The Things They Carried (SparkNotes) PDF

the things they carried Tim O’Brien editorial director Justin Kestler executive editor Ben Florman series editors Boomie Aglietti, John Crowther, Justin Kestler production Christian Lorentzen writers Jon Natchez, Sarah Robbins editors Boomie Aglietti, Benjamin Morgan Copyright © 2003 by Spark...

the things they carried Tim O’Brien editorial director Justin Kestler executive editor Ben Florman series editors Boomie Aglietti, John Crowther, Justin Kestler production Christian Lorentzen writers Jon Natchez, Sarah Robbins editors Boomie Aglietti, Benjamin Morgan Copyright © 2003 by SparkNotes llc All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher. sparknotes is a registered trademark of SparkNotes llc. This edition published by Spark Publishing Spark Publishing A Division of SparkNotes llc 120 Fifth Avenue, 8th Floor New York, NY 10011 Any book purchased without a cover is stolen property, reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the Publisher, who receives no payment for such “stripped books.” 02 03 04 05 sn 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Please send all comments and questions or report errors to [email protected]. Library of Congress information available upon request Printed and bound in the United States rrd-c isbn 1-58663-827-0 Introduction: stopping to buy sparknotes on a snowy evening Whose words these are you think you know. Your paper’s due tomorrow, though; We’re glad to see you stopping here To get some help before you go. Lost your course? You’ll find it here. Face tests and essays without fear. Between the words, good grades at stake: Get great results throughout the year. Once school bells caused your heart to quake As teachers circled each mistake. Use SparkNotes and no longer weep, Ace every single test you take. Yes, books are lovely, dark, and deep, But only what you grasp you keep, With hours to go before you sleep, With hours to go before you sleep. Contents context 1 plot overview 5 character list 7 analysis of major characters 11 tim o’brien 11 jimmy cross 12 mitchell sanders 12 kiowa 13 themes, motifs & symbols 15 physical and emotional burdens 15 fear of shame as motivation 16 the subjection of truth to storytelling 16 storytelling 17 ambiguous morality 18 loneliness and isolation 18 the dead young vietnamese soldier 19 kathleen 20 linda 20 summary & analysis 21 “the things they carried” 21 “love” 24 “spin” 26 “on the rainy river” 28 “enemies” & “friends” 32 “how to tell a true war story” 34 “the dentist” 37 “sweetheart of the song tra bong” 38 “stockings” 41 “church” 42 “the man i killed” 44 “ambush” 47 v  “style” 48 “speaking of courage” 50 “notes” 52 “in the field” 55 “good form” 57 “field trip” 58 “the ghost soldiers” 60 “night life” 63 “the lives of the dead” 64 important quotations explained 67 key facts 73 study questions & essay topics 75 review & resources 79 quiz 79 suggestions for further reading 84 vi Context W illiam timothy o’brien was born on October 1, con t e xt 1946, to an insurance salesman and an elementary school teacher in Austin, Minnesota. He was raised in Worthington, a small town in southern Minne- sota that he would later describe as what one would find if one “look[ed] in a dictionary under the word boring.” As a child, the overweight and introspective O’Brien spent his time prac- ticing magic tricks and making pilgrimages to the public library. His father’s New York Times accounts of fighting in Iwo Jima and Oki- nawa during World War II inspired O’Brien to consider a career in writing. When O’Brien arrived at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, he decided to focus his studies on political science. His college years, however, were spent trying to ignore the Vietnam War or railing against it—he attended peace vigils and war protests and aspired to join the State Department. He graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa and had already been accepted to a Ph.D. program at Harvard University’s School of Government when he received his draft notice, two weeks after graduation. Faced with the prospect of fighting in the war he so actively opposed, the twenty-two-year-old O’Brien felt pulled between his convictions, which could be kept intact by escaping across the bor- der to Canada, and the expectations of those in his hometown who, he once said, “couldn’t spell the word ‘Hanoi’ if you spotted them three vowels.” Though torn, he entered the military for basic train- ing at Fort Lewis, Washington, on August 14, 1968. When he arrived in Vietnam in February 1969, he served in the Fifth Battal- ion of the 46th Infantry, 198th Infantry Brigade, American Division until March 1970. O’Brien’s area of operations was in the Quang Ngai Province, where he later set The Things They Carried. O’Brien’s service brought him to the South Vietnamese village of My Lai a year after the infamous massacre of 1968. He was eventu- ally wounded and returned home with a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star for Valor, and a Combat Infantry Badge. He also had a storehouse of guilt and an endless supply of observations and anecdotes that would later comprise his memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. This work was published in 1973 as O’Brien was abandoning his graduate studies for a career as a national 1  2 H ti m o’ bri en affairs reporter for the Washington Post. That reporting stint lasted a year. In 1975 he published Northern Lights, an account of two brothers in rural Minnesota. Going After Cacciato, which won the National Book Award in 1979 over John Irving’s The World According to Garp and John Cheever’s Stories, was the account of a con t e xt platoon forced to chase one of its awol soliders. Winning the National Book Award solidified O’Brien’s reputation as a masterful writer concerned with the ambiguities of love and war. Following this success came The Nuclear Age, a novel about a draft-dodger obsessed with the idea of nuclear holocaust, published in 1985. After The Nuclear Age’s home-front comedy, O’Brien returned his attention to the battlefields. He wrote a short story, “Speaking of Courage,” that was originally meant for inclusion in Going After Cacciato. In 1990, “Speaking of Courage” was one of twenty-two stories included in The Things They Carried, a sequence of lyrical and interrelated stories that has been heralded as one of the finest volumes of fiction about the Vietnam War. The work gained atten- tion and wide acclaim not only for its subject matter but also for its honesty and specificity, its discussion of fact and fiction, and its commentary on memory and on the act of storytelling itself. Much of the material in the work has been drawn from O’Brien’s experi- ences; he felt so close to his stories that he dedicated the work to his characters—Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa. The most striking elimination of the boundary between fact and fiction is the narrator and protag- onist’s name, Tim O’Brien. The main character also has grown up in Worthington, Minnesota, and has attended Macalester College. Like the real O’Brien, the fictional O’Brien becomes a writer who records many of his Vietnam experiences in stories and novels. Nev- ertheless, several discrepancies exist between the two men. Unlike his protagonist, for example, the real O’Brien never killed a man while at war, and he doesn’t have any children. The Things They Carried was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and it earned O’Brien comparisons to several eminent fiction writers. Two to whom he is often connected are Stephen Crane and Kurt Vonnegut. Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, published in 1895, follows a Union regi- ment during the Civil War and specifically concerns a recruit who, like the protagonist in The Things They Carried, struggles with his fear of cowardice and the “red sickness of battle.” Vonnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five is about a World War II draftee who is  the things they c a r r ied H 3 taken as a prisoner-of-war during the Battle of the Bulge. Like Von- negut, O’Brien inserts himself into his stories—in order to anchor his narratives to a larger world, but also because he is unable to escape the often terrifying memories of his war experience. con t e xt Plot Overview T he protagonist, who is named Tim O’Brien, begins by describing an event that occurred in the middle of his p l ot ove rvi ew Vietnam experience. “The Things They Carried” cata- logs the variety of things his fellow soldiers in the Alpha Company brought on their missions. Several of these things are intangible, including guilt and fear, while others are spe- cific physical objects, including matches, morphine, M-16 rifles, and M&M’s candy. Throughout the collection, the same characters reappear in vari- ous stories. The first member of the Alpha Company to die is Ted Lavender, a “grunt,” or low-ranking soldier, who deals with his anxiety about the war by taking tranquilizers and smoking mari- juana. Lavender is shot in the head on his way back from going to the bathroom, and his superior, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, blames himself for the tragedy. When Lavender is shot, Cross is distracting himself with thoughts of Martha, a college crush. It is revealed in “Love” that Cross’s feelings for Martha, whom he dated once before leaving for Vietnam, were never reciprocated, and that even twenty years after the war, his guilt over Lavender’s death remains. In “On the Rainy River,” the narrator, O’Brien, explains the series of events that led him to Vietnam in the first place. He receives his draft notice in June of 1968, and his feelings of confusion drive him north to the Canadian border, which he contemplates crossing so that he will not be forced to fight in a war in which he doesn’t believe. Sitting in a rowboat with the proprietor of the Tip Top Lodge, where he stays, O’Brien decides that his guilt about avoiding the war and fear of disappointing his family are more important than his political convictions. He soon leaves, going first back home to Worthington, Minnesota and later to Vietnam. In addition to Ted Lavender, a few other members of the Alpha Company are killed during their mission overseas, including Curt Lemon, who is killed when using a grenade to play catch with the medic, Rat Kiley. Though O’Brien is not close to Lemon, in “The Dentist,” he tells a story of how Lemon, who faints before a routine checkup with an army-issued dentist, tries to save face by insisting that a perfectly good tooth be pulled. Lee Strunk, another member of the company, dies from injuries he sustains by stepping on a land- 5  6 H ti m o’ bri en mine. In “Friends,” O’Brien remembers that before Strunk was fatally hurt, Strunk and Dave Jensen had made a pact that if either man were irreparably harmed, the other man would see that he was quickly killed. However, when Strunk is actually hurt, he begs Jensen to spare him, and Jensen complies. Instead of being upset by the news of his friend’s swift death en route to treatment, Jensen is relieved. plot ove rvie w The death that receives the most attention in The Things They Carried is that of Kiowa, a much-loved member of the Alpha Com- pany and one of O’Brien’s closest friends. In “Speaking of Cour- age,” the story of Kiowa’s death is relayed in retrospect through the memory of Norman Bowker, years after the war. As Bowker drives around a lake in his Iowa hometown, he thinks that he failed to save Kiowa, who was killed when a mortar round hit and caused him to sink headfirst into a marshy field. O’Brien realizes that he has dealt with his guilt over Kiowa’s death differently than Norman Bowker in “Notes.” Just before the end of the war, O’Brien receives a long letter from Bowker that says he hasn’t found a way to make life meaningful after the war. O’Brien resolves to tell Bowker’s story, and the story of Kiowa’s death, in order to negotiate his own feelings of guilt and hollowness. Like “Love” and “Notes,” several of O’Brien’s stories are told from a perspective twenty years after the Vietnam War, when he is a forty-three-year-old writer living in Massachusetts. Exposure to the guilt of old friends like Jimmy Cross and Norman Bowker prompts him to write stories in order to understand what they were going through. But two stories, “The Man I Killed” and “Ambush,” are written so that O’Brien can confront his own guilt over killing a man with a grenade outside the village of My Khe. In “The Man I Killed,” O’Brien imagines the life of his victim, from his childhood to the way things would have turned out for him had O’Brien not spotted him on a path and thrown a grenade at his feet. In “Ambush,” O’Brien imagines how he might relay the story of the man he killed to his nine-year-old daughter, Kathleen. In this second story, O’Brien provides more details of the actual killing—including the sound of the grenade and his own feelings—and explains that even well after the fact, he hasn’t finished sorting out the experience. In the last story, “The Lives of the Dead,” O’Brien gives another twist to his contention that stories have the power to save people. In the stories of Curt Lemon and Kiowa, O’Brien explains that his imag- ination allowed him to grapple successfully with his guilt and con- fusion over the death of his fourth-grade first love, Linda. Character List Tim O’Brien The narrator and protagonist of the collection of stories. O’Brien is a pacifist who rationalizes his participation in Vietnam by concluding that his feelings of obligation toward his family and country are character li s t stronger influences than his own politics. When the war is over, he uses his ability to tell stories to deal with his guilt and confusion over the atrocities he witnessed in Vietnam, including the death of several of his fellow soldiers and of a Viet Cong soldier by his own hand. Jimmy Cross The lieutenant of the Alpha Company, who is responsible for the entire group of men. Cross is well intentioned but unsure of how to lead his men. He is wracked with guilt because he believes that his preoccupation with his unrequited love for a girl named Martha and his tendency to follow orders despite his better judgment caused the deaths of Ted Lavender and Kiowa, two members of Alpha Company. Mitchell Sanders One of the most likable soldiers in the war. Sanders strongly influences the narrator, O’Brien. He is kind and devoted, and he has a strong sense of justice. Because of these qualities, he is a type of father figure. Though his ideas of storytelling may or may not agree with O’Brien’s in the end, his ability to tell stories and to discuss their nuances makes a profound impression on O’Brien. Kiowa O’Brien’s closest friend and a model of quiet, rational morality amid the atrocities of war. Kiowa’s death, when the company mistakenly camps in a sewage field, is the focal point of three stories. Since it is a prime example of arbitrary, unforgiving cruelty in war, Kiowa’s death is given more prominence than his life. 7  8 H ti m o’ bri en Norman Bowker A man who embodies the damage that the war can do to a soldier long after the war is over. During the war, Bowker is quiet and unassuming, and Kiowa’s death has a profound effect on him. Bowker’s letter to O’Brien in “Notes” demonstrates the importance of sharing stories in the healing process. Henry Dobbins The platoon’s machine gunner and resident gentle giant. Dobbins’s profound decency, despite his character l is t simplicity, contrasts with his bearish frame. He is a perfect example of the incongruities in Vietnam. Bob “Rat” Kiley The platoon’s medic. Kiley previously served in the mountains of Chu Lai, the setting of “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong.” O’Brien has great respect for Kiley’s medical prowess, especially when he is shot for a second time and is subjected to the mistreatment of another medic, Bobby Jorgenson. Though levelheaded and kind, Kiley eventually succumbs to the stresses of the war and his role in it—he purposely blows off his toe so that he is forced to leave his post. Curt Lemon A childish and careless member of the Alpha Company who is killed while tossing a grenade in a game of catch. Though O’Brien does not particularly like Lemon, Lemon’s death is something O’Brien continually contemplates with sadness and regret. The preventability of his death and the irrational fears of his life—as when a dentist visits the company—point to the immaturity of many young American soldiers in Vietnam. Ted Lavender A young, scared soldier in the Alpha Company. Lavender is the first to die in the work. He makes only a brief appearance in the narrative, popping tranquilizers to calm himself while the company is outside Than Khe. Because his death, like Lemon’s, is preventable, it illustrates the expendability of human life in a senseless war.  the things they c a r r ied H 9 Lee Strunk Another soldier in the platoon and a minor character. A struggle with Dave Jensen over a jackknife results in Strunk’s broken nose. In begging Jensen to forget their pact—that if either man is gravely injured, the other will kill him swiftly—after he is injured, he illustrates how the fantasy of war differs from its reality. Dave Jensen A minor character whose guilt over his injury of Lee Strunk causes him to break his own nose. Jensen’s character li s t relief after Strunk’s death is an illustration of the perspective soldiers are forced to assume. Instead of mourning the loss of his friend, Jensen is glad to know that the pact the two made—and that he broke—has now become obsolete. Azar A soldier in the Alpha Company and one of the few unsympathetic characters in the work. Every time Azar appears, he is mean-spirited and cruel, torturing Vietnamese civilians and poking fun both at the corpses of the enemy and the deaths of his own fellow soldiers. His humanity is finally demonstrated near the end of the work, when he is forced to help unearth Kiowa’s body from the muck of the sewage field. This moment of remorse proves that a breaking point is possible even for soldiers who use cruelty as a defense mechanism. Bobby Jorgenson The medic who replaces Rat Kiley. The second time O’Brien is shot, Jorgenson’s incompetence inspires O’Brien’s desire for irrational revenge. Although Jorgenson’s anger prompts him to kick O’Brien in the head for trying to scare him, he later apologizes, redeeming himself as a medic by patching things up with O’Brien. Elroy Berdahl The proprietor of the Tip Top Lodge on the Rainy River near the Canadian border. Berdahl serves as the closest thing to a father figure for O’Brien, who, after receiving his draft notice, spends six contemplative days with the quiet, kind Berdahl while he makes a decision about whether to go to war or to escape the draft by running across the border to Canada.  10 H ti m o’ brien Kathleen O’Brien’s daughter and a symbol of the naïve outsider. Although O’Brien alludes to having multiple children, Kathleen is the only one we meet. Her youth and innocence force O’Brien to try to explain the meaning of the war. Frustrated that he cannot tell her the whole truth, he is inspired by her presence since it forces him to gain new perspective on his war experience. Mary Anne Bell Mark Fossie’s high school sweetheart. Although character l is t Mary Anne arrives in Vietnam full of innocence, she gains a respect for death and the darkness of the jungle and, according to legend, disappears there. Unlike Martha and Henry Dobbins’s girlfriend, who only serve as fantasy reminders of a world removed from Vietnam, Mary Anne is a strong and realized character who shatters Fossie’s fantasy of finding comfort in his docile girlfriend. Mark Fossie A medic in Rat Kiley’s previous assignment. Fossie loses his innocence in the realization that his girlfriend, Mary Anne, would rather be out on ambush with Green Berets than planning her postwar wedding to Fossie in Cleveland. Linda O’Brien’s first love, whose death of a brain tumor in the fifth grade is O’Brien’s first experience with mortality. From his experience with Linda, O’Brien learns the power that storytelling has to keep memory alive. Analysis of Major Characters T I M O’B R I E N Tim O’Brien is both the narrator and protagonist of The Things character analys i s They Carried. The work recounts his personal experience in the Vietnam War and allows him to comment on the war. He enters the war a scared young man afraid of the shame that dodging the war would bring him and leaves the war a guilt-ridden middle-aged man who tells stories about Vietnam in order to cope with his painful memories. To cover the distance between himself and what he recounts, O’Brien weaves a prominent thread of memory through the work. Reading these stories is similar to spending extended time with an old soldier, allowing his memories to come to him slowly. O’Brien’s point of view shapes the events he relates. In many, if not most, cases, O’Brien holds himself up as evidence for the gener- alizations he makes about the war. He is our guide through the inex- plicable horror of the war and the main example of how extreme situations can turn a rationally thinking man into a soldier who commits unspeakable acts and desires cruel and irrational things. Occasionally, O’Brien fades away and lets another character or a seemingly omniscient third person tell the story. This technique lends a universal human quality to the stories’ themes and gives us the opportunity to understand the Alpha Company from several dif- ferent perspectives. O’Brien uses storytelling as solace and as a means of coming to terms with the unspeakable horrors he witnessed as a soldier. His comments suggest that although he has become a successful writer and that his negotiation of memory through storytelling has been a good coping mechanism, he still thinks that certain realities cannot be explained at all. His experience with those untouched by the war, such as his daughter Kathleen, exposes an irony in his faith in story- telling. He knows that he can grapple with his feelings of disbelief and painful confusion by telling others what happened and how, but he cannot express every feeling. 11  12 H ti m o’ brien JIMMY CROSS Jimmy Cross’s character represents the profound effects responsi- bility has on those who are too immature to handle it. As a sopho- more in college, he signs up for the Reserve Officers Training Corps because it is worth a few credits and because his friends are doing it. But he doesn’t care about the war and has no desire to be a team leader. As a result, when he is led into battle with several men in his charge, he is unsure in everything he does. Cross’s guilt is palpable every time one of his men dies, but it is character analysis most acute in the case of Ted Lavender. Right before Lavender is killed, Cross allows himself to be distracted and deluded by the thoughts of his coveted classmate, Martha, who sends him photo- graphs and writes flowery letters that never mention the war. His innocent reverie is interrupted by Lavender’s death, and Cross’s only conclusion is that he loves this faraway girl more than he loves his men. Cross’s confession to O’Brien, years later, that he has never forgiven himself for Lavender’s death testifies to his intense feelings of guilt about the incident. Jimmy Cross can be viewed as a Christ figure. In times of inexpli- cable atrocity, certain individuals assume the position of a group’s or their own savior. Such men suffer so that others don’t have to bear the brunt of the guilt and confusion. Cross is linked to Christ not only on a superficial level—they share initials and are both con- nected to the idea of the cross—but also in the nature of his role. Like Christ, who suffers for his fellow men, Cross suffers for the sake of the entire platoon. In “The Things They Carried,” Cross bears the grief of Lavender’s death for the members of his troop, such as Kiowa, who are too dumbfounded to mourn. In the same story, he makes a personal sacrifice, burning the letters from Martha so that her presence will no longer distract him. In each case, Cross makes a Christ-like sacrifice so that his fellow men—Norman Bowker and Kiowa, in this case—can carry on without being crip- pled by grief and guilt. MITCHELL SANDERS Mitchell Sanders is a likable soldier and a devoted friend. He has a sense of irony, picking lice off his body and sending them back to his draft board in Ohio, and a sense of loyalty, refusing to help O’Brien inflict revenge on the medic Bobby Jorgenson and standing by Rat  the things they c a r r ied H 13 Kiley in his decision to escape Vietnam by shooting himself in the toe. He also has a strong sense of justice—when Cross leads the troops into the sewage field where Kiowa eventually meets his death, Sanders refuses to forgive him because the evidence shows that he should have known better. Sanders often applies this pragmatism to his storytelling. He believes that a good war story often lacks a moral and that some- times a story without commentary or explanation speaks for itself because he understands that war stories are never simple or cut-and- dried. In his story about the platoon driven crazy by phantom voices character analys i s in the jungle, for example, he offers no explanation of what the voices were. Instead, he focuses on the soldiers’ experience of the voices, which he considers more relevant and concrete. Sanders is in this way a mouthpiece for O’Brien, who presents the stories that constitute The Things They Carried not to teach a moral but to por- tray an experience. KIOWA In life, Kiowa is diligent and honest, introspective and compassion- ate. He is practical, carrying moccasins in order to be able to walk silently and helping his fellow soldiers to rationalize their own unfortunate actions, especially O’Brien’s killing of a young Viet- namese soldier. A Baptist and a Native American, he brings a per- spective different from that of his fellow soldiers to the unfortunate events that befall the Alpha Company. Kiowa’s death is symbolic of the senseless tragedy of war. He dies in a gruesome way, drowning under the muck of a sewage field about which his lieutenant, Jimmy Cross, has a bad feeling. Kiowa’s entirely submerged body represents the transitory nature of life and the horrifying suddenness with which it can be snatched away. There is no dignity to Kiowa’s death; he becomes another casualty in a war that strips men of their identity and turns them into statistics. Themes, Motifs & Symbols THEMES Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. Physical and Emotional Burdens The “[t]hings” of the title that O’Brien’s characters carry are both literal and figurative. While they all carry heavy physical loads, they also all carry heavy emotional loads, composed of grief, terror, love, and longing. Each man’s physical burden underscores his emotional themes burden. Henry Dobbins, for example, carries his girlfriend’s panty- hose and, with them, the longing for love and comfort. Similarly, Jimmy Cross carries compasses and maps and, with them, the responsibility for the men in his charge. Faced with the heavy bur- den of fear, the men also carry the weight of their reputations. Although every member of the Alpha Company experiences fear at some point, showing fear will only reveal vulnerability to both the enemy and sometimes cruel fellow soldiers. After the war, the psychological burdens the men carry during the war continue to define them. Those who survive carry guilt, grief, and confusion, and many of the stories in the collection are about these survivors’ attempts to come to terms with their experi- ence. In “Love,” for example, Jimmy Cross confides in O’Brien that he has never forgiven himself for Ted Lavender’s death. Norman Bowker’s grief and confusion are so strong that they prompt him to drive aimlessly around his hometown lake in “Speaking of Cour- age,” to write O’Brien a seventeen-page letter explaining how he never felt right after the war in “Notes,” and to hang himself in a ymca. While Bowker bears his psychological burdens alone, O’Brien shares the things he carries, his war stories, with us. His col- lection of stories asks us to help carry the burden of the Vietnam War as part of our collective past. 15  16 H ti m o’ br ien Fear of Shame as Motivation O’Brien’s personal experience shows that the fear of being shamed before one’s peers is a powerful motivating factor in war. His story “On the Rainy River” explains his moral quandary after receiving his draft notice—he does not want to fight in a war he believes is unjust, but he does not want to be thought a coward. What keeps O’Brien from fleeing into Canada is not patriotism or dedication to his country’s cause—the traditional motivating factors for fighting in a war—but concern over what his family and community will think of him if he doesn’t fight. This experience is emblematic of the con- flict, explored throughout The Things They Carried, between the misguided expectations of a group of people important to a character and that character’s uncertainty regarding a proper course of action. Fear of shame not only motivates reluctant men to go to Vietnam but also affects soldiers’ relationships with each other once there. Concern about social acceptance, which might seem in the abstract an unimportant preoccupation given the immediacy of death and themes necessity of group unity during war, leads O’Brien’s characters to engage in absurd or dangerous actions. For example, Curt Lemon decides to have a perfectly good tooth pulled (in “The Dentist”) to ease his shame about having fainted during an earlier encounter with the dentist. The stress of the war, the strangeness of Vietnam, and the youth of the soldiers combine to create psychological dan- gers that intensify the inherent risks of fighting. Jimmy Cross, who has gone to war only because his friends have, becomes a confused and uncertain leader who endangers the lives of his soldiers. O’Brien uses these characters to show that fear of shame is a mis- guided but unavoidable motivation for going to war. The Subjection of Truth to Storytelling By giving the narrator his own name and naming the rest of his char- acters after the men he actually fought alongside in the Vietnam War, O’Brien blurs the distinction between fact and fiction. The result is that it is impossible to know whether or not any given event in the sto- ries truly happened to O’Brien. He intentionally heightens this impossibility when his characters contradict themselves several times in the collection of stories, rendering the truth of any statement suspect. O’Brien’s aim in blending fact and fiction is to make the point that objective truth of a war story is less relevant than the act of telling a story. O’Brien is attempting not to write a history of the Vietnam War through his stories but rather to explore the ways that  the things they c a r r ied H 17 speaking about war experience establishes or fails to establish bonds between a soldier and his audience. The technical facts surrounding any individual event are less important than the overarching, subjec- tive truth of what the war meant to soldiers and how it changed them. The different storytellers in The Things They Carried—Rat Kiley and Mitchell Sanders especially, in addition to O’Brien—work to lay out war’s ugly truths, which are so profound that they require nei- ther facts nor long explanations. Such statements as “This is true,” which opens “How to Tell a True War Story,” do not establish that the events recounted in the story actually occurred. Rather, they indicate that the stylistic and thematic content of the story is true to the experience that the soldiers had in the war. This truth is often ugly, in contrast to the ideas of glory and heroism associated with war before Vietnam. In O’Brien’s “true” war story, Kiley writes to Lemon’s sister, and when she never responds, he calls her a “dumb cooze,” only adding to the ugliness of the story. O’Brien’s declara- tion that the truest part of this story is that it contains no moral moti fs underscores the idea that the purpose of stories is to relate the truth of experience, not to manufacture false emotions in their audiences. MOTIFS Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes. Storytelling O’Brien believes that stories contain immense power, since they allow tellers and listeners to confront the past together and share otherwise unknowable experiences. Telling stories returns to the foreground of the narrative again and again. Mitchell Sanders, the Alpha Company’s resident storyteller, whose anecdotes range from the mythic (the story of six men who hear voices in the jungle) to the specific (the story of how Rat Kiley shoots himself in the foot and as a result is allowed to leave Vietnam), contends that truth and moral- ity in a war story have little to do with accuracy. For example, after telling the story of the men who hear voices in the jungle, Sanders admits that he made up a few things in order to get his point across. Nevertheless, his story has resonance. The added details are only further proof of the universal truth: the eerie quiet of the jungle causes soldiers’ imaginations to run wild with fantastic images far stranger than anything they might actually encounter.  18 H ti m o’ br ien O’Brien shows that storytelling is not just a coping mechanism for soldiers who are embroiled in the war but also a strategy for communication throughout life. Several of the stories in The Things They Carried are told from O’Brien’s point of view, twenty years after the war. With this distance, facts have become cloudy and all that remains of the experience are the lingering feelings and memo- ries. He is aware of his omissions and exaggeration of detail, and in the case of “Good Form,” he even suggests that all of his previous stories are made up. Even if he did not actually kill a soldier in My Khe, the truth of his feelings about war is no less valid. His insis- tence on the idea that stories can make the past become part of the present shows that his priority is not on the facts but on our identi- fication with his feelings. Ambiguous Morality O’Brien’s stories show that the jungle blurs boundaries between right and wrong. The brutal killing of innocents on both sides can- moti fs not be explained, and in some moments of disbelief, the men deal with the pain of their feelings by pointing out the irony. “There’s a moral here,” Mitchell Sanders ironically points out again and again, each time stressing the actual immorality of the specific situation. After Ted Lavender is fatally shot by the enemy, for example, Sand- ers jokes that the “moral” of Ted Lavender’s accidental and tragic death is to stay away from drugs. Exposed to these horrors, the men’s notions of right and wrong shift and bend. After Ted Lavender’s death, for example, Cross evens the score and deals with his own guilt by burning the entire village of Than Khe. Similarly, Rat Kiley deals with his frustration about Curt Lemon’s death by brutally killing a water buffalo. Affected by the senselessness of war, even O’Brien—a college edu- cated, peace-loving man—feels himself grow hard and callous, will- ing to wish others harm. Ironically, the moral or lesson in The Things They Carried is that there is no morality in war. War is ambiguous and arbitrary because it forces humans into extreme sit- uations that have no obvious solutions. Loneliness and Isolation O’Brien argues that in Vietnam, loneliness and isolation are forces as destructive as any piece of ammunition. In repeatedly emphasiz- ing the impact of solitude on the soldiers, he shows that thoughts, worries, and fears are as dangerous—if not more dangerous—than  the things they c a r r ied H 19 the Vietnamese soldiers themselves. In “How to Tell a True War Story,” Mitchell Sanders’s story concerning soldiers made so para- noid by their experience on listening patrol that they hear strange noises emphasizes how the imagination can take over instantly in the lonely silence. In “The Ghost Soldiers,” O’Brien takes unfair advantage of the power of isolation when he attempts to frighten Bobby Jorgenson while Jorgenson is on night guard duty. In order to emphasize the evil intentions of his revenge plot, O’Brien reflects on his fear of being cut off from the outside world and the close relation between night guard and childhood fears of the dark. In Vietnam, isolation is synonymous with endless time to dwell on the unknown. Loneliness remains a strong presence enveloping the soldiers long after the war is over. Jimmy Cross, for example, feels bereft after the war because his hope for happiness in Martha is dashed by her rejection. Norman Bowker also feels empty and isolated after the war. In “Speaking of Courage,” he aimlessly drives around a lake in his hometown, thinking that he has no one to talk to. He s ymbols even attempts to converse with an A&W employee, but no one will offer him consolation. O’Brien himself realizes that if he didn’t have writing to work through his trauma, he might be in as abject a place as Bowker. The character O’Brien’s narration—and, in effect, the author O’Brien’s The Things They Carried—is an attempt to com- bat the destructive isolation that the Vietnam experience fostered. SYMBOLS Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. The Dead Young Vietnamese Soldier Although O’Brien is unclear about whether or not he actually threw a grenade and killed a man outside My Khe, his memory of the man’s corpse is strong and recurring, symbolizing humanity’s guilt over war’s horrible acts. In “The Man I Killed,” O’Brien distances himself from the memory by speaking in the third person and con- structing fantasies as to what the man must have been like before he was killed. O’Brien marvels at the wreckage of his body, thinking repeatedly of the star-shaped hole that is in the place of his eye and the peeled-back cheek. The description serves to distance O’Brien from the reality of his actions because nowhere in its comprehensive detail are O’Brien’s feelings about the situation mentioned. His guilt  20 H ti m o’ br ien is evident, however, in his imagining of a life for the man he killed that includes several aspects that are similar to his own life. Kathleen Kathleen represents a reader who has the capability of responding to the author. Like us, O’Brien’s daughter Kathleen is often the recipient of O’Brien’s war stories, but unlike us, she can affect O’Brien as much as O’Brien affects her. O’Brien gains a new per- spective on his experiences in Vietnam when he thinks about how he should relay the story of the man he killed to his impressionable young daughter. Kathleen also stands for the gap in communication between one who tells a story and one who receives a story. When O’Brien takes her to Vietnam to have her better understand what he went through during the war, the only things that resonate to the ten-year-old are the stink of the muck and the strangeness of the land. She has no sense of the field’s emotional significance to O’Brien, and thus does s ymbols not understand his behavior there, as when he goes for a swim. Linda Linda represents elements of the past that can be brought back through imagination and storytelling. Linda, a classmate of O’Brien’s who died of a brain tumor in the fifth grade, symbolizes O’Brien’s faith that storytelling is the best way for him to negotiate pain and confusion, especially the sadness that surrounds death. Linda was O’Brien’s first love and also his first experience with death’s senseless arbitrariness. His retreat into his daydreams after her funeral provided him unexpected relief and rationalization. In his dreams, he could see Linda still alive, which suggests that through imagination—which, for O’Brien, later evolves into story- telling—the dead can continue to live. Linda’s presence in the story makes O’Brien’s earlier stories about Vietnam more universal. The experience he had as a child illu- minates the way he deals with death in Vietnam and after; it also explains why he has turned to stories to deal with life’s difficulties. Just like Linda, Norman Bowker and Kiowa are immortalized in O’Brien’s stories. Their commonplace lives become more significant than their dramatic deaths. Through the image of Linda, O’Brien realizes that he continues to save his own life through storytelling. Summary & Analysis “T H E T H I N G S T H E Y C A R R I E D ” Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. (See quotations, p. 67) Summary Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, of the Alpha Company, carries various reminders of his love for Martha, a girl from his college in New Jer- sey who has given no indication of returning his love. Cross carries her letters in his backpack and her good-luck pebble in his mouth. After a long day’s march, he unwraps her letters and imagines the s ummary & analys i s prospect of her returning his love someday. Martha is an English major who writes letters that quote lines of poetry and never men- tion the war. Though the letters are signed “Love, Martha” Cross understands that this gesture should not give him false hope. He wonders, uncontrollably, about whether or not Martha is a virgin. He carries her photographs, including one of her playing volleyball, but closer to his heart still are his memories. They went on a single date, to see the movie Bonnie and Clyde. When Cross touched Mar- tha’s knee during the final scene, Martha looked at him and made him pull his hand back. Now, in Vietnam, Cross wishes that he had carried her up the stairs, tied her to the bed, and touched her knee all night long. He is haunted by the cutting knowledge that his affection will most likely never be returned. The narrator, Tim O’Brien, describes the things all the men of the company carry. They are things in the most physical sense—mos- quito repellent and marijuana, pocket knives and chewing gum. The things they carry depend on several factors, including the men’s pri- orities and their constitutions. Because the machine gunner Henry Dobbins is exceptionally large, for example, he carries extra rations; because he is superstitious, he carries his girlfriend’s pantyhose around his neck. Nervous Ted Lavender carries marijuana and tran- quilizers to calm himself down, and the religious Kiowa carries an illustrated New Testament, a gift from his father. Some things the men carry are universal, like a compress in case of fatal injuries and a two-pound poncho that can be used as a rain- 21  22 H tim o’brien coat, groundsheet, or tent. Most of the men are common, low- ranking soldiers and carry a standard M-16 assault rifle and several magazines of ammunition. Several men carry grenade launchers. All men carry the figurative weight of memory and the literal weight of one another. They carry Vietnam itself, in the heavy weather and the dusty soil. The things they carry are also determined by their rank or specialty. As leader, for example, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carries the maps, the compasses, and the responsibility for his men’s lives. The medic, Rat Kiley, carries morphine, malaria tablets, and sup- plies for serious wounds. One day, when the company outside the Than Khe area is on a mission to destroy tunnel complexes, Cross imagines the tunnels collapsing on him and Martha. He becomes distracted by wonder- ing whether or not she is a virgin. On the way back from going to the bathroom, Lavender is shot, falling especially hard under the bur- den of his loaded backpack. Still, Cross can think of nothing but s ummary & analys i s Martha. He thinks about her love of poetry and her smooth skin. While the soldiers wait for the helicopter to carry Lavender’s body away, they smoke his marijuana. They make jokes about Lav- ender’s tranquilizer abuse and rationalize that he probably was too numb to feel pain when he was shot. Cross leads his men to the vil- lage of Than Khe—where the soldiers burn everything and shoot dogs and chickens—and then on a march through the late afternoon heat. When they stop for the evening, Cross digs a foxhole in the ground and sits at the bottom of it, crying. Meanwhile, Kiowa and Norman Bowker sit in the darkness discussing the short span between life and death in an attempt to make sense of the situation. In the ensuing silence, Kiowa marvels at how Lavender fell so quickly and how he was zipping up his pants one second and dead the next. He finds something unchristian about the lack of drama surrounding this type of death and wonders why he cannot openly lament it like Cross does. The morning after Lavender’s death, in the steady rain, Cross crouches in his foxhole and burns Martha’s letters and two photo- graphs. He plans the day’s march and concludes that he will never again have fantasies. He plans to call the men together and assume the blame for Lavender’s death. He reminds himself that, despite the men’s inevitable grumbling, his job is not to be loved but to lead.  the things they c a r r ied H 23 Analysis O’Brien uses the list of physical objects that the members of the Alpha Company carry in Vietnam as a window to the emotional burdens that these soldiers bear. One such burden is the necessity for the young soldiers to confront the tension between fantasy and real- ity. The realization of this tension disrupts Cross’s stint as the resi- dent dreamer of the Alpha Company. Cross thinks that because he was so obsessed with his fantasy of Martha and the life they might lead after the war, he was negligent. He sees Ted Lavender’s death as the result of his negligence. If “The Things They Carried” is the illustration of the conflict between love and war, then the death of Ted Lavender and the subsequent disillusionment of Lieutenant Cross signify a triumph for war in this conflict. Cross’s reaction to Ted Lavender’s death shows how the horrors of the war can make men irreparably cynical and gloomy. Before Lavender’s death, the most vivid images Cross carries in his mind s ummary & analys i s are those of Martha. He is obsessed with trivial matters such as whether or not she is a virgin and why she so tantalizingly signs her letters “Love.” But when he decides his thoughts of her have led him astray and that they—and she—caused the distraction and incom- petence that led to Lavender’s death, he expresses his anger at her in the only way possible. He burns Martha’s pictures and letters in an attempt to distance himself from the sentimentality he sees as a destructive force during wartime. His conclusion, at the end of this story, that it is better to be loved than to lead, reveals how the expe- rience of Lavender’s death has affected his mentality. The emotional burdens that the soldiers bear are intensified by their young age and inexperience. Most of the men who fought in Vietnam were in their late teens and early twenties—they were chil- dren, students, and boyfriends who had no perspective on how to rationalize killing or come to terms with their friends’ untimely deaths. From the beginning, O’Brien the author uses explicit details to illustrate what the experience was like for the scared men. Among the things the men carry are guilt and cowardice that they are nei- ther able to admit to nor negotiate. Although they are sad for the loss of their friend Lavender, their predominant feeling is of relief, since they are still alive. O’Brien’s decision to intersperse profound thoughts with mun- dane events establishes the matter-of-fact tone of the collection. The collection’s narrative alternates between reflections on war and the story of Ted Lavender’s death. By arranging the work this way,  24 H tim o’brien O’Brien uses facts to create setting. He explicitly demonstrates his characters’ natures not by describing them but by showing the items they carried with them in such dire circumstances. Rather than explain Kiowa’s heritage in concrete terms, for example, O’Brien simply mentions that Kiowa carries his grandfather’s hatchet and an illustrated New Testament. O’Brien here offers us glimpses of char- acters whose traits become integral to the ideas that O’Brien explores throughout The Things They Carried. “L O V E ” Summary Years after the end of the war, Jimmy Cross goes to visit Tim O’Brien at his home in Massachusetts. They drink coffee and smoke ciga- rettes, looking at photographs and reminiscing. When they come s ummary & analys i s across a picture of Ted Lavender, Cross confesses that he has never forgiven himself for Lavender’s death. O’Brien comforts him by say- ing that he feels the same way about other things, and the two men switch from coffee to gin. They steer the conversation away from the more harsh memories and laugh about less upsetting recollec- tions, such as the way Henry Dobbins used to carry his girlfriend’s pantyhose around his neck as a good-luck charm. Finally, by the end of the night, O’Brien thinks it’s safe to ask about Martha. Cross tells O’Brien that when he finally reconnected with Mar- tha at a college reunion in 1979, they spent most of their time together, catching up. She had become a Lutheran missionary and had done service in Ethiopia, Guatemala, and Mexico. She had never married and told Cross she didn’t know why. Later, Cross took her hand, but Martha didn’t squeeze back; when he told her he loved her, she didn’t answer. Finally Cross told her that the night of their only date, after they watched Bonnie and Clyde, all he’d wanted to do was to take her home and tie her to her bed so he could touch her knee all night long. Martha replied coldly that she didn’t understand how men could do such things. At breakfast the next morning, she apologized and gave him another snapshot, telling him not to burn this one. Cross tells O’Brien that he still loves Martha. But for the rest of his visit with O’Brien, he doesn’t speak of her. Finally, as O’Brien walks Cross to his car, he tells his former lieutenant that he would like to write a story about some of what they have spoken about. After some  the things they c a r r ied H 25 consideration, Cross consents, saying that maybe Martha will read it and come begging for him. He urges O’Brien to paint him as a brave and good leader. He then asks O’Brien for a favor—that he not “mention anything about—.” O’Brien responds that he won’t. Analysis “Love” functions as a postscript or epilogue for the story of Jimmy Cross and Martha, begun in the previous story, “The Things They Carried.” O’Brien’s explanation of how things turned out for Cross and Martha, twenty years after the war, is his first reference to the fallout of Vietnam. When the war ended, soldiers returned home to realize the dreams they had put on hold during the war. However, what was waiting for them in the end wasn’t always what they hoped it would be. Cross put his faith in Martha because he couldn’t put his faith in war itself and because the notion of her as a sexual s ummary & analys i s being and as someone who might want to start a life with him upon his return was safe and comforting. The meaning of the title “Love” is complicated because Cross is both skeptical of the word and hopeful that it carries meaning in Martha’s letters. Cross’s skepticism becomes clear early on; when he reads Martha’s letters in an effort to distract himself from the atroc- ities and unknowns he faces in the jungle, he suspects that the “Love” with which she signs her letters is merely a figure of speech. When the details are filled in years after the fact, the truth of the word “Love” is revealed—Martha never loved Cross. In effect, this realization makes only more profound the impact of Lavender’s death on the already guilt-ridden Cross. Whether Martha is uninter- ested because she is incapable of love, because Cross’s obsession with her eventually turned her off, or because the time in which she came of age was filled with such abject disillusionment, Cross is injured—he needs gin to prompt him into speaking, and he doesn’t want to linger too long on the topic. Through Cross’s character, O’Brien shows how repression of painful memories can be essential for survival. Cross carries a haunting secret with him from his experience leading the Alpha Company, but O’Brien leaves the nature of the secret ambiguous. Informed by the previous story, we assume that the secret is Cross’s lingering guilt over Lavender’s death, but O’Brien not only refuses to name it, he actually obscures Cross’s naming of the secret at the end of “Love.”  26 H tim o’brien O’Brien’s narrative strategies reflect the repression that his char- acters practice. O’Brien himself is unwilling to communicate fully with his readers, which makes it unclear whether or not he is reli- able. It is unclear, for instance, whether O’Brien’s conversation with Cross actually happened or whether it is a fiction that renders “The Things They Carried” more realistic. Though the distinction is not made in this story, or in any of the others, the resemblance between O’Brien the author and O’Brien the main character is one of several attempts O’Brien makes to raise the stakes of his storytelling and to inspire our investment in his stories. The distinction between truth and fiction does not mean much to O’Brien; feelings behind the story give the narrative its purpose. Therefore, whether or not O’Brien betrayed Cross is irrelevant when compared to the impact of Cross’s feelings of guilt. The ambiguous ending of “Love” is symptomatic of the diffi- culty war veterans have in vocalizing traumatic experiences. We s ummary & analys i s cannot be sure if the thing Cross asks O’Brien not to mention has been put in the story or not. Perhaps O’Brien has betrayed his friend and the thing Cross requested he not mention is his guilt over Ted Lavender’s death or his relationship with and eventual rejection by Martha. Or perhaps O’Brien is faithful to Cross’s wishes and the thing he is asked not to mention is kept from us the entire time. No matter what Cross’s secret is, O’Brien’s ambiguities force us to con- sider the act of writing as a way of conveying the conflicting motiva- tions involved in making difficult decisions. “S P I N ” Summary Insisting that sometimes war is less violent and more sweet, O’Brien shares disconnected memories of the war. Azar gives a bar of choc- olate to a little boy with a plastic leg. Mitchell Sanders sits under a tree, picking lice off his body and depositing them in an envelope addressed to his Ohio draft board. Every night, Henry Dobbins and Norman Bowker dig a foxhole and play checkers. The narrator stops the string of anecdotes to say that he is now forty-three years old and a writer, and that reliving the memories has caused them to recur. He insists that the bad memories live on and never stop hap- pening. He says his guilt has not ceased and that his daughter Kath- leen advises him to write about something else. Nevertheless, he  the things they c a r r ied H 27 says, writing about what one remembers is a means of coping with those things one can’t forget. O’Brien describes when the Alpha Company enlists an old Viet- namese man whom they call a “poppa-san” to guide the platoon through the mine fields on the Batangan Peninsula. When he is done, the troops are sad to leave their steadfast guide. Mitchell Sanders tells a story of a man who went awol in order to sleep with a Red Cross nurse. After several days, the man rejoined his unit and was more excited than ever about getting back into combat, saying that after so much peace, he wanted to hurt again. Norman Bowker whispers one night that if he could have one wish it would be for his father to stop bothering him about earning medals. Kiowa teaches Rat Kiley and Dave Jensen a rain dance, and when they ask him, afterward, where the rain was, he replies, “The earth is slow, but the buffalo is patient.” Ted Lavender adopts a puppy, and Azar later kills it, claiming his own immaturity as an excuse. Henry Dobbins s ummary & analys i s sings to himself as he sews on his new buck-sergeant stripes. Laven- der occasionally goes too heavy on the tranquilizers and calls the war “nice” and “mellow.” After Curt Lemon is killed, he hangs in pieces on a tree. Last comes the vision of a dead, young man and Kiowa’s voice ringing in O’Brien’s ear, assuring him, repeatedly, that O’Brien didn’t have a choice. Analysis “Spin,” with its unconnected anecdotes delivered in scattered phrases and half-realized memories, stylistically echoes the frag- mentation of the war experience. Like the anecdotes in “The Things They Carried,” the anecdotes here are static and seemingly unre- lated. They jump in time, purpose, and magnitude in the same way that a soldier’s mind might jump around his past. In this story, it becomes clear to us that all the stories O’Brien is telling originate from his memory. A shift in tone accompanies the fragmentation; O’Brien transitions from a balanced to a disillusioned evaluation of the war. He argues that the war is unlike Dobbins and Bowker’s well-ordered, rational games of checkers. The war has neither rules nor winners, and men witness horrific acts juxtaposed with random acts of kindness. “Spin” is like a map of the uncharted territory of war for readers who have never experienced it. The story allows us to feel the bore- dom of war by describing the things that happen when nothing is  28 H tim o’brien happening: jibes, songs, stomachaches, and despair. It also addresses the way men choose to deal with fright, uncertainty, and devastation. Unable to cope with stress, Azar brutally kills Ted Lav- ender’s adopted puppy and uses his immaturity and youth as an excuse for his actions. O’Brien’s decision not to explain or elaborate on this event conveys the message that sometimes the facts in a true war story need no further commentary. Although the plot of “Spin” is not complicated, the story estab- lishes the identities of the characters who appear throughout The Things They Carried. We encounter most of the main characters in the title story, but we find out more about them here. We see the immature inhumanity of Azar, the philosophical even-headedness of Kiowa, and the dimness of Norman Bowker, and each character becomes more rounded and real with the revelation of a new detail. One way that “Spin” develops characters is by describing the inner conflicts that define them throughout The Things They Carried. s ummary & analys i s O’Brien revisits, throughout the work, such elements as Ted Laven- der’s tranquilizer abuse, Curt Lemon’s death, and his own killing of a Vietnamese man, and with each new look at a given event we gain added perspective on the characters involved. O’Brien’s relationship with his daughter Kathleen reveals the importance of storytelling. An outsider to O’Brien’s experience, Kathleen cannot begin to imagine what her father went through when he was a soldier in a foreign country long before she was born. She is therefore convinced that her father’s obsession with Vietnam is an easily curable condition. She suggests that he write something happier, something entirely different, failing to realize that there is a reason that he needs to tell these stories, and to tell them to her, spe- cifically. O’Brien says the function of telling stories is delivering the past into the future, for giving perspective and understanding. His act of telling, which bridges the gap between past and present, helps both him and Kathleen more fully understand his war experience. “O N T H E R A I N Y R I V E R ” Summary O’Brien says he has not told this story to his parents, siblings, or wife. He speaks of living with the shame of the story, whose events occurred during the summer of 1968. On June 17, 1968, a month after he graduates from Macalaster College, Phi Beta Kappa,  the things they c a r r ied H 29 summa cum laude, and president of the student body, Tim O’Brien receives his draft notice to fight in the Vietnam War. The war seems wrong to him, its causes and effects uncertain. Like most Ameri- cans, the young O’Brien doesn’t know what happened to the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin, and he can’t discern what type of person Ho Chi Minh, the president of North Vietnam, really is. In college, O’Brien took a stand against the war. The day the draft notice is delivered, O’Brien thinks that he is too good to fight the war. Although his community pressures him to go, he resists making a decision about whether to go to war or flee. He spends the summer in a meatpacking plant in his hometown of Wor- thington, Minnesota, removing blood clots from pigs with a water gun. He comes home every night stinking of pig and drives around town aimlessly, paralyzed, wondering how to find a way out of his situation. It seems to him that there is no easy way out. The govern- ment won’t allow him to defer in order to go to graduate school; he s ummary & analys i s can’t oppose the war as a matter of general principle because he does agree with war in some circumstances; and he can’t claim ill health as an excuse. He resents his hometown for making him feel com- pelled to fight a war that it doesn’t even know anything about. In the middle of the summer, O’Brien begins thinking seriously about fleeing to Canada, eight hours north of Worthington. His conscience and instincts tell him to run. He worries, however, that such an action will lose him the respect of his family and commu- nity. He imagines the people he knows gossiping about him in the local café. During his sleepless nights, he struggles with his anger at the lack of perspective on the part of those who influenced him. One day, O’Brien cracks. Feeling what he describes as a physical rupture in his chest, he leaves work suddenly, drives home, and writes a vague note to his family. He heads north and then west along the Rainy River, which separates Minnesota from Canada. The next afternoon, after spending the night behind a closed-down gas station, he pulls into a dilapidated fishing resort, the Tip Top Lodge, and meets the elderly proprietor, Elroy Berdahl. The two spend six days together, eating meals, hiking, and playing Scrabble. Although O’Brien never mentions his reason for going to the Cana- dian border, he has the sense that Elroy knows, since the quiet old man is sharp and intelligent. One night O’Brien inquires about his bill, and after the two men discuss O’Brien’s work—washing dishes and doing odd jobs—in relation to the cost of the room, Elroy con- cludes that he owes O’Brien more than a hundred dollars and offers  30 H tim o’brien O’Brien two hundred. O’Brien refuses the money, but the next morning he finds four fifty-dollar bills in an envelope tacked to his door. Looking back on this time in his life, O’Brien marvels at his innocence. He invites us to reflect with him, to pretend that we’re watching an old home movie of O’Brien, tan and fit, wearing faded blue jeans and a white polo shirt, sitting on Elroy’s dock, and think- ing about writing an apologetic letter to his parents. On O’Brien’s last full day at the Tip Top Lodge, Elroy takes him fishing on the Rainy River. During the voyage it occurs to O’Brien that they must have stopped in Canadian territory—soon after, Elroy stops the boat. O’Brien stares at the shoreline of Canada, twenty yards ahead of him, and wonders what to do. Elroy pretends not to notice as O’Brien bursts into tears. O’Brien tells himself he will run to Canada, but he silently concludes that he will go to war because he is embarrassed not to. Elroy pulls in his line and turns the boat back toward Minnesota. The next morning, O’Brien washes s ummary & analys i s the breakfast dishes, leaves the two hundred dollars on the kitchen counter, and drives south to his home. He then goes off to war. Analysis “On the Rainy River” is an exploration of the role of shame in war. The story develops the theme of embarrassment as a motivating fac- tor, first introduced by Jimmy Cross in “The Things They Carried” and “Love.” Just as Jimmy Cross feels guilty about Ted Lavender’s death, O’Brien feels guilty about going to Vietnam against his prin- ciples. He questions his own motives, and in this story he returns to the genesis of his decision in order to examine with us the specifics of cause and effect. Ironically, despite its specific details and its preoccupation with reality, “On the Rainy River” is the story most easily identifiable as fiction. The real Tim O’Brien did indeed struggle with his decision to heed his draft notice, but he never actually ran to the Canadian bor- der, and he never stayed at the Tip Top Lodge. Still, as he states explicitly later in the work, the point of a story like this one is not to deliver true facts exactly as they happened but rather to use facts and details in order to give an accurate account of the feelings behind a given situation. Though the events in the story are not true, the story itself conveys an emotional truth. By describing his personal history, O’Brien makes a broader comment on the confusion that soldiers experienced when the  the things they c a r r ied H 31 demands of their country and community conflicted with the demands of their princples and conscience. O’Brien’s description of his moral dilemma about going to Vietnam illustrates how the war was fought by soldiers who were often reluctant and conflicted. In the context of the collection’s later stories, “On the Rainy River” weighs the guilt of avoiding the draft against the guilt of committing atrocities against other humans. Though it seems obvious that kill- ing is more ethically reprehensible than draft-dodging, O’Brien’s story explains how his largely uninformed community nonetheless wields a moral clout that overpowers his own opposition to the war. This story references one of the recurring ideas in The Things They Carried: that war twists moral structures and makes it impos- sible to take a morally clear course of action. Joseph Heller’s World War II novel Catch-22 also addresses the twisted morality of war by describing a situation, called a “catch-22,” in which a problem’s only solution is impossible because of some characteristic of the s ummary & analys i s problem. O’Brien is trapped in a catch-22 because the only way that he can avoid guilt is by taking a course of action that will make him feel guilty. If he goes to war, he will feel guilty for ignoring his own objection to United States involvement in Vietnam, but the only way to avoid this guilt involves incurring the disapproval of his community—which will cause him to feel guilt and shame. In The Things They Carried, O’Brien shows how soldiers experience catch- 22s both during the war and in the time surrounding it. The bald, shrunken, silent Elroy Berdahl is a father figure for the narrator. Although the two do not explicitly discuss O’Brien’s dilemma, Elroy forces O’Brien to shake himself out of complacent confusion. But Berdahl’s presence isn’t sharp or invasive. Rather, his effect is that of a mirror—saying nothing, expecting nothing, per- haps not even knowing the situation at hand, he leads O’Brien to the river and forces him to confront Canada and the prospect of free- dom from the draft sitting on the other side. O’Brien is compelled into action, not because Elroy forces him, but rather because the old man leads him to the river, where the necessity of making a choice once and for all becomes clear to O’Brien. O’Brien’s narrative reveals that he feels the need to justify and explain his decision to us, his readers, by putting us in the position of ethical judges of his actions. O’Brien’s description of himself as a naïve, impressionable youth is part of a defense of himself and of his actions. Although his blunt questioning of “What would you do?” and “Would you cry, as I did?” forces us to recognize the difficulty of  32 H tim o’brien his position, it also invites us to evaluate the validity of his course of action. Later in the work, O’Brien illustrates the power of war to transform an individual by showing his own transformation from young and impressionable to disillusioned and uninspired. Here, he compares the act of remembering his young, naïve self to watching an old home movie, and this metaphor makes us the audience of this movie and forces us to take a more active role in considering O’Brien. “E N E M I E S ” & “ F R I E N D S ” Summary: “Enemies” One morning on patrol Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk get into a fistfight over a missing jackknife that Jensen thinks Strunk has stolen. Jensen breaks Strunk’s nose, hitting him repeatedly and without mercy. Afterward, Jensen is nervous that Strunk will try to get revenge and s ummary & analys i s pays special attention to Strunk’s whereabouts. Finally, crazed by apprehension, Jensen fires his gun into the air and calls out Strunk’s name. Later that night, he borrows a pistol and uses it to break his own nose in order to even the score. The next morning, Strunk is amused by the news, admitting that he did steal Jensen’s jackknife. Summary: “Friends” Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk learn to trust each other. They resolve that if one gets seriously wounded, the other will kill him to put him out of his misery. In October, Strunk’s lower leg gets blown off by a mortar round. Jensen kneels at his side and Strunk repeatedly begs not to be killed. Strunk is loaded into a helicopter, and later Jensen is relieved to learn that Strunk didn’t survive the trip. Analysis: “Enemies” & “Friends” In these two brief stories, the pressures of war distort social codes, causing two men on the same side to act violently toward one another for no real reason. O’Brien explains that this behavior results from the immaturity of Jensen and Strunk, and of the imma- turity of grunts in general. Amid the chaotic war in Vietnam, sol- diers often battled one another, to relieve the tension of waiting and because such close confines inspired contentious relationships. In this story, social codes and contracts become arbitrary. In most societies, those who steal are punished by others in order to inspire  the things they c a r r ied H 33 guilt about, and fear of, committing wrongs. However, in “Ene- mies,” the lack of an attempt by Jensen and Strunk to resolve their conflict using peaceful dialogue demonstrates that social contracts have begun to break down. While Jensen assumes that Strunk will inflict eye-for-an-eye revenge on him for breaking his nose, Strunk assumes Jensen was somewhat justified in his rash action and in the end Strunk feels that he’s gotten what he deserved, since he did steal Jensen’s jackknife. Strunk’s acceptance of the matter and the relief Jensen takes in his exaggerated gesture of settling the score show that both men are willing to take responsibility for their actions. Unfortunately, with the breakdown of the social code, each is taking responsibility out of guilt rather than integrity. The irony in these two stories is expressed by their titles. At the beginning of “Enemies,” Jensen and Strunk are violently opposed to one another although they are fighting on the same side of a brutal war. At the end of “Friends,” Jensen is relieved rather than s ummary & analys i s aggrieved to learn of Strunk’s death, although the two are supposed to be friends. These titles emphasize a wartime distortion of the notion of friendship, especially when compared with the notion of fidelity and promises. Jensen’s relief at Strunk’s death signals that he operates under a strict code of right and wrong, putting more stock in fidelity and promises than in friendship. Just as he assumes, in “Enemies,” that he has broken a social code by wronging Strunk and must therefore feel bad, so too in “Friends” does he feel he has broken a social code by not honoring the terms of his pact with Strunk, even though Strunk is the one who waves off the pact. O’Brien contends that war is a time when fantasies are shat- tered and notions of honor are rendered obsolete in the frightening face of death. When Jensen and Strunk make their pact, they are thinking of both grave injury and death as abstract, distant things, remnants of their notions of heroism from before the war, that have yet to become real because of their relative inexperience with death since their arrival. But when Strunk is actually injured, he immediately wants to rescind the agreement made in a time when the prospect of its being enacted seemed unlikely. Being alive and injured is better than being dead, he realizes. As Strunk begs for his life, Jensen is forced to grant an escape clause to the pact. Still, although Jensen doesn’t take action to kill Strunk, the relief he feels upon hearing of Strunk’s death suggests he believes that there was a right—honoring the pact—and a wrong—honoring Strunk’s revised wishes—in this situation.  34 H tim o’brien “H O W T O T E L L A T R U E W A R S T O R Y ” Summary O’Brien prefaces this story by saying that it is true. A week after his friend is killed, Rat Kiley writes a letter to the friend’s sister, explain- ing what a hero her brother was and how much he loved him. Two months pass, and the sister never writes back. Kiley, frustrated, spits and calls the sister a “dumb cooze.” O’Brien insists that a true war story is not moral and tells us not to believe a story that seems moral. He uses Kiley’s actions as an example of the amorality of war sto- ries. O’Brien reveals that Kiley’s friend’s name was Curt Lemon and that he died while playfully tossing a smoke grenade with Rat Kiley, in the shade of some trees. Lemon stepped into the sunlight and onto a rigged mortar round. O’Brien says sometimes a true war story cannot be believed s ummary & analys i s because some of the most unbearable parts are true, while some of the normal parts are not. Sometimes, he says, a true war story is impossible to tell. He describes a story that Mitchell Sanders tells. Sanders recounts the experience of a troop that goes into the moun- tains on a listening post operation. He says that after a few days, the men hear strange echoes and music—chimes and xylophones—and become frightened. One night, the men hear voices and noises that sound like a cocktail party. After a while they hear singing and chanting, as well as talking monkeys and trees. They order air strikes and they burn and shoot down everything they can find. Still, in the morning, they hear the noises. So they pack up their gear and head down the mountain, where their colonel asks them what they heard. They have no answer. The day after he tells this story, Mitchell approaches O’Brien and confesses that some parts were invented. O’Brien asks him what the moral of the story is and, listening to the quiet, Sanders says the quiet is the moral. O’Brien says the moral of a true war story, like the thread that makes a cloth, cannot be separated from the story itself. A true war story cannot be made general or abstract, he says. The significance of the story is whether or not you believe it in your stomach. Heeding his own advice, he relays the story of Curt Lemon’s death in a few, brief vignettes. He explains that the platoon crossed a muddy river and on the third day Lemon was killed and Kiley lost his best friend. Later that day, higher in the mountains, Kiley shot a Viet Cong water buffalo repeatedly—though the ani-  the things they c a r r ied H 35 mal was destroyed and bleeding, it remained alive. Finally Kiowa and Sanders picked up the buffalo and dumped it in the village well. O’Brien expounds on his problem by making a generalization. He says that though war is hell, it is also many other contradictory things. He explains the mysterious feeling of being alive that follows a firefight. He agrees with Sanders’s story of the men who hear things in the jungle—war is ambiguous, he says. For this reason, in a true war story, nothing is absolutely true. O’Brien remembers how Lemon died. Lemon was smiling and talking to Kiley one second and was blown into a tree the next. Jensen and O’Brien were ordered to climb the tree to retrieve Lemon’s body, and Jensen sang “Lemon Tree” as they threw down the body parts. A true war story can be identified by the questions one asks after- ward, O’Brien says. He says that in the story of a man who jumps on a grenade to save his three friends, the truth of the man’s purpose makes a difference. He says that sometimes the truest war stories s ummary & analys i s never happened and tells a story of the same four men—one jumps on a grenade to take the blast, and all four die anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead turns to the man who jumped on the grenade and asks him why he jumped. The already-dead jumper says, “Story of my life, man.” Thinking of Curt Lemon, O’Brien concludes he must have thought the sunlight was killing him. O’Brien wishes he could get the story right—the way the sunlight seemed to gather Lemon and carry him up in the air—so that we could believe what Lemon must have seen as his final truth. O’Brien says that when he tells this story, a woman invariably approaches him and tells him that she liked it but it made her sad, and that O’Brien should find new stories to tell. O’Brien wishes he could tell the woman that the story he told wasn’t a war story but a love story. He concludes that all he can do is continue telling it, mak- ing up more things in order give greater truth to the story. Analysis “How to Tell a True War Story” examines the complex relationship between the war experience and storytelling. It is told half from O’Brien’s role as a soldier, as a reprise of several old Vietnam stories, and half from his role as a storyteller, as a discourse on the art of sto- rytelling. O’Brien’s narrative shows that a storyteller has the power to shape his or her listeners’ experiences and opinions. Much in the  36 H tim o’brien same way that the war distorts the soldier’s perceptions of right and wrong, O’Brien’s story distorts our perceptions of beauty and ugli- ness. O’Brien tells Curt Lemon’s death as a love story. Despite its gruesomeness, evident by O’Brien’s graphic recounting of the situa- tion, he describes the scene as beautiful, focusing on the sunlight rather than the carnage. Blood and carnage are never even discussed, not even as O’Brien and Dave Jensen are forced to shimmy up the tree in order to throw down Curt Lemon’s body parts. The way O’Brien describes this action, and the death in general, is unspecific and detached. His storytelling functions as a salve that allows him to deal with the complexity of the war experience, so much even as to turn the story of Curt Lemon from a war story to a love story. A true war story, O’Brien explains, has an absolute allegiance to obscenity and evil that renders commonly held storytelling notions of courage and pride obsolete. When we learn that Rat Kiley sends a letter to Curt Lemon’s sister, extolling the virtues of his fellow sol- s ummary & analys i s dier after his death, we expect the death and the story to have a pos- itive, heartwarming outcome. The essence of the true war story lies in the reality of the situation: the sister does not respond, and Kiley reacts immaturely. This irony makes sense, O’Brien contends, both because Kiley is young and because he has been exposed to such unspeakable things. He calls the sister a “dumb cooze” not because he is a misogynist but because it is his way of negotiating anger. Blame must be assigned, Kiley rationalizes in his anger, and O’Brien sees the truth in Kiley’s emotions. A true war story is not about cour- age and heroism but about the reality of misplaced anger and the inability of soldiers to deal effectively with their feelings about a horrible experience. Although all members of the Alpha Company are effectively sol- diers turned storytellers, O’Brien and Sanders take their role as sto- rytellers more seriously than the rest. Ironically, Sanders’s most vehement piece of advice—to get out of the way and to let the story tell itself—is one that both he and O’Brien ignore. When he inserts himself into his story about the soldiers who hear voices, Sanders gets in the way, with his comments and clarifications, where he might have let the image of the men speak for itself. This contradic- tion proves that there are no truths to storytelling, even and espe- cially in true war stories. Sanders’s advice points out that even in the case of an unreliable narrator, the truest part of a true war story is the listener’s visceral reaction to the details. O’Brien insists the story is absolutely true,  the things they c a r r ied H 37 but then, after telling it, in a more general discussion of storytelling, insists that it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. The only conclusion we can arrive at is that truth in a true war story is irrelevant. O’Brien is so explicit as to say “war is hell,” but that simple statement has little impact because it is so general and clichéd. Truth is what “makes the stomach believe,” like the image of Rat Kiley torturing a buffalo because he cannot sit with his emotions about Curt Lemon’s death. The image of this suf- fering Viet Cong buffalo that refuses to die is a far more vivid testa- ment to war than a hollow cry of “war is hell.” “T H