Curtis H.

Brown

Professor Erin Chamberlain

Introduction to Literature

09 November 2009

“The Things They Carried”: The weight carried by soldiers.

O’Brien’s short story “The Things They Carried” provides a brief glimpse into the world

of the soldier on the battlefield. O’Brien’s story is based upon his own experiences during his

tour in Vietnam, although the location maybe different, the experience of a soldier in combat has

not really differed in any war. O’Brien focuses first on the weight of the actual equipment that

an infantryman is required to carry to successfully complete his assigned mission. Soldiers in

combat carry many things with them, and O’Brien details some of these in his narrative.

Generally soldiers carry the person who they have been before entering a combat zone, then they

add on the fear of violence and their need to cope with that experience, and finally the last

burden the soldier carries is the change from who they were, to who they are after surviving war.

Infantrymen in Vietnam, and nearly every conflict that has ever been fought, are young

men between the ages of 18-25 years old. They are leaving their homes and traveling around the

world to face in combat other young men of the same age. The military’s training program is

designed to break the individual down and rebuild them as a soldier. Even with this process the

soldier carries with them their own life experiences. O’Brien introduces us to First Lieutenant

(1LT) Jimmy Cross. 1LT Cross spent his time thinking often of Martha, the girl back home.

1LT Cross “carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in

New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping.” (322). Surrounded

by his soldiers and the foreign land of Vietnam 1LT Cross had a need to remember the girl back

home. This is the 1LT’s attempt to maintain who he was in the face of where he is now. This
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weight is added to his duties as the leader for his soldiers. 1LT Cross attempts to balance who he

was with who he is, by keeping time for moments to remember life outside of the war. “In the

late afternoon, after a day’s march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen,

unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light

pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New

Hampshire. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there.”

(322). 1LT Cross fights to remember who he was. The romantic camping trips become his way

to hold who he was, to where he is now. 1LT Cross is settled in for the night, carrying the

weight of his past and attempts to balance this weight with his responsibilities of his present

time, “At dusk, he would carefully return the letters to his rucksack. Slowly, a bit distracted, he

would get up and move among his men, checking the perimeter, then at full dark he would return

to his hole and watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin.” (323). 1LT Cross longs for

his former innocence, and this burden is measured through Martha. He wonders about her

virginity, or a better understanding, he wonders about her innocence and his. The weight of his

innocent past is carried in him, and within his rucksack that he wears throughout the day’s

march.

The weight of who the soldiers were, and their desire to remain that same person adds to

the physical weight they actually carry. 1LT Cross carries Martha’s letters which “weighed 10

ounces” (323), his soldiers also carry similar loads as reminders of who they were. O’Brien

describes the 1LT Cross’ soldiers, and the weight of their reminders of who they were. “Norman

Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an

illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father, who taught Sunday

school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. As a hedge against bad times, however, Kiowa also

carried his grandmother’s distrust of the white man, his grandfather’s old hunting hatchet.” (323-
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324). These items are reminders, talismans, designed to keep the fear of the individual soldier at

a distance. They are each man’s attempt to remember who they were before arriving in Vietnam

and war. These burdens add to the soldier’s weight that they carry and also reflect the innocence

of the men. Kiley’s comic books seem out of place when compared to the other items that the

soldiers must carry. “As PFCs or Spec 4s, most of them were common grunts and carried the

standard M-16 gas operated assault rifle. The weapon weighed 7.5 pounds unloaded, 8.2 pounds

with its full 12-round magazine. Depending on numerous factors, such as topography and

psychology, the riflemen carried anywhere from 12 to 20 magazines, usually in cloth bandoliers,

adding on another 8.4 pounds at minimum, 14 pounds at maximum.” (325). The talismans

physically add little weight to the soldiers’ burden, but O’Brien describes the psychology of the

soldiers themselves. One of 1LT Cross’ soldiers, Ted Lavender is described as being afraid, and

because of this he carries the additional weight of “six or seven ounces of premium dope, which

for him was a necessity.” (323) and had “carried 34 rounds when he was shot and killed outside

of Than Khe, and he went down under an exceptional burden, more than 20 pounds of

ammunition, plus the flak jacket and helmet and rations and water and toilet paper and

tranquilizers and all the rest, plus the unweighed fear.” (325-326). This unweighed fear is a

burden which grows with the soldiers the longer they survive in combat. Their burdens, physical

and psychological, grow with their missions. O’Brien describes these burdens as “They all

carried ghosts.” (328). These men would share their burden and fear among each other as

equally as possible. 1LT Cross receives an order to clear a complex of enemy tunnels. “…there

were 17 men in the platoon, and whoever drew the number 17 would strip off his gear and crawl

in headfirst with a flashlight and Lieutenant Cross’s .45-caliber pistol.” (328). This fear is

shared among the soldiers who “fan out as security. They would sit down or kneel, not facing

the hole, listening to the ground beneath them, imagining cobwebs and ghosts, whatever was
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down there.” (328). Their burdens are added to while waiting, “…the men smoked and drank

Kool-Aid, not talking much, feeling sympathy for Lee Strunk but also feeling the luck of the

draw. You win some, you lose some, said Mitchell Sanders, and sometimes you settle for a rain

check. It was a tired line and no one laughed.” (329). The soldiers burden of fear has become so

much a part of who they are now, that even their humor is colored by that fear.

The burdens the soldiers carry in their current fight for not only survival, but also to

remain who they are will change who they are forever. The struggle to remain always vigilant

about security and mission does not allow for a soldier to remain the person he was before. 1LT

Cross is the leader and providing security as well but “Vaguely, he was aware of how quiet the

day was, the sullen paddies, yet he could not bring himself to worry about matters of security.

He was beyond that. He was just a kid at war, in love. He was twenty-two years old. He couldn’t

help it.” (329). 1LT Cross knows that he is just a kid, but also he is more than that. The platoons

missions add to that burden by reacting to orders from higher commands. “They searched the

villages without knowing what to look for, nor caring, kicking over jars of rice, frisking children

and old men, blowing tunnels, sometimes setting fires and sometimes not, then forming up and

moving on…” (332). These soldiers acted upon the orders of others, without knowing why, and

to their burden of equipment and talismans they also “carried their own lives. The pressures

were enormous.” (332). The soldiers often discarded equipment through the marches of the day,

knowing that “the great American war chest—the fruits of sciences, the smoke stacks, the

canneries, the arsenals at Hartford, the Minnesota forests, the machine shops, the vast fields of

corn and wheat—they carried like freight trains; they carried it on their backs and shoulders—

and for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the

single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.” (332). This

understanding of the reality of their never-ending physical burden does not prepare the soldiers
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for the death of one of their own. The loss of their platoon member, Ted Lavender, shocks all of

them, “while Kiowa explained how Lavender died, Lieutenant Cross found himself trembling.

He tried not to cry.” and “He felt shame. He hated himself. He had loved Martha more than his

men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to

carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war.” (332). 1LT Cross acknowledges that

the death of one of the soldiers he is responsible for will be carried for the rest of the war, but

what he does not know is that weight will remain with him throughout his life. The burden of

authority forces 1LT Cross to acknowledge his reality and to acknowledge that “In part, he was

grieving for Ted Lavender, but mostly it was for Martha, and for himself, because she belonged

to another world, which was not quite real.” (333). 1LT Cross, and all of the soldiers, also carry

“…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. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely

restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden

of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. They

carried their reputation. They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing.

Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.” (335-336). 1LT Cross changes

who he is because “his obligation was not to be loved but to lead. He would dispense with love;

it was not now a factor.” (339). This change, once completed, is the greatest burden of all, for

once the individual is lost the soldier remains, and the fear is that the individual will not return.

O’Brien’s story brings to light the burdens that soldiers carry into combat. The intangible

weight of who they were, the fear of where they are, and the guilt of the fear of what they have

done to survive. The story does not show the fight that those soldiers carry into their future, but

it does acknowledge the burden that they will carry for the rest of their tour in combat. These
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soldiers were not the first to experience the burden of war, nor the last, but with the innocence of

youth they entered combat, surviving in spite of their past and fear of their present, they carry

with them the guilt for living, and for remembering their fallen brothers.
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Work Cited

O’Brien, Tim. “The Things They Carried.” Literature A Pocket Anthology Fourth Edition. Ed. R.

S. Gwynn. Longman: Penguin Academics, 2009. 322-339. Print.