Martha In O Brien's The Things They Carried

"Lieutenant Cross kept to himself. He pictured Martha's smooth young face, thinking he loved her more than anything, more than his men, and now Ted Lavender was dead because he loved her so much and could not stop thinking about her" (O'Brien 6).

He has so much responsibility that he blames himself for the death of two of his soldiers: Ted Lavender and Kiowa. There are two deaths that Cross blames himself for: Ted Lavender and Kiowa. He feels guilty because he thinks that if he had been watching his soldiers carefully than it would not have happened. “When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war… A moment of carelessness or bad judgment or plain stupidity carried consequences that lasted forever.” (O’Brien 169) Someone or something must be blamed when a man died. Jimmy Cross always blamed himself because he was the leader. He carried a lot of guilt throughout the war. He blames himself for thinking of Martha instead of focusing on the war.

Through the exchange of letters between Lt. Jimmy Cross and the center of his infatuation Martha in “The Things They Carried”, he allowed himself to become more obsessed with the thought of her. The letters simply state the events Martha encounter in her daily life, lines

At this point Lieutenant Cross came to a decision that he needed to be in the war one hundred percent. Later that night he began digging a hole with tears running down his face. These tears were tears of mourning, not only for Ted Lavender, but for him and Martha as well. At this point he realized that in order for him to fully protect his men, he would have to let Martha live in her own world. He placed Martha's letters and pictures into a flame and burned them all.

This is the crucial turning point for Lt. Cross. He reaches the crossroad where he must choose between his men or continue the drug us of Martha and be transported to fantasy land. “But didn’t” (358) tells us exactly which path he chose. He burns the letters and photos of Martha, symbolizing his desire to forget about that life, and moves forward with contemplating how to dispose of the pebble. “Everything seemed part of everything else, the fog and Martha” (357) comparing Martha to the fog. Fog is gray, dense and prevents one to see clearly, and that was Martha. When he was high on Martha, he couldn’t see clearly and he couldn’t think clearly. “…deepening rain. It was a war, after all… Lt. Jimmy Cross took out his maps… shook his head hard, as if to clear it…” (357), it is the symbolism of the rain that clears out his thinking, and washing away the distraction. This is the first time we see the leader in Lt. Cross emerge. He takes out his “map to plan the day’s march… and they would head west… country green and inviting” (358). This passage allows us to get a glimpse of the new Lt. Cross who is putting his men first, planning out the day’s travel, with plans to leave the darkness behind and head towards life and

Martha also weighs upon Lt. Cross' actions (or lack thereof). Early in the story, the reader can see how Martha is a distraction during troop movements. Tasting the letter from Martha does not directly distract Lt. Cross from his duties, but it does lead the reader to believe that she is too often the focus of his

In the novel The Things They Carried Tim O'Brien often brings up Jimmy cross’s love for Martha and how he struggles expressing they way feel feels about her. “Right then he thought he should’ve done something brave”(O’Brian 5) Cross felt much regret because he did not act on his feelings. He did not have the courage to express his love they way he wanted to towards Martha. Jimmy Cross, who had been in love with Martha for quite sometime even though she didn't feel the same way tried to play it off as if he had gotten over her.

But he was not there. He was buried with Martha under the white sand at the Jersey Shore. They were pressed together… yet he could not bring himself to worry about matters of security.”(Things they Carried Novel) Lieutenant Cross should have been focusing on his duties and this quote shows that while he was looking into the tunnel he thinks about Martha and him being buried. This demonstrates and shows that he shouldn’t be focusing on Martha while Ted lavender was previously shot, Cross has to be more mindful of where he currently was and he clearly has to understand that if Cross kept daydreaming about Martha then little could we find out that instead of Ted Lavender possibly dieing Cross could’ve possibly died with Ted at that time. In reality many people can be relatable to how Cross was clearly lost in his thoughts. In the Bloom’s guide of pg.22 a quote shows an example of how Jimmy cross was just lost in processes of thinking. “The episode goes on to detail the optimistic detachments of the letter and how, to Jimmy, they become unintentional love letters. Some nights, sitting in his foxhole, holding he pictures in his fingers, he imagines a complete life with Martha, a life antithetical to the experience he was undergoing”

In the first chapter in the book, titled The Things They Carried, Jimmy Cross is one of the many examples throughout the novel in where a soldier has a way to escape from the realities of war. Cross, who is a lieutenant in his company, carries two photographs of a girl named Martha whom he truly loves and wishes nothing else but to be with her in the end. Along with the photographs, he carries letters from Martha herself as well as her good-luck pebble in his mouth. Martha’s letters has a huge impact on Cross’s escape on reality because those letters do not mention war at all but for him to stay safe. All of these items comforts Cross and eventually reminisce about the times when he was back home with Martha away from any war. He relives a moment when he was with Martha at the movies, and then remembers that he touched her knee but Martha did not approve and pushed his hands away. Now while he’s in Vietnam, he does nothing but fantasizes taking her to her bed, tying her up, and touching that one knee knee all night long.

pictures of her. He would read the letters at the end of a long day in a foxhole he dug. He would sometimes lick the seal of the envelope because he knew that Martha’s tongue had been there. This obsession distracts Cross from the war and from his platoon.

Eventually, his constant thoughts of Martha lead him to be “distracted” causing one of his soldiers to get killed. The violent event causes him to lash against himself and constantly terrorizes him. This scene shows how the violent death of a soldier affects those who survived and haunts them repeatedly. In Jimmy Cross’s case it leads him to resent Martha for being a distraction to him, so he destroys the image he had of her and replaces it with guilt and hatred. O’ Brien says, “He felt shame.

He had touched these items day by day, wondering who had been beside her while she had retrieved the pebble from the beach, or who placed the shadow in the photo of her. His mind would race day and night, making it difficult for him to provide adequate attention on the war. Cross “would yell at his men to spread out the column, to keep their eyes open, but then he would slip away into daydreams, just pretending, walking barefoot along the Jersey shore; with Martha, carrying nothing” (396). Cross would hope for nothing more than to be carrying nothing. These physical objects weighed him down terribly after the death of Ted Lavender. He had loved Martha much more than his men, and due to his overpowering love he had lost one of them. The pebble was not only a symbol of importance to Cross as he dealt with the trauma of war, but as the physical weight he carried due to the death of his man. These physical symbols helped to identify a shift in the story when Cross decides to open up and make a change to the way he is coping with the war after Lavender’s death. This “wouldn’t help Lavender, he knew that, but from this point on he would comport himself as an officer” (403).

Love is a powerful force, and Lieutenant Cross sometimes gets lost in his musings while thinking of Martha. O’Brien writes: “His mind wandered. He had difficulty keeping his attention on the war. On occasion he would yell at his men to spread out the column, to keep their eyes open, but then he would slip away into daydreams, just pretending, walking barefoot along the Jersey shore, with Martha, carrying nothing.” Like any sane person in his situation, Lieutenant Cross wants to escape – to anywhere else but the war. The war brings terrible experiences – fear, death, hunger, and pain beyond imagination. The only way that Lieutenant Cross can endure these things is by escaping to an imaginary life with Martha. Although to her, he is little more than a friend, to Lieutenant Cross, Martha represents innocence, perfection, and a world free from war.

Martha is the first women we meet in the book. She is pretty much the typical stay at home war girl. She writes letters to Lt. Jimmy Cross, they met at a college in New Jersey but nothing sparked between them besides a friendship. There isn't any hope of them ever being together but Jimmy Cross still thinks about her constantly everyday. In one particular letter she sends him a good-luck-pebble. "Martha wrote that she had found the pebble on the Jersey shoreline and carried it in her breast pocket for several days" (8). Jimmy Cross reads the letter spends hours wondering who she was at the beach with, if she was with a man, if they were a couple. When the women sent letters home, it really helped keep the morale of the soldier's. Although Martha continues to kind of mislead Jimmy when she signs the letters "love." "Ted Lavender was shot in the head on his way back from peeing. He lay with his mouth open" (12).

During the war, women are used to reflect society’s abandonment of the soldiers through their insensitivity that ultimately leaves the soldiers to fight alone. For Lieutenant Cross, Martha writes long letters back and forth with him, but rarely do they ever speak of Cross’s life in battle. Merely, the only time war is mentioned is to say, “Jimmy, take care of yourself” (2). Considering the pages and pages of writing that Martha writes regarding her life, she does not put in the effort to ask about Cross, who risks his life every day. Simply, she tells Cross to