"The Things They Carried," By Tim O'Brien

“The Things They Carried,” by Tim O’Brien, is a very long and well-described list as opposed to a short story.  To summarize the story would be to say that it describes the things soldiers in Vietnam carried with them as they marched, or “humped” through out the war.  The things they carried were not just the physical items one might expect a soldier to carry, such as their weapons and helmets as was S.O.P. (Standard Operating Procedure), but also, “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.  They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture.”  We see the emotional side of First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross mainly; he is our window into the personal life of the soldiers, and we as readers feel his emotion.  Jimmy “carried letters from a girl named Martha” whom he was sweet on.  He claims to have loved Martha, even though knows that she is not in love with him.  Jimmy often finds himself distracted my Martha and her letters.  He blames himself when one of his soldiers is killed:

“He felt shame. He hated himself. 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.”

I found this statement very ironic because in one of Martha’s letters to Jimmy she sent a stone she found on the beach, a stone which Jimmy carried in his mouth as he was marching and something he realistically could have swallowed!

The story follows a pattern of sections that alternate between emotional and physical burdens, but one thing stays constant, as the title implies, they are always caring something. “They carried like freight trains; they carried it on their backs and shoulders - and for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.”