PTSD in the Shit Field
In the novel The Things They Carried there are many characters throughout the book that experience some sort of PTSD. The character I chose to represent in my project is the young soldier in the chapter “In The Field”. I chose to represent this character in my mask because he experiences a traumatic event in his time at war. This particular event is when Kiowa and himself were watching the field one night and the young soldier pulled out a picture of his girlfriend and turned on the flashlight so that they could look at it. But at this point when they turned the flashlight on it drew attention to where they were so they were then ambushed and Kiowa drowned in the shit field. Now the young soldier thinks that he is responsible …show more content…
The first and most obvious symbol on the mask is the mud which represent the shit field that Kiowa fell under. The mud is so thick that you can no longer see any of the facial features, which actually represents the fact that the soldiers are losing themselves in the war. “He was alone. He’d lost everything. He’d lost Kiowa and his weapon and his flashlight and his girlfriend’s picture. He remembered this. He remembered wondering if he could lose himself.”. This quote is placed in the chapter “In The Field” which shows how much the soldier is feeling lost. Another big quote that really ties in the meaning of the mud is “The filth seemed to erase identities, transforming the men into identical copies of a single soldier.”. Another symbol represented on the mask are the footprints on the face to represent a couple different things. The biggest one is that the soldiers couldn’t find Kiowa so they were trying to search for him using their feet, so he might of actually been stepped on. One of the other meaning this symbol means is that I connected it to the other book we read this semester, Slaughterhouse 5, because in that book having a pair of boots was very important to