The Things They Carried

4 Pages 997 Words

It is difficult for the young adults of our generation to grasp the intensity of the mental anguish endured while engaged in militant combat, especially when we refer to the Wars of Korea and Vietnam. Several students rarely even cover the wars in History class. To that end, it is no surprise that cinema is the primary educator on the subject. However, movies are often dramatized or overly fictional and therefore undependable. Literature is the next source, and while it is an accurate depiction, it is simply too boring for the common student. Contradictory, Tim O’brien’s portrayal through metafiction, in the story The Things They Carried offers cinematic appeal and literary precision. The combination presents an illustration of the real human emotions of soldiers in the Vietnam War.
In the stories’ beginning, we met Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, a romantic, who longed for his distant love, Martha. He carried (or “humped” as O’Brien respectively put it) with him letters from her; and while they weren’t love letters he obsessed over them as if they were. In one instance, she had sent him a pebble for good luck. His mind wandered into a dream of Martha walking along a shoreline with her beautiful bare feet exposed in the purest form. He went as far as to put the pebble in his mouth to enhance the dream with the taste of sea salt. “On occasion he would yell at his men…to keep their eyes open, but then he would slip away into daydreams…walking barefoot along the Jersey shore, with Martha…”(O’Brien 75) While mentally paralyzed by one of his fits, one of his men, Ted Lavender, was shot in the head. Following the gruesome death of Ted, Lt. Cross realized his negligence as a commander. He decided to extinguish his foolish love for Martha by burning the letters and thus alleviated his mental malfunction; he was a soldier again. This fictional microcosm of the Vietnam War claims that while the soldiers faced apprehensive dan...