Blog 3

In "The Things they Carried," Tim O'Brien presents his version of the truth about the Vietnam war, in a book he calls fiction. O'Brien believes "the memory-traffic feeds into a rotary upon your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride" (33). When describing what he saw in Vietnam, many of the things horrific depicting death, O'Brien admits that as a soldier or a person, you don't see an event fact for fact, you cringe and look away. In that time the mind fills in what is believed to have taken place, thus his stories were not the truth. His book is fiction because he embellishes on what actually took place in order to convey the emotions to the reader. O'Brien describes these embellishments as, "You start sometimes with an incident that really happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but none the less help to clarify and explain' (152). O'Brien invented incidents such as his time at the Tip Top Lodge, which was solely in the book to convey to the reader the hesitation a soldier faces when drafted to the war.

O'Brien begins the book with a chapter titled, "The Things they Carried" and ends with "The Lives of the Dead." This organization starts the novel with a metaphor of the emotional burdens soldiers carried through what the physically carried. The novel then ends with the subject of dealing with death, which is the main cause of the emotional burdens the soldiers carry. The things the soldiers physically carry in addition to the necessities include Lieutenant Jimmy Cross's letters from Martha, Henry Dobbins' extra rations and girlfriend's panty hose, Dave Jensen's hygienic products, Ted Lavender's tranquilizers, Mitchel Sanders' condoms, Norman Bowker's diary, Rat Kiley's comic books,and Kiowa's New Testament. Although all of these objects are very important to their carrier, but the represent more. They can be a distraction from the reality of the war, although not always for the best. This is evident when Lieutenant Cross is fantasizing over Martha, and he believes that his break of focus is the reason Ted Lavender was killed. This leads into the other facet of the emotional burden; death. Lieutenant Cross burns the letters he has from Martha after Ted lavender's death because that is the only way he knows how to deal with it. It is not until the final chapter of the book when Tim O'Brien fully admits that storytelling is his way of dealing with death. Throughout the chapter depicting his first love Linda's death, O'Brien also chronicles how the other men death with death. Their ways ranged from shaking a dead mans hand, to making jokes about cleaning up the bodies. Tim O'Brien's way of dealing with death, whether it be of a loved one or a soldier in Alpha Company, is to write stories about them alive. O'Brien wrote, "I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story" (233). The only way for him to deal with the emotional burdens he now carries from the war and losing Linda and subsequently his innocence, is to remember the dead while they were alive, and write about it.

A unique aspect of O'Brien story is that he does not use the word hero to describe the majority of the military operations, which is a word often found in war stories. In the chapter "Speaking of Courage," Norman Bowker imagines what the conversation with his father would be like if he told him that he almost one a Silver Star . In this conversation Bowker focuses on the fact that he didn't win the Silver Star because he blames himself for Kiowa's death, saying he "let the guy go" (147). Bowker's father on the other hand sees only that he won seven medals. That shows the difference between those who were in the war and those who were not. To the soldier's being a hero was not about winning medals, there is so much more to a war that can not be quantified by medals, or the term hero. O'Brien's idea of a hero is the Lone Ranger, a masked cowboy. O'Brien's lone ranger is Elory from the Tip Top Lodge. O'Brien considers this man a hero because he forced the character Tim O'Brien to take charge of his life, allowing him to make this decision on his own wether or not to flee to Canada. The actions during the war were not heoric to O'Brien because they were just performed to save one's own life, not to protect thier country.