"The Things They Carried"--Reader Response

The beginning of the novel focuses on the things each soldier carried. What I found very interesting was that many stories were not about the plot but in essence turned out to be the moral. For example, Ted Lavender’s death was not told to give respects to Lavender’s character as a person, but in fact to explain the characters more fully, especially Jimmy Cross. We learn about his love for Martha. We learn about his loss of Martha. And finally we learn how he became a stronger general because of Lavender’s death: “he went back to his maps…he was now determined to perform his duties firmly and without negligence” (25).

Cross’s story with Martha stayed with me throughout the novel. I didn’t really understand why he loved her so. She seems like a very average person, and the fact that he wanted to tie her up “and put his hand on her knee and just [hold] it there all night long” was very unsettling to me (29). What impresses me about Jimmy Cross is that he “did not want the responsibility of leading these men,” but he led them anyway (167). After I read that he didn’t want to lead them, I wondered how he had risen to his rank unwillingly and I realized that he is one of the only characters in the novel who truly cares about his men. Cross takes the responsibility to explain Kiowa’s death to the Native American’s father “carefully, not covering up his own guilt” (169). This is what makes Jimmy Cross worthy to lead.

Why doesn’t O’Brien use quotation marks for 27 pages? “There’s a moral here, said Mitchell Sanders” (21). There are no quotation marks where there should be.

The checkers O’Brien describes provided a lot of insight into how frustrating the war must have been. O’Brien clearly shows what he wanted in contrast with what the war in Vietnam actually was; “there was a winner and a loser. There were rules” in checkers, but not in his war (32). When I read about O’Brien almost running away I could relate with him the most. The author takes my exact sentiments of war when he states, “there should be a law…if you support a war…that’s fine, but you have to be willing to put your own precious fluids on the line” (42). This is an almost an exact quote that my mother gave when it seemed there might be a draft for the war in Iraq the year my brother turned eighteen.

O’Brien seems to stress the totally opposite aspects of war. At one point he will state “war is hell…and love. War is nasty; war is fun….War makes you a man; war makes you dead” (80). I had a lot of trouble comprehending this fully. I understand that the trips and adventures could be fun, but when the soldiers “can’t wait to get back into action” I don’t understand it (35). The soldiers have to kill people, and it changes them. The soldiers have to watch their best friends blow up, the soldiers have to peel people out of trees. This upsets them so much that they torture animals and even then “there wasn’t a great deal of pity for the baby water buffalo” (79). O’Brien even shows this with his story of Mary Anne Bell. Mary Anne comes to Vietnam innocent and unknowing and turns into a person who wears “a necklace of human tongues” (110). This worst part about Mary Anne though was that she then tries to convince her ex-lover that “‘it’s not bad’” that she’s become something new, something without feeling (111). I felt like O’Brien sends very mixed messages throughout the novel, sometimes “even though you’re pinned down by a war you never felt more at peace” (36). And sometimes “you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” (69). All over the novel O’Brien continually compares the war to opposites: “‘it’s like trying to tell someone what chocolate tastes like’…‘or shit’” (113). I understand the message the author is trying to convey by doing this, but I can’t relate to it at all.

One of the main themes of the novel is story telling. And, in essence, the definition of truth. Throughout the novel O’Brien stresses that stories enhance truth to make it more real for the listener.

Blame is also an interesting theme from the novel. O’Brien seems to blame his town for him going to war. For putting pressure on him to do many things he didn’t think were right, “I held them responsible. By God yes I did” (45). The author understands that blame can go to anyone: “the munitions makers or Karl Marx or a trick of fate or an old man in Omaha that forgot to vote” (177). But in the end, it comes own to personal guilt as well.

Henry Dobbins became my favorite character when he carried Azar over to a well and told him to “‘dance right’” (136).

Norman Bowker’s story was very sad to me. Why did tasting the lake water make him feel better?

It was very powerful how O’Brien made up details that he could relate to for the boy who died. I was glad to finally see a character see a Vietnamese person as actually human instead of just a “dink”. What made it more powerful too, was that the author does not actually describe how he felt at the moment, he merely describes it all so that we may feel the disgust, partially by repetition, and partially by strong writing. What scared me is that he “did not see him as the enemy; [he] did not ponder morality or politics or military duty” (132). I consider such contemplations necessary for almost any decision, and it scares me when people don’t think about such things when a person life is on the line.

When telling the story of Mary Anne, O’Brien stresses the impressionability of the couple: Mary Anne and Mark Fossie. Is the reason we draft young people to wars because they’re impressionable? The best fighters can’t be under the age of twenty and yet “the average age of the platoon…was nineteen or twenty” (37).