Essay on The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

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

The Things They Carried is a collection of stories about the Vietnam War that the author, Tim O’Brien, uses to convey his experiences and feelings about the war. The book is filled with stories about the men of Alpha Company and their lives in Vietnam and afterwards back in the United States. O’Brien captures the reader with graphic descriptions of the war that make one feel as if they were in Vietnam. The characters are unique and the reader feels sadness and compassion for them by the end of the novel. To O’Brien the novel is not only a compilation of stories, but also a release of the fears, sadness, and anger that he has felt because of the Vietnam War.

The text, ‘The Things They Carried', is an excellent example which reveals how individuals are changed for the worse through their first hand experience of war. Following the lives of the men both during and after the war in a series of short stories, the impact of the war is accurately portrayed, and provides a rare insight into the guilt stricken minds of soldiers. ‘The Things They Carried' shows the impact of the war in its many forms: the suicide of an ex-soldier upon his return home; the lessening sanity of a medic as the constant death surrounds him; the trauma and guilt of all the soldiers after seeing their friends die, and feeling as if they could have saved them; and the deaths of the soldiers, the most negative impact a war

     Anxiety about death follows the men everywhere they go and they have many different ways to disguise their fear and many ways to defend against it. The men were ready for everything in the war: they had their radio to call in help, their guns to defend against enemies, and their pride and dignity to disguise fear. Disguising fear is very hard because it is such a strong emotion. Great fear is impossible to hide as evident by the actions of the men when they were involved in the intense fights where they would say 'Dear Jesus and (flop)

When reading the first chapter of The Things They Carried, it is quickly understood that the soldiers mentioned are burdened to carry a great deal of baggage. This baggage does not only consist of guns, ammunition, protection gear, survival materials, and personal items—this baggage also includes the numerous emotions of grief, longing, guilt, shame, and fear of dying. In complete, soldiers from Vietnam were constrained to carry material baggage as well as mental baggage that varied from each individual. The outcome of this constraint seems to play a huge role in being a soldier, however, not each soldier may handle this constraint the same way. Some soldiers may drive their vehicle around aimlessly, like Norman Bowker, trying to forget the war. Others may decide the burden is too tough to carry and hang themselves, like Bowker eventually did (p.154).

In "The Things They Carried," O'Brien made reference to the Vietnam war that was closely associated with the physical, psychological, and emotional weight the soldiers beared.  The overall method of presentation of this story incorporated many different outlooks on the things the soldiers carried, dealt with, and were forced to adapt to.  In addition to this, O'Brien showed us the many reasons why and how the soldiers posessed these things individually and collectively and how they were associated directly and indirectly.  The strong historical content in "The Things They Carried" helped emphasize the focus of the story and establish a clearer understanding of details in the

In the novel “The Things They Carried written by Tim O’Brien, the author destroys the stereotypical archetype of the warrior in shining armor bravely fighting for the good of his country. O’Brien presents the soldiers who openly express their fears, homesickness, and regrets. He discusses the physical and emotional burdens that come comes along with war. The “things” that soldiers carry are both literal and figurative. They carry sentimental items to remind them of home such as amulets, weapons, survival gear, and even emotional wounds, also they carry grief, longing, terror, and most prevalently, guilt. In The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, the burdens on these soldiers revealed the author’s opinion of how soldiers in Vietnam defines the soldier archetype.

The novel, The Things They Carried is a story of one man’s accounts resulting to his tour of duty in Vietnam. Many of the men that are discussed in the book continued to be effected by the war, long after they returned home. Men were left emotionally scared, even if they managed to get out of the war physically unharmed. The

The Things They Carried is a story based on the experiences of young American soldiers fighting during the Vietnam War. The story begins giving you insight into the thoughts of the soldiers, describing to you what they humped along with them through their walk in the deep jungle of Vietnam. Some of those things were necessities P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing-gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets (81) and some were objects to give them hope. Throughout the story you follow a young platoon of men on their journey through the jungle never knowing which day could be the last day of their lives. The author, Tim O’Brien, using very accurate description and detail gives us

Each soldier carried something that weighed in pounds Besides carrying physically objects, “they carried emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—but also the weight of memory, the terrible gravity of guilt…” This contrast the physical and emotional things the soldiers carried, and it reveals both sides of war. One not only has to come physically prepared but also mentally prepared to fight in war. A person has to be ready for the unexpected, many soldiers end up traumatized and scarred for life due to horrific

“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien is a short story written about the Vietnam War. The title has two meanings. The first is their duties and equipment for the war. The second, the emotional sorrows they were put through while at war. Their wants and needs, the constant worry of death were just a few of the emotional baggage they carried. During the Vietnam War, like all wars, there were hard times. Being a soldier wasn’t easy. Soldiers always see death, whether it be another soldier or an enemy. In “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien explores the motivation of solders in the Vietnam War to understand their role in combat, to stay in good health, and accept the death of a fellow soldier.

The psychological burden that plagues the soldiers the most is fear. The fear of death. Even though the soldiers’ experience fear at some point, showing that fear only reveals vulnerabilities to the enemy and sometimes the crueler fellow soldiers. “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing – these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.” (O'Brien, 1990) The

“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’ Brien is a story in which the author details the possessions the emotions and the memories which were carried by the soldiers into the Vietnam War. The accuracy fact fullness and the attention to details make this story a truthful experience, riding on a thin line between fiction and a reality. It embodies the transformation that a soldier in a war zone undergoes. The author being a war veteran himself captures the events in a vivid manner. The two works of literature serve as an authentic and knowledgeable depiction of men fighting a war. They not only carry the weight of weaponry and ammunitions and supplies needed but also the weight of the struggle and the violent deaths that surround them which weigh heavier than the items they carried. The outcomes of war for the side that wins or loses results in devastation of the people but the soldiers are the ones who carry with them the memories of pain and struggle long after the war ends. Every war is partly fought on the ground and partly in the mind of soldiers.

The Things They Carried is a novel written by Vietnam Veteran Tim O’Brien. The Vietnam War took place between 1955 and 1975. Most of the soldiers fighting were young teenage men around the age of eighteen and nineteen years old. Like O’Brien many of these young men were pulled away from their families and life to fight a war they didn’t approve of or even know about. This had a strong affect on most of these men and O’Brien uses different ways to show how the Vietnam War affected them both physically and mentally. In order to display these affects he constantly relates different things in battle to a normal life back at home. Through the use of storytelling, fear, and physical and emotional burdens, O’Brien creates a certain environment

In The Things They Carried written by Tim O’Brien, an established author and veteran in the war in Vietnam, he recalls events about himself and his platoon in the war, expressing true and fictional events, in order to show the reader what the war was truly like. To reinforce his purpose of showing the audience what the war was like, he contrasts two extremely unlike places; the United States and Vietnam. He specifically focuses on the pleasantness and safeness of the United States versus the dangerousness and foreignness of Vietnam, the culture shock due to the routineness of society in the United States as opposed to the chaotic society in Vietnam, and the common referencing of skills learned and things carried from Vietnam back to the United States.