"The Things They Carried"

I think the most vivid passage in O'Brien's essay "The Things They Carried" is the passage on page 21 where he talks about the intangibles that the soldiers carry; grief, terror, love, longing, and the "fear of blushing." O'Brien says, "It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment. They crawled into tunnels and walked point and advanced under fire." He ends the passage with, "So easy, really. To go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world." I love this passage because it evokes so much sympathy from the reader, and, at least for me, makes me generate all of these images in my head of the men trudging along, wanting so much to just give up, but not letting themselves because of the fear of guilt and shame and dishonor. For the soldiers, the "cause" had evolved into a pure fear of embarrassment.

The main character in the essay is First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, who wants more than anything for his unrequited love of a girl named Martha to be returned. He wanted the letters she wrote to him to be love letters, rather than friendly and seemingly trivial. He wanted to be able to think back on the times they were together and be able to interpret all of her words and gestures as romantic and caring, rather than friendly and sometimes awkward. One of Cross' men, Ted Lavender dies and Cross blames himself for the death, believing his obsession with Martha caused him to lose focus. After Lavender dies Cross burns all of Martha's letters. He still loves her, but I think now he hates himself for loving her, even though he can't help it.

My favorite object from the story is the thumb that Mitchell Sanders gives to Norman Bowker. Sanders finds a dead Vietnamese boy and decides to cut off the thumb, joking that there's a "moral." The scene is pretty disgusting, but I think that we don't have such a reaction because we think about it in terms of the scenery. The soldiers, at this point, have only experienced death and destruction and hatred and loss and longing all the time for however long they've been at war, and so we accept their sometimes barbaric behavior because we think that they aren't neccessarily themselves. Tim O'Brien even eludes to the fact that they're not really in the world, when he says that the chopper would carry your off to the world. They're sort of in their own personal hells, and we can't begin to judge anything that they do because we have no idea what it's like to be where they are.