Lack of Morality in War Depicted in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried

This helped us see that the narrator thought the war was traumatizing. To begin, O’brien used the literary device, Man vs. Self, to relay that war is a traumatizing experience. One thing he said that shows this is, “when I’m reading a newspaper or just sitting or just sitting alone in a room I’ll look up and see the young man coming out of the morning fog.” He is trying to cope with it everyday that he had to kill a man that had done no harm to him. He sees the young man walking past him often as constant reminder.

O’Brien always questioned the idea of “enemies”. Throughout the book he questioned in many ways and asked why were they enemies. What have they done to make them enemies, he sought for answers to his questions and eventually justified them by “if I don't kill them then they will kill me”.He was afraid of both killing, and dying but he knew that if he didn’t kill then he himself would be dead. These experiences and suppression of ideas are what led O’Brien’s to write The Things They Carried. In real life, Tim O'Brien feared the war and wrote this book to persuade others and to plant an idea in their head about the horrors that they should not want to suffer. Tim portrays his fear of the war by sharing his experiences as stories. Tim portrays many of his fears

O'Brien's reason for writing the novel is to tell a true war story with the story-truth, instead of the happening-truth. The happening truth isn't important because the emotions of the soldiers is what matters, which the story-truth captures. In "Good From," the story-truth gives in detail of the man O'Brien killed, but in the happening-truth O'Brien didn't kill anybody and is left with "faceless responsibility and faceless grief." (page 172) It shows why the happening-truth doesn't matter because it doesn't convey the guilt O'Brien felt over death in the war, while the story-truth does. "I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth" (page 171)

O’Brien knows this. He does not shy away from long, thoughtful passages that explain the basic realities of battlefield life. Look at In the Field, when Jimmy Cross tries to think of what precisely caused Kiowa’s death. “You could blame the war. You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going into it... In the field, though, the causes were immediate. A moment of carelessness or bad judgment or plain stupidity carried consequences that lasted forever” (O’Brien 169). This passage articulates the immediacy and constant danger of war. Every moment, every river or rainstorm could mean death. That is what Lamott might call “meat-and-potato truth” to the soldiers. A concept so poignant can easily transcend words, and if O’Brien had had any reluctance to delve so deeply into how the Lieutenant thinks, it could have been lost in translation. Only through O’Brien’s intimate musing comes a shadow of enormous reality, the “meat-and-potato

War covets the aspect of man that is man itself, for it craves to morph them into mere objects and targets. For many soldiers, they succumb to such a fate; being depleted their ability to feel immediate emotion, they develop primitive, animalistic urges of bloodlust during a time of bloodshed. The aspects of war gravely impacts a person, and as such can be seen in O’Flaherty’s character “the sniper,” as well as seen in O’Brien’s character “Private Paul Berlin.” The sniper is a victim to the war’s cold, emotionless embrace. A Republican soldier, he is, divided from his brothers in arms on the other side, the ones called the “Free Staters.” Nonetheless, under the circumstances, they all are pawns to Dublin’s chess table of a civil war, being played at the mercy of the war’s

While the Vietnam War was a complex political pursuit that lasted only a few years, the impact of the war on millions of soldiers and civilians extended for many years beyond its termination. Soldiers killed or were killed; those who survived suffered from physical wounds or were plagued by PTSD from being wounded, watching their platoon mates die violently or dealing with the moral implications of their own violence on enemy fighters. Inspired by his experiences in the war, Tim O’Brien, a former soldier, wrote The Things They Carried, a collection of fictional and true war stories that embody the

Memories and stories swarming the mind and twisted by imagination are the only glimpse of humanity a man can hold on to while at war. Through stories, men at war can share their thinning humanity with one another. The deafening silence of war defeats the human spirit and moral compass, thus it is not only man against man but man against sanity. Tim O 'Brien 's “The Things They Carried” provides a narrative of soldiers in the Vietnam War holding on to the only parts of themselves through their imagination. O’Brien employs symbolic tokens, heavy characterization, and the grueling conflict of man to illustrate how soldiers create metaphorical stories to ease the burden of war.

Throughout Tim O'Brien's, “How to Tell a True War Story”, the concept of truth and how one tells a “true” war story is discussed. Several factors contribute to the “truth” of the stories the soldiers told; the madness of the war, the civilians back home who didn't experience war or understand that it was hell, and the indescribable ways the soldiers felt. O'Brien explains that people willingly accept the facts of what happened during a war but, what they don’t consider is the deception of these facts that change through people’s stories. All of these factors combined caused the soldiers to react to certain situations and tell stories differently. O’Brien’s stories characterize that “truth” isn’t always a straightforward concept; and that it can be revealed in many ways. It can be the narrator’s intention, to provide the truth but the person listening might find a different truth to the story.

Tim O’Brien uses saddening tone words to explain why he fabricated the entire novel, instead of telling the truth. O’Brien feels as though he is responsible for the deaths that happened in Vietnam, even if he did not do the killing. He believes that his “presence was guilt enough,”(171). This is why O’Brien formulates the false stories, to make the reader feel the same way he did in that situation, even if he has to bend the truth to do so. The author finds it necessary to put a face to the victim in order to make it more bearable. Otherwise, O’Brien is left with “faceless guilt” and “faceless responsibility,” (171). He also feels as if he holds the weight of all of the men that he could’ve possibly killed.

O’Brien may have believed it in the beginning, when he was still a “greenie”, but one exposure to the real war environment can quickly change his mind. War is not like the movies, movies that shows the perfect courageous good always defeating the obvious evil. It’s impossible for a real soldier to follow the footsteps of heroes in entertainment, and he wants to emphasize this point to the readers: “You’re not human anymore. You’re a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, or leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted or believed in. You know you’re about to die. And it’s not a movie and you aren’t a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait” (211). The emotions he feels at the time is hard to put into words, and so he makes the reader try to experience it, just as he wants Bobby Jorgenson to experience it. Because O’Brien has accumulated familiarity with this irrational fear soldiers experience, he feels like this is a punishment suitable in its notoriety for a new soldier like Jorgenson, and would hopefully get back at the pain he had endured from the medic’s failed aid to his gunshot

His purpose is to convey the hauntings of his experiences as a foot soldier, but at the same time, avoids writing directly from memory. O’Brien mixes in fictional characters, places, and events about the war that blurs the line between real & imaginary. What this does for the reader is allows a broader understanding of the word ‘truth’. In one passage from the text called How to Tell a True War Story, Tim O’Brien writes that

The seductive allure of war in O’Brien’s novel, “The Things They Carried,” is linked to the tendencies of human nature in men. War acts as a catalyst for many causing them to become more primal versions of themselves or “human killing machines.” O’Brien revisits the idea of man losing himself numerous times adding in subtle variations of his own life experiences and inconstant propensity to make witness to and offer detailed accounts of coping mechanisms and grief in attempt to gain control over the chaos of the war by creating a story of survival. During the war, American soldiers carried patriotic derision on their shoulders, however, after the war, they were exposed to unnecessary psychological effects that in many ways were worse than the war itself. Soldiers during the war felt a strong sense of isolation from their friends, families, and communities back home.

In this passage O’brien demonstrates his own character traits. As a writer, he has a strong ability to understand what others are feeling and sympathize. When he kills the young soldier, he creates a story around him, imaging the soldier as having similar struggles to his own. He deeply regrets the soldier's death because he feels that neither of them really wanted to be fighting in this war and relates his own life story to the fictional one he creates for the soldier.

The immorality of the war sometimes makes the wrong seems right, while the right seems wrong. War is a place of destruction and death, but when one has lived in peace, and then being forced into a wartime environment, his moral and the nature of the war would make every decision more difficult to confirm. The vietnamese man who O’brien killed might could have been a communist, who was carrying out a mission in secret, at night. He could have caused harm to the American boys, and O’brien’s unintentional decision might be what saved them, which was something right to do. However, O’brien’s moral sense make him feel guilty for killing someone that didn’t hurt him first, even though he is in a war, where killing should have been something typical.

O’Brien tells his first tale prior to the war after beginning stories during the war, because of his own continuing internal conflict with cowardice. He tells of when he considered running away from the draft to Canada, finishing the tale with the statement “I was a coward. I went to war,” (58). He continues to fight with this decision long after the war is over, as the story proves. Perhaps his second most important internal conflict of the novel happens later on, a story in which he repeatedly brings up over and over. His first kill brings about many battles on whether or not he truly has killed or not. He