Things They Carried While I

¶ … Things They Carried

While I have mostly read books for entertainment reasons, I can remember one that a friend told me about that I read out of curiosity. This curiosity made me stop and think about a life that was so different from mine. The book is the Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien and my friend told me to read it because it was a good book about war. I'm not big on war but I respect my friend's opinion, so I read the book. I enjoyed reading it because it did not glamorize war and it was not over the top as far as wrenching every emotion out of the reader. What I

Enjoyed about the book was that it was telling a story but it was also like reading fiction. O'Brien's writing style is powerful in that it is so straightforward. I found that I did not necessarily like what I was reading about but I wanted to read more because the story was so good.

One of the most powerful stories in the novel is "The Things They Carried." This is the first story and captures the reader with sheer details. We know more about these soldiers than we want to know and maybe more than we should now but again, we want to read more. We automatically think of the physical things the men might carry with them while in Viet Nam, but rarely anything else. We read the men carried "the land itself - Vietnam, the place... The pressures were enormous" (O'Brien 15). This statement illustrates how much stress the men must have been under fighting unknown men in a foreign land. This was something that I had never considered before I read the book.

Another story that I found fascinating was "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong." This story is powerful because it shows the effect war can have on someone that lives a life outside the war. Mary Anne becomes obsessed with the war in a strange way. It is as if she sees another kind of life that is so radically different than her own that it consumes her. She seems to be so sweet and innocent at the beginning of the story and at the end she is like an animal that She adopt the Green Beret way of life and becomes one of them in just a few days. She states, "I'm full of electricity and I'm glowing in the dark -- I'm on fire almost -- I'm burning away into nothing -- but it doesn't matter because I know exactly who I am" (121). Mary Anne's change was one that made me think of the war in a way that I never had before because I had never thought of the rituals of war becoming something that someone could become obsessed with and actually want to do. The fact that this happened to a girl made it even more powerful because we always think of the stereotypical girl as being opposed to war - especially fighting in one.