Quillen Kimleigh
The Things They Carried
Honors English 10 Final
The Things They Carried is a collection of short stories written by a war veteran from the Vietnam War. The short stories all play into each other for the most part and they all address the basic themes and central ideas that the author is trying to convey. Throughout all the stories we see how war leaves behind physical and mental damages far beyond our understanding. The author, Tim O’Brien describes what his life was like before, during and after the war through short stories. He expresses his struggles to overcome personal things and to leave things behind that hold him back. He was there first hand and knew what was going on in the heat of the moment. His team also reached out to him and they talked about their struggles after the war, so he is expressing the experiences of a few different people and how war affects them differently. War leaves different scares on everybody; Norman Bowker-- one of O’Brien’s platoon mates-- goes through this struggle and he contacts O’Brien about it and wants O’Brien to write about him and his struggle, in the short story “Notes” O’Brien says “I recieved a long, disjointed letter in which Bowker described the problem of finding a meaningful use for his life after war… ‘The thing is,’ he wrote, ‘there’s no place to go. Not just in this lousy little town. In general. My life, I mean. It’s almost like I got killed over in Nam… Hard to describe… Feels like I’m still in deep shit.’” Bowker was one of the people that was left with deep emotional holes that made life after war hard for him. The title of the book describes a theme; The Things They Carried Stay with them and are still part of their everyday lives, its not just what they physically carried, it’s a lot about the emotional traumas and advancements they got as result of the war and the things they saw and went through. The first story-- “The Things They Carried”-- goes very in depth about the things they carried physically but touches on the fact that they are carrying emotional stuff as well, “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing-- these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.” The war was more than physical strain and risk, it was a long hard mental game, that took its toll on the men.
Throughout the short stories there is a consistent tone and style to the writing. O’Brien always went in depth on things that usually wouldn’t stand out as very important, but when looked further into, had a deeper meaning that helped build to the case of the struggles and traumas of war and the effects on the men. The tone was always pretty calm and sombre no matter what was happening in the book; the men could be engaged in battle and rather than focusing on the battle scene O’Brien would break down the thoughts racing through his head and the actions of the other men, that also helped build to the trauma factor. It’s hard to describe, but the way O’Brien described situations and the thoughts going through his head impacted the way I viewed the war and what everyone was going through significantly. It was no longer a war where people simply lived or didn’t it became a place where people struggled with themselves and even if they made it out, they still lived a life that Vietnam was very much a part of. O’Brien put in unnecessary details like what occurred when they killed someone that helped the reader see the separation in types of people and how they viewed the situation in Vietnam.
The short story “Speaking of Courage,” helps us-- the reader-- understand just how lost some war veterans feel and how truly f***ed up they are after the war. They feel insignificant and like there is no place for them in the world, just because they went through things that none of us can begin to understand. Each of their experiences are different in some way or another and they know that they are alone in the sense that no one will understand what they went through and how it impacted their lives, whether that be good or bad. “The Man I Killed” is another story that goes in depth about an event in Vietnam and how it will stay with O’Brien forever, he wrote about it twenty years later and it seemed as though it had happened recently. He remembered that moment perfectly and it didn’t necessarily scare him, but it got him thinking-- about what he had done, to whom he had done that to; it wasn’t just a random Vietnamese person, it was someone with a family, a past and a future, someone who didn’t want to be in war but was there because of pride… much like O’Brien himself. This story had a profound effect on me, it made me realize that everyone who died in the war isn’t insignificant, maybe to us they are but they each had their own path and future, they had their own family that loved them like mine loves me. Every single person killed had an effect, maybe not noticeable to us but it was felt and noticed by others. War is just a waste and this brought it to my attention, it made me think about what war is as a whole and it made me uncomfortable at times for sure, because it made me face something I’ve been avoiding.. the inconvenient truth, that war really happened. I think it’s wrong that I avoided the truth and didn’t look into the Vietnam War sooner, because really it has affected us all one way or another. I’m happy that I know what I know now, it made me realize what all these men went through, it made me gain respect for what they still go through. It opened my eyes to real world problems.
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