The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

It is based on necessity such as the standard fatigue jacket and trousers, canteens, MRE’s or C-rations, cigarettes, steel helmets, flak jacket, ponchos or sleep bags, a weapon such as the M-16, the M-60, or the .45 caliber pistol, or in Ted Lavender’s case dope. It is based on rank or field specialty such as Lt. Cross carrying the maps, compass and codebook, or Mitchell Sanders being the RTO carrying the PRC-25 radio, or Rat Kiley being the medic carrying his canvas satchel filled with morphine, and plasma and malaria tablets and surgical tape. It is based on mission, such as a mine detector is they though an area was especially littered with toe poppers and bouncing betties, and it is based on superstition, such as Lt. Cross’s good-luck pebble, Dave Jensen’s rabbit’s foot or Henry Dobbins carrying his girlfriend’s pantyhose. Despite the heavy load (each soldier carrying closer to a 100 lbs worth of gear) this story, isn’t about the physical weight, but rather the emotional and psychological toll a war can take on a person. The Things They Carried is about LT. Cross and his men, Rat Kiley, Henry Dobbins, Dave Jensen, Kiowa, Ted Lavender, Norman Baker, Lee Strunk and Mitchell Sanders and there time in Vietnam. The author talks about the various things that they had to carry and well as a number of events such as Mitchell Sanders cutting of the dead vietcongs thumb, to Lee Strunk being picked to going in a VC tunnel and to the sudden death of Ted Lavender, who was shot while walking back from

There were certain items or supplies that each soldier needed to possess that aided in their survival. Other items were discretionary or optional, not entirely important for the

For example, Lt. Jimmy Cross carried letters from Martha that he continually fantasized about. Kiowa carried his grandfather’s old hunting hatchet as a way to hold on to his cultural past. The additional weight depended somewhat upon the soldier’s rank and position. For example, the radiotelephone operator carried a twenty-six pound radio as part of his position.

Many of the soldiers carried personal possession from back home to remind them of the life they had left. Jimmy Cross carried a picture of Martha and letters she wrote to him. Jimmy Cross also carried the pebble Martha sent to him from the Jersey shore. This would remind him of how he yearned to be back at home with her. Kiowa carried

Soldiers in the Army of the Potomac would live and sleep in camps. In the camps they would build small two man tents, they are easily pitched, and log huts that could fit several men. They would use blankets to keep warm at night. Canteens were for them to drink fresh water. Haversacks were what they used to keep their belongings in. They had inadequate food and shelter,

“Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” Dante Alighieri. Hope is an anodyne. In times of war many soldiers require a buffer to alleviate the pain of witnessing the horrors of the war zone reality. This may manifest as emotional baggage, a reoccurring theme in “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien. Emotional baggage transcends the physical weight it manifests that was in the soldier’s packs. Emotional baggage can manifest as something intangible, like an obsession, or take on physical weight and mass, like something that gives comfort simply by having it on one’s person. However, there comes a time when the emotional baggage must be shrugged off if one is to move forward and onward in one’s life. O’Brien uses the reoccurring theme emotional baggage in his novel “The Things They Carried” to show not only how some soldiers utilized it in an attempt to buffer themselves from the front line, but how some put faith in the symbolism of they carried, and how some come to the realization that they must shrug off some of this distracting emotional baggage if they were to carry on.

In the story The Things They Carried Tim O’Brien didn’t mention anything about traditional war heroes. I think this was a great idea, because there are no traditional war heroes. A traditional war hero is someone who is fearless and someone who can’t be harmed mentally or emotionally. But in The Things They Carried the soldiers out on the front lines were emotionally and physically scarred. Tim O’Brien didn’t write about traditional war heroes, O’Brien wrote about normal people, people with different views on the Vietnam war, and how the war affected these people.

In the repeated use of ideas of weight throughout his short story “The Things They Carried”, Tim O’Brien highlights its pivotal symbolism: the intense burden of fear, especially of their own mortality, experienced by the soldiers, and thus weight’s role as the most important word in the text. O’Brien accomplishes this effect through recurring references to weight in relation to Ted Lavender’s death, and his frequent use of weight and weightlessness metaphors in the dreams of Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and the other soldiers. Using the character’s ideas of weight to investigate their emotional reality, O’Brien’s explores heaviness and lightness in both physical and metaphysical connotations providing ample evidence for weight’s central symbolic purpose within the text.

Dobbins the biggest man carries the M-60 machine gun that ways twenty three pounds and additionally he carries fifteen pounds of ammunition draped across his upper body. The soldiers also carry dead bodies when necessary, for example they carry Lavender’s body across to the field to wait for the helicopter “He was dead weight” (71). The term used by the soldiers to carry something was “hump” which symbolizes an obstacle. “In it’s transitive form, to hump meant to walk, or to march, but it implied burdens far beyond the intransitive” (69). To comfort themselves they carried items such as canned peaches, toothbrush, tranquilizers, diary, condoms and an old hunting hatchet. When the men discarded some of the weight, they knew of only two ways. The first is by throwing away weight while on marches. ”They would often discard things along the route of the march” (71), the soldiers would do this because they knew that helicopters would always come with fresh supplies. The second method is to die on the field. “Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge...” (81).

Another substantially detailed necessity of the men is their military supplies. O'Brien goes into minute detail, for literally pages, describing the supplies that the men used for defense purposes. Primarily, he lists the standard weaponry for war, the typical rifles, grenades, and defensive clothing such as the flak jacket and helmet (6- 7). He relates the enormous burden of weight that Ted Lavender was carrying when he was shot, and how that weight caused him to fall like "a big sandbag or something - just boom, then down." (7) The next passage describes all of the extra weapons they carried, ranging from fragmentation grenades to brass knuckles

Bullets whiz by his head as soldiers drop to the ground around him. Some are shot dead. Some are wounded. Some are cowering in fear, trying to preserve their lives. Blood, limbs, smoke, and fire stain the battlefield like a painters’ canvas. Some try to carry on, leading their brothers to victory. Others stay still, crying to themselves about loved ones back home. War has everlasting traumatic effects on people. The soldiers that do survive will never live the same lives they did before the war. Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried does a great job explaining the effects of war on soldiers through many stories O’Brien experienced during the Vietnam War. From trying to escape the war, to his buddy Kiowa dying in muck, O’Brien expertly

Each soldier carried with them items, some tangible others intangible, which helped them to adapt their minds and escape from the setting so that they could survive the traumatic events taking place. “Ted Lavender carried six or seven ounces of premium dope.” “Rat Kiley carried comic books.” The soldiers in the story do not only have a physical battle to deal with but also a mental one. Most of these items were a necessity in order to bear the war. However, there were a few items that the soldiers carried not because they had to or because they needed it to survive physically but because they needed it in order to survive emotionally. One soldier carried his wife’s pantyhose; another carried a new testament. One soldier permitted his items to take control of him and become an obsession, a trauma that took his focus away from his priorities, the war, and his men.

In the book, The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien; the men in combat carried many things, each with a specific purpose for survival. Each man carried individual items, which weighed between 12 and 18 pounds, and added onto this weight with other necessities for the whole group. The necessities the men carried depended upon a man's rate of metabolism, and their habits. All the men were required to carry large 5 lb steel helmets, and jungle boots, with a weight of 2.1 lbs. Another requirement was that all the men carry a steel centered, nylon-covered flak jacket, with a weight of 6.7lbs. In the field, a poncho was a multi-purpose treasure, and could even be used as a body carrier. What the men carried also depended on their rank, and their

Some of the necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellant, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, C rations and two or three canteens of water. By necessity, and because it was standard operating procedure they all carried steel helmets that weighed five pounds. On their feet they carried jungle boots, which weighed two pounds. They also carried a steel-centered nylon covered flak jacket which weighed seven pounds. (O’Brien 266)

textiles required to clothe troops, the war made materials, used to make clothes, hard to come by. “Clothes