Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

“He was realistic about it. There was that new hardness in his stomach. He loved her but he hated her. No more fantasies, he told himself. Henceforth, when he thought about Martha, it would be only to think that she belonged elsewhere. He would shut down the daydreams. This was not Mount Sebastian, it was another world, where there were no pretty poems or midterm exams, a place where men died because of carelessness and gross stupidity. Kiowa was right. Boom-down, and you were dead, never partly dead. Briefly, in the rain, Lieutenant Cross saw Martha’s gray eyes gazing back at him.”

Jimmy Cross being the immature lieutenant is affected being responsible of his men, and carries much of the war’s burden. Every time one of Cross’s men dies, he experiences deep regrettable feelings that he should have been a better

Jimmy cross was the leader of Tim O'Brien platoon. Jimmy Cross was in charge of all the men under his command but he never want to be in charge of all those young men and didn’t want the guilt that came with every time he lost a man in the Vietnam war. Every time he lost a man in the field he blamed himself that he wasn’t being the best and that every time a man was killed he would blame himself. When Jimmy Cross was visiting Tim O'Brien after the war was over.They shared memories of old time and friends they lost during the war and when Tim O'Brien had his photo’s out Jimmy Cross stared at the photo of Ted Lavender and Jimmy cross thought that Ted Lavender's death was his fault and he has the guilt still after the war was over about his death. “And said he’d never forgiven himself for Lavender’s death.” So Jimmy cross is still dealing with the guilt of losing Ted Lavender in the war and has not gotten over it. In the story “In the Field” Jimmy Cross talk’s about how he felt guilty and responsible for what happen to Kiowa when Kiowa died in the field. When LT Jimmy Cross received his orders for the top commanded he is to set up came in the field near the town that was near by. Kiowa sink into the mud in the middle of the night and died because of it LT Jimmy Cross blamed himself that Kiowa died and that he should have choose somewhere else to set up for the night even know a villager warned

After the death of Kiowa in the shit fields, Cross was determined to find his body because he wouldn’t let the good soldier be left behind. He knew Kiowa didn’t deserve that. As he searched the field with the troops he was forced to construct a letter to send home to Kiowa's father.

He should have moved to higher ground for the night, should’ve radioed in false coordinates”(187). Hindsight is twenty-twenty and it is hard to watch Cross torment himself over a situation where, once again, he is only trying to do what is right. With the weight of the war on his back, Cross can see no reason other than his wanton lack of judgment for Kiowa’s death. He attempts to cope with his overwhelming guilt by composing a letter to Kiowa’s father right there in the shit field. “He would explain this to Kiowa’s father. Carefully, not covering up his own guilt, he would tell how the mortar rounds made craters in the slush… My own fault, he would say” (191). In another situation, perhaps, he could think rationally and realize that he could never have fathomed what the field would become when transformed by night and merciless rain. But with the backdrop of war, to Jimmy Cross there is no other reasonable cause for the death of his man.

Jimmy Cross is the First Lieutenant who carries “the responsibility for the lives of his men” (O’Brien 429). Cross let his imagined love get in the way of his responsibilities and one of his men was killed. Cross carries the weight of Lavender’s death and adds that to the weight of his renewed responsibility to his men (427-437).

In the 1960’s and 70’s many young men with bright futures were being sentenced to a war that they did not want to fight and found no reason for the war itself. In the novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien connects the stories of other soldiers and very few them are fictional. He also describes the feelings and overwhelming emotions each would be going through. Throughout the novel, Tim O’Brien portrays the theme of loss which leads to the theme of guilt, both are because of the war and the decisions they make leading to loss and the feeling of guilt.

When fighting as a soldier in the Vietnam War, everything carried has to have significance. In The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, the soldiers carried items that were important to them symbolically and emotionally. There were some objects that were a necessity such as, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, steel helmets, ponchos, and etc… Also, standard weapons were needed like the M-60, M-16, and M-79. Jimmy Cross was first lieutenant so he had the responsibility to shuffle around a compass, maps, code books, binoculars, and a .45-caliber pistol. RTO Mitchell Sanders had the responsibility to carry the PRC-25 radio, which was a whole 26 pounds. Rat Kiley was the medic and had certain items needed to treat

I have experienced love, lost, and the slimmest of experience of realizing that you fallen and that you now have to pick yourself back up and try again. I empathize with Jim Cross from the short story “The Things They Carried” for all the emotions he goes through while living in the purgatory that is called war. From the sentence, where Jim Cross looks back at a moment where Martha and he were at the movies, ”when he touched her knee, she turned and looked at him in a sad, sober way that made him pull his hand back(P.3),” it becomes clear that the aim of the flashback was to solidify the reader’s understanding that Jim’s love is unrequited. Throughout high school I was in love with my best friend, which turned out to be unrequited also. I was in absolutely despair and heartbroken, but the love that was there, throughout all the pain it brought me, was a gift.

A traumatic event occurs when a person is in a situation where there is a risk of harm or danger to themselves or other people. Situations like this are usually frightening or cause a lot of stress. In such situations, people feel helpless. We all cope with these traumas in different ways, in the protagonist’s case, he writes about it. Tim O’Brien expresses a candid tone in the passage corresponding to Lavender’s death from fictional novel, The Things They Carried using specific rhetorical strategies in order to create a relatable dilemma with how often times horrific stories are unintentionally skewed.

Write an essay in which you explore how these 2 texts, and specifically their treatments of this theme, have contributed to your intellectual and/or emotional growth this year? Memory is often incorrectly interpreted as a burden that people waste energy thinking about, preventing them from achieving their full potential in the present. The most frequent advice I have received is to ‘get over it’ or ‘forgive and forget’. However, while reading The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien and The World of a Few Minutes Ago by Jack Driscoll, this perception was challenged.

     In “On the Rainy River”, O’Brien writes of intrapersonal struggle in its most profound form. The gripping torture of indecision seemed to paralyze Lt. Jimmy Cross in every move he made. Fear is what kept him away from the war, and fear is what made him join his countrymen in battle. A pacifist

Cross guilt gets worse every time one of his men die but the death that made him the most guilty was Ted because he was to focused on touching a girls knee. He loved this girl more than his own men. Cross suffers for the sake of the whole platoon he burns Martha's letters to forget about her and stop being distracted and focus on his men who are there and not this girl across the world who just distracted him a quote of Jimmy Cross guilt from the book “He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war.” From his point of view he was a young man just trying to past time in the war by forgetting about everyone and everything and just focusing on himself and Martha and because of that, his men

Ultimately, he ends up getting shot, which Cross feels guilty of seeing as his attention was not focused on the problem in front of him (O’Brien,1990). Throughout the story multiple other soldiers die and the story changes from different

In the story “The Things They Carried” Jimmy Cross is the lieutenant of the Alpha Company, who is responsible for the entire group of men. He doesn’t really know how to lead his men. He has guilt because he believes that he is preoccupied by his unrequited love for a girl named Martha and his tendency to follow orders despite his better judgment cause the deaths of Ted Lavender and Kiowa. These are two members of his Alpha