Essay
The novel The Things They Carried works as a vessel, a mask that can fit on the face of any man left scarred by war. O'Brien paints war in a heighten and pellucid manner, stripping a soldier down to a basic primitive concept: the preservation of the body and the mind. Without the essenial exertion of the mind, we cannot lead our bodies. O'Brien illustrates how a common soldier struggles with moral duty, passion and discipline in the time of war.

A moral duty is the desire to conduct a task in an attempt to obey a higher authority; or by following what one believes is right (morally or legally) without self interest or desire involved. Its a background force that leads man into action, the conviction that is instilled within every soldier …show more content…
Later it burned down to a smoldering self-pity, then to numbness."-A marination that would boil down to a simple fear 'spreading inside me like weeds.'(O'Brien, 20) Fear was born inside him long before he'd hold a gun. He'd have his own emotions that had their 'own mass and specific gravity' and tangible weight' to carry one with him to this war. These soldiers would remain fixated on death, making one with their fears, frolicking within thier own fantasies: "I imagined myself dead. I imagined myself doing things I could not do- sharging at enemy positions, taking aim at another human being." (O'Brien, …show more content…
For example, Kiowa carried his treasured bible, and moccasins or Henry Dobbins carried his girlfriends stocking around his neck. "Like many of us in Vietnam, Dobbins felt the pull of superstition, and he believed firmly and absolutely in the protective power of the stockings. They were like body armor, he thought." (O'Brien, 112). Henry Dobbins venerated and respected monks and their 'churches', the way a village girl danced surrounded by death- these things displayed a rare normalcy in a war with its "absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil (O'Brien,