Mark Koon
Professor Paquette
English 102 / F / 8:00 AM
Friday, October 15, 2015

The Things They Carried

In the short story, “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien a Lieutenant by the name of Jimmy Cross and his squad carry a list of many things, some of these things heavy physical loads and some heavy emotional loads composed of grief, terror, love, and guilt. The things each soldier carries depends on the soldier himself including his priorities and his constitutions and also his rank or his specialty for example Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carries maps, compasses, and the heavy burden of the responsibility of his men’s lives. A nervous soldier named Ted Lavender carries marijuana and tranquilizers to calm himself down and the religious soldier Kiowa carries an illustrated New Testament and every single one of these men carry the figurative weight of memory, fear, and hope and the literal weight of one another. In this short story the author uses the title symbolically for both the seen and unseen things that men at war carry and to represent the traumas and hardships they have suffered that they will carry for the rest of their lives. These soldiers know they can die at any moment and so when the inevitable happens and a soldier is actually killed in action extra tension stems from the fact that Lt. Cross knows he is responsible. When Ted Lavender is killed in action one of the soldier’s, Kiowa, cannot stop marveling at how fast and hard Lavender hit the ground. “Boom-Down” (277) he repeats to himself and his fellow soldiers. He marvels how he can be pissing one second and dead the next and he tries to make sense of it all. He is bothered with the lack of drama surrounding the death and is mad at the lack of emotion he has towards the death. He claims that it seems “Un-Christian” (277) and has some trouble coping with the death. With Lavender's death, O'Brien creates a tension between Lt. Cross' participation in the war and with his imagined fantasies that give him refuge from the war. In the wake of Lavenders death Lt. Cross burns the letters from Martha and accepts full blame for Lavender's death and while he destroys all of the physical memories of Martha, Lt. Cross continues to carry the memory of her with him still and to that is also added the heavy burden of grief and guilt. With the heavy burden of guilt and grief that some of the soldiers carry, some of them also carry the burden of missing a loved one. Lt. Jimmy Cross throughout the whole story is obsessed with a girl back home named Martha. Throughout the story Jimmy has his mind off of the war and on Martha, looking at pictures and letters she has sent him and reminiscing about time spent together. With his body at war and his mind back home it is clear that Jimmy Cross is carrying more than just physical things. “Lieutenant Cross gazed at the tunnel. But he was not there” (274). Cross was thinking about Martha like always and was not fearing the consequences of a wandering mind during war and in turn one of his own men is killed due to his lack of attention. With the death of Ted Lavender, Lt. Cross adds more baggage and weight to his already heavy load. The weight of guilt and grief that he feels for being responsible for Lavender’s death is one of the heaviest things he carries. After the death, Cross and his men all carry the emotional baggage of men who might die. “Grief, terror, love, longing – these were intangibles” (279). His men were tough but all of them carried things inside themselves. They liked to keep a mask of composure on and make jokes about all the cowards in the war while trying not to show any envy or awe towards these men but however hard they tried the image still seems to play itself out in their own eyes. They make jokes about the death of Lavender, keeping their minds off each of their own emotional baggage. They all carried the heavy burden of cowardice with them. Deciding whether to run, freeze or hide. In many ways this was the heaviest burden of all to the men for it could never be put down. The cowardice drove them. Each day moving forward and never falling in the fear of being deemed a coward if they did. These men all carried these heavy burdens inside of them while seeming to maintain a mask of composure. These men show that fear of shame is a misguided but unavoidable motivation for going to war. In an attempt to convey the harsh realities of war, seen and unseen, O’Brien shows that in addition to the physical weight soldiers carry at war they also carry emotional weight that none of them like to talk about. Fear and guilt and grief and love drive the soldiers and at the same time stops them, these burdens are what weigh most on the soldiers’ backs and what weigh most on their minds. The symbolism shown between the title and the story is made clear throughout the story and is shown through the thoughts and actions of Lt. Cross and his men.