In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, ghosts have been a motif throughout the first half of the novel. In addition to things like panty hose, lucky stones, and dope, the young men at war “all carried ghosts” (page 9). The Things They Carried focuses a lot on the emotional burdens the men carried with them through their journeys, and ghosts act as a representation of the haunting weight. At times, even the war itself seems ghostly. When the soldiers were stationed in the mountains for seven days in complete silence, they are described in a spectral way. “It's spooky. This is the mountains. You don't know spooky till you been there. . . .Serious spooky” was how the speaker explained it to Sanders. When asked
