believe some of the most gruesome stories, like the death of Curt Lemon and the death of the baby water buffalo, and yet they suspect both are "true." The characters are trying to tell themselves what they are doing is good, or at least necessary by making up stories that make it seem better or much worse than it really is. This book shows that war is neither good nor necessary; it is simply a way for two sides who disagree to do away with each other, and never really come to an agreement or an understanding. This is especially important regarding the Vietnam War, because that war has never really "gone away." It is still controversial, and many people refer to the War in Iraq as "another Vietnam," meaning it is a war we cannot win and should not be fighting. If Vietnam were not so controversial, people like Tim O'Brien would not continue to write books about it twenty or thirty years after it ended.

O'Brien uses many techniques throughout the novel to show the hopelessness and waste of the Vietnam War and continue his antiwar message. One is metaphor, particularly the metaphor of poor Kiowa slowly sinking and dying in a field of *****. O'Brien writes, "[...] when he got there Kiowa was almost completely under. There was a knee. There was an arm and a gold wristwatch and part of a boot" (O'Brien 149). He makes Kiowa vividly real by using the minute details of a soldier's life to show what a man leaves in the end. It makes the reader think about the waste of war and warfare, and it is a metaphor for the entire war, too. Critic Neilson believes the metaphor is strong, too. He writes,

That men's lives were wasted in Vietnam is likewise emblematized by the ***** field. Kiowa's death also evokes the notion that for the U.S. Vietnam was a quagmire; his drowning functions almost emblematically to suggest America's deepening entanglement in Southeast Asia. 'This field,' O'Brien writes, 'had embodied all the waste that was Vietnam'" (Neilson 193).

The entire book is an antiwar message, and it continues in the chapters and memories where O'Brien follows the men home after the war.

The Chapter "Notes" follows Norman Bowker, one of O'Brien's fellow soldiers who felt especially responsible for Kiowa's death. After he returns to the United Sates after he was discharged, he continues to write to O'Brien, telling him of his life back home. It is a life that he feels he no longer fits. O'Brien writes, "I received a long, disjointed letter in which Bowker described the problem of finding a meaningful use for his life after the war" (O'Brien 155). This was a problem with many returning Vietnam veterans, many who still suffer today. Many of these young men could not cope with all they had seen in the jungles and battlefields of Vietnam. Many of them had used drugs, which were plentiful in Southeast Asia, to block out the horrors of the war, and they continued when they returned home. Many could not keep jobs, and ended up homeless and on the streets, where they remain today.

Some, like Norman Bowker, simply could not cope with a normal life after everything that had happened to them in the war. O'Brien continues about Bowker, "He spent his mornings in bed. In the afternoons he played pickup basketball at the Y, and then at night he drove around town in his father's car, mostly alone, or with a six-pack of beer, cruising" (O'Brien 155-156). Bowker found his life meaningless and what he had done in Vietnam equally meaningless. Bowker writes to O'Brien, "That night when Kiowa got wasted, I sort of sank down into the sewage with him... Feels like I'm still in deep *****'" (O'Brien 156). Bowker and thousands like him were indeed in "deep *****." They, like Bowker in the novel, end up committing suicide. Others end up in mental institutions, victims of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome and other diseases and mental problems that did not have names until after the Vietnam War. War is hell, and O'Brien shows that the hell continues long after the fighting is over.

After Vietnam, an entire generation of American young people did not have to worry about fighting in a war. They did not understand war, and they did not experience war. O'Brien's book also introduces this generation to war, and instructs them in what to look for and what to think about. He writes, "A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done" (O'Brien 68). Therefore, this book of his is not a "true" war story, because it does have a moral, and that is clearly why he wrote it. He wrote it so people who never experienced war might understand it, and he wrote it to show that he believes war is morally wrong. His point is that a "true" war story somehow glorifies war, but really, war should not be glorified, even for the victors, it should be understood and stopped.

There is another important antiwar message in this book that O'Brien saves until the last Chapter "The Lives of the Dead." He shows that the lives of those lost during the war are kept alive by stories just like the stories he wrote in this book - even people he did not know, such as the young Vietnamese boy he blew up with a grenade, or the old man killed in a deserted village. O'Brien makes up stories about the lives of these people to keep them real, just as he writes the stories of the people who died to perpetuate them and their lives. He writes late in the book, "By slighting death, by acting, we pretended it was not the terrible thing it was" (O'Brien 238). But it was terrible, and that is the ultimate message of this book. Death is final, and many of these deaths in Vietnam seemed like a needless waste. War is hell, and war is what changes men forever. Some of them never come home, and that is the ultimate hell.

When the character O'Brien returns to Vietnam with his daughter, he remembers, "I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief" (O'Brien 180). That is another poignant reference to O'Brien's strong antiwar commitment. He shows how even twenty, thirty, and forty years later the war has an affect on the people who fought it. Those who fought the war and survived paid a terrible price. They have to live with their memories every day, and most of those memories are horrible. They also have to lie about what they did in the war, as O'Brien does when his daughter asks if he killed anyone. He can lie and say "no," or he can say "yes." He keeps his past private because it is painful, and it would be even more painful for his daughter to know the truth.