Blog 3 The Things They Carried

O’Brian begins “The Things They Carried” with a chapter appropriately titled “The Things They carried”. This chapter’s title is more significant than it would appear on face value. Throughout the chapter, characters and stories are introduced. Each soldier carried pounds of SOP equipment plus good-luck charms and personal items. The reader learns about Lt. Jimmy Cross obsessing over a girl back home that he barely knew and letting that obsession cause Sergeant Lavender’s death. It is shown that the soldiers learn to deal with constant death in a light-hearted tone. As the soldiers live through such relentless danger and death, they accumulate their baggage: literally and metaphorically. The things they carried were burdens. They carried their longings for home, their emotional troubles with constant fear of death, and good luck charms to help them out through all of it.
There are many stories throughout the book that can be tied back to this original chapter. Every story further on in the reading has a reference in the introduction chapter. O’Brian tells these stories and calls them fiction. This is because they never happened. As he claims, it is impossible to tell a “true” war story, because most of the things that a soldier remembers only ‘seemed’ to have happened. Although the truth was impossible to tell, soldiers still lived stories very similar, if not identical, to the stories told.
Most of these stories stem from the theme of the loss of innocence. Every boy became a man, and most of those men would die. One notable story about this loss of innocence was in the chapter called “The Sweetheart from Song Tra Bong”, where one soldier manages to get his girlfriend into the soldiers’ camp site. This camp site was far from the image of war: they were relaxed and had good times at that camp in Song Tra Bong. When Mary Anne (a 17 year old girl just graduating high school) visits the camp, the soldiers are fascinated by her girlish curiosity and innocence. As time passed, she grew into a soldier, learning different tricks of the trade, how to assemble and shoot a weapon, and she even explored a nearby Vietnamese town, seemingly unaware of the enemy environment. Soon enough she is seduced by the Green Beret’s way of life and joins their forces instead of getting married. When the reader sees her on her return and integration to the Green Beret force, she bears a necklace of copper wire and human tongues: a symbol of her lost innocence.
While O’Brian tells the stories of soldiers fighting and dying, the word “hero” does not get much mention. This is because O’Brian struggles to define what a hero is. The soldiers did not fight and risk their lives because they were heroic, but because they did not want to face the embarrassment and ridicule that they would face if they did not. O’Brian’s story of himself almost fleeing to a new Canadian life is a good example of this. American soldiers went to war because someone told them to. They killed because they were told to and had to shake off the thought of doing so will constant joking and emotional distraction.
At the end of the book, O’Brian tells the story of Linda. Linda was his childhood sweetheart who died at an extremely young and innocent age. O’Brian concludes with this to provide contrast as well as a connection to reality. Death comes to us all, and it does not matter whether or not you are heroic, falsely heroic, or an innocent child. We do not choose to die, and in the case of this war, we do not even choose who we kill.