About this Novel

The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried, published in 1990, was a runaway hit and is included in many high school
and university curricula. O’Brien has called the form of the work “meta-fiction,” indicating that it is
neither non-fiction nor quite fiction. The work is made up of 22 stories or chapters that are loosely
linked by a common experience of the same events and many of the same characters. This technique
is familiar from James Joyce’s seminal The Dead. Despite the stories’ commonalities they cover a
wide spread of psychological and geographical territory, from triumph to post-war recovery from
trauma, from Vietnam to farm towns in Minnesota.

O’Brien has described himself as an obsessive writer, and his attention to detail and structure makes
itself felt in all of his books. The Things They Carried is achingly, minutely, painfully detailed. The
story after which the collection is named describes the objects soldiers brought with them, in a
manner akin to calling out the names of the dead. It is an elegy, but a senseless, painful elegy that is
for things as much as it is for people.

The book is plainly anti-war. The fictional version of O’Brien, the narrator, writes that he could
imagine himself fighting in World War II, so he is not entirely a pacifist. But fighting in Vietnam
seemed wrong. The character lacks the moral courage to run away to Canada. In this sense The
Things They Carried is a straightforward tragedy, with the main flaw of an otherwise likeable main
character causing his downfall. All of the horrors of the book – killing, having friends killed,
boredom punctuated by fear – follow from this decision. 

The book is stylistically unique not only because of its sui generis status regarding fiction/non-
fiction and novel/short stories, but also because of its voice. There is only one “I,” the first-person
narration of the fictional Tim O’Brien. But an omniscient narration gets into the minds of many of
the other characters as well, and we only read metaphors they would think, only have access to
words they would know.

One point of view The Things They Carried pointedly denies the reader is the Vietnamese
perspective. None of the Vietnamese characters have names; O’Brien is forced to invent a backstory
for the man he killed, because he knows nothing about him. With this narrative technique, O’Brien
suggests the unknowability of the other, in this case a racial other, a strategy which is rooted in
French existential literature such as Camus’ The Stranger. In one story, a visiting girlfriend goes on
what is essentially a sightseeing trip down to a village controlled by the enemy. O’Brien suggests
that any narrative from the Vietnamese viewpoint would be as futile and possibly dangerous as her
little outing.

After the story The Things They Carried was published in Esquire, it received the National Magazine
Award in 1987 and was included in the 1987 Best American Short Stories edited by John Updike. It
has since been anthologized in many collections having to do with war, national memory, and
Vietnam. O’Brien went on to write short stories for the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and the New
Yorker, among other publications. Other stories from The Things They Carried were published in
The Massachusetts Review, Granta, Gentleman’s Quarterly and Playboy. Despite his celebrity and
his talent in bringing his fiction very close to his life experience, O’Brien remains a private author;
he wears his signature baseball cap in most photographs. Similarly, the reader is granted a certain
amount of access to the fictional O’Brien. We live his struggles with him, but there is always a part
that remains private.

Short Summary
The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried is a collection of twenty-two stories, or chapters. All focus on the Alpha
Company and the fate of its soldiers after they return home to America. A character named Tim
O’Brien (same name as the author) narrates most of the stories.

In “The Things They Carried,” the Alpha Company is mobilized to fight in the Vietnam War. The
soldiers carry goods necessary to their survival as well personal items. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross
carries letters and photos from a female friend named Martha, and spends most of his time mooning
over her. The first casualty for the company is Ted Lavender, shot dead while relieving himself.
Cross blames himself for the death because he thinks he was too busy thinking about Martha to
properly take care of his troops. He burns her letters and photographs and decides to be a better
leader.

In “Love,” Jimmy goes to visit the narrator, Tim O’Brien, in his home in Massachusetts after the
war. Cross relates that he bumped into Martha after she got home, and that he still loves her although
she doesn’t love him back. He has never forgiven himself for Lavender’s death, but pleads with
O’Brien to portray him as a great leader if the writer ever writes about their experiences.

“Spin” is made up of a collection of recollections of the ordinary things soldiers do when they are at
war, such as playing chess games. O’Brien compares the war to a Ping-Pong ball, saying that one
can spin it in many different directions. He is now a 43-year-old writer who only writes war stories.
His daughter thinks he should find a happier topic, but O’Brien keeps replaying the gruesome war
scenes over and over in his mind. 

In “On The Rainy River,” O’Brien describes the decision of whether or not to go to war after
receiving his draft card. He had just graduated college and planned to go to Harvard for graduate
school. He was split between the instinct to run, and the instinct to do what everyone expected: go to
war. He took the car up to the Canadian border, and a friendly hotel owner rowed him along a river
right up to Canada. In the end he couldn’t bring himself to jump out of the boat. He cried in the boat,
paid Elroy for the room, and drove home. It is a hard story for O’Brien to tell, he writes, because it
shows that he was a coward and that he made the wrong choice.

In “Enemies,” two members of the company, Lee Strunk and Dave Jensen, get into a fistfight over a
missing penknife. Jensen wins the fight and breaks Strunk’s nose. Jensen borrows a pistol and uses it
to break his own nose. Then he asks Strunk if they are “square.” Strunk says yes and laughs at his
new friend -- because he was the one who had stolen Jensen’s knife in the first place. In “Friends,”
Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk make a pact that if either were seriously injured or crippled, the other
would find a way to kill him. In October Lee Strunk steps on a mortar and loses his leg as a result of
the accident. He is terrified, because he thinks Jensen will kill him. Later the men find out that
Strunk has died, which seems to relieve Jensen of a big burden.
In “How to Tell a True War Story,” Curt Lemon steps on a mortar and is killed. O’Brien has to go
up into a tree to pick out his remains, and one of the other men makes a bad pun on “lemon tree,”
similar to many other morbid jokes the soldiers make throughout the book After Lemon's death, Rat
Kiley writes his sister a long letter to which she never responds. Rat dismisses her as a “dumb
cooze.” O’Brien says this is a true story because such stories are unsentimental, seem too crazy to
believe, or else never end. Another “true” story O’Brien tells is about a water buffalo the company
tortured after Lemon died. It seems incomprehensible, so it must be true, he writes.

After Curt Lemon was killed, and O’Brien describes having a hard time mourning him in “The
Dentist.” Lemon was a macho guy, but one day a dentist came in on a helicopter to check up on the
men’s teeth. Lemon was so afraid that when it was his turn he passed out in the dentist’s chair. Then
he was so ashamed that he woke up the dentist in the middle of the night, insisted that he had a
toothache, and made the dentist remove a perfectly good tooth.

O’Brien retells a story that he first heard from Rat Kiley in “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong.”
Before joining up with Alpha, Kiley was stationed at a medical detachment near the village of Tra
Bong along with a special force called the Green Berets. A young man named Mark Fossie imported
in his American girlfriend. Fossie got upset when she didn't return to their quarters one night. It turns
out she wasn’t cheating on him, but was on ambush duty with the Green Berets. Later, Fossie finds
her in the Green Beret encampment wearing a necklace made of human tongues. In the end, she
becomes a killer and disappears into the mountains by herself. 

Henry Dobbins keeps his girlfriends’ stockings wrapped around his neck for good luck, and credits
them with the fact that he never gets shot. Then, in “Stockings,” his girlfriend says she wants to
break up. He continues to wear the stockings around his neck all the same. In “Church,” the
company sets up camp at a pagoda where a few monks still remain. The monks especially like Henry
Dobbins, who talks about possibly joining the order and gives the monks some chocolate and
peaches as a parting gift.

In “The Man I Killed,” Tim O’Brien surveys the man he killed, repeating the same details over and
over: He has thin, arched eyebrows, like a woman; he is thin, with a concave chest, like a scholar.
O’Brien imagines that the man was always afraid to go to war, was possibly in love, was possibly a
scholar. Kiowa tries to get O’Brien to stop staring at the corpse, with no success.

In “Ambush” O’Brien’s nine-year-old daughter, Kathleen, asks her father if he has ever killed
anyone. Of course not, O’Brien tells her; he thinks when she is a grown-up she will understand
better. In “Style,” his company enters a burnt-down compound full of dead bodies, and the only
living person they find is a young girl, dancing. Azar thinks she is performing some strange rite.
Dobbins thinks she is dancing because she likes to dance. 

In “Speaking of Courage,” Norman Bowker returns to his hometown after the war is over. His best
friend is dead and his ex-girlfriend has married someone else, so he has no one to talk to about why
he failed to get a Silver Star medal for courage. He imagines a conversation with his father about the
subject; the reason he didn’t get the medal was that he let his comrade Kiowa die in a shit field after
Kiowa was shot. Bowker stops for a burger, drives around his hometown lake, and stops to admire
the sunset. In 1975, writes O’Brien in “Notes,” he received a letter from Bowker telling the story that
he retells in “Speaking of Courage.” O’Brien wants to emphasize that he made up the part about
Bowker failing to save Kiowa and worrying about why he didn’t get the Silver Star. The letter shook
O’Brien, who had congratulated himself on adjusting so well, transitioning straight from Vietnam to
Harvard. In 1978, Bowker hanged himself. 

All 18 soldiers in the company search for Kiowa’s body in the shit field in “In the Field.” Bowker
eventually locates Kiowa’s body. Cross mentally rehearses different letters he might write to
Kiowa’s father; perhaps he will take responsibility for the death, perhaps not. Instead of writing the
letter to Kiowa’s father, he decides, he’ll play golf. In “Good Form,” O’Brien, the 43-year-old
writer/narrator, says that “story truth”, i.e. what happens in the story, is more important than
“happening truth,” i.e. what happened in reality. A few months after writing “In the Field,” O’Brien
returns to Vietnam with his daughter, Kathleen, who is ten. In “Field Trip,” she doesn’t understand
what the war was about, nor why her father insists on traveling to a funny-smelling place (the shit
field). O’Brien buries a pair of Kiowa’s moccasins where his friend died, and tries to say goodbye.

O’Brien blames Bobby Jorgenson, a young medic who replaced Rat Kiley with the company, for
almost letting him die of shock after getting shot. In “The Ghost Soldiers,” O’Brien enlists Azar’s
help to get revenge on Jorgenson. They make noises outside Jorgenson’s encampment to make him
think he is being attacked. Jorgenson is terrified, but then he figures out it's just O’Brien, and the two
say they are “even.” “Night Life” is the account, culled secondhand from another soldier, of how Rat
Kiley went beserk and had to leave the company. The strain of the war was too much for him and he
shot himself in the foot to be discharged from the army.

In “The Lives of the Dead” O’Brien writes that the purpose of stories is to save lives. He had been in
love with a nine-year-old, Linda, when he was also nine. They went on a date, and then she died of a
brain tumor. Afterwards, he made dates with her in his dreams, and they went ice-skating together.
The purpose of stories, writes O’Brien, is to make people like Linda or the soldiers killed in Vietnam
live again.

Character List
The Things They Carried
Lieutenant Jimmy Cross

The 24-year-old is in charge of a company fighting in Vietnam. He is in love with Martha, and
carries pictures of her and letters from her around until he burns them.

Martha

Martha is a few years younger than Jimmy Cross, does not love the soldier back but writes him
letters and sends him mementos anyway. She is a poet and dreamer and university student who loves
the work of Virginia Woolf.

Ted Lavender

Lavender is shot and killed while taking a pee. Before then he is the most frightened of the soldiers,
and carries a supply of drugs to keep him calm.
Kiowa

Kiowa is a Native American member of the company who is always slightly suspicious of white
people. He carries around a Bible, which he uses as a pillow, and mocassins for good luck. He is
Tim O'Brien's best friend in the company.

Norman Bowker

Bowker is a gentle soldier in the company who carries the thumb of a Vietnamese boy for good luck.
He ultimately cannot bear not having been killed in the war and commits suicide when he goes
home.

Henry Dobbins

Dobbins is a fat member of the company who carries extra rations of dessert.

Rat Kiley

Kiley is a member of the company who carries comic books and is a great storyteller. He is also a
medic who treats O'Brien when he is shot. Kiley eventually shoots himself to be discharged.

Curt Lemon's sister

We never find out her name. The one role she has is to not reply to a letter about her brother's death.

Tim O'Brien

This is the narrator of the book, who has the same name of the author, but is not the same person.
Some stories are told from his point of view, others are told in the third person.

Curt Lemon

Lemon is one of the only characters who enjoys the feeling of danger. He is killed when he steps on
a landmine.

Azar

Azar is a foot soldier who seems to like war for war's sake, has a cruel side, and makes fun of the
way a Vietnamese girl dances.

Mitchell Sanders

Sanders is a more experienced soldier who controls the radio. He is one of the few to blame Cross
for Lavender's death.

Bobby Jorgenson
An inexperienced, green soldier, Jorgenson fails to help O'Brien in time when he is wounded.
O'Brien vows to get revenge on Jorgenson.

North Vietnamese Soldier

We never learn the names of any Vietnamese people, but this one holds a special place in O'Brien's
imagination. O'Brien has killed him, and fantasizes about what his life might have been like.
Decades later, he still dreams about him.

Linda

O'Brien's young "girlfriend" from elementary school, who dies of a brain tumor. When O'Brien is
trying to decide whether to escape to Canada, he imagines Linda watching him.

Nick Veenhof

Classmate of Linda and "Timmy" (Tim O'Brien) when they were all young.

Lee Strunk

Strunk is best friends with Dave Jensen, and the two have an agreement that if either is injured badly
the other will shoot to kill them. When part of Strunk's leg is blown off by a landmine he is terrified
that Jensen will kill him.

Dave Jensen

Best friends with Lee Strunk, the two are almost unidentifiable from one another as characters.

Kathleen

Kathleen is Tim O'Brien's daughter who tries to persuade him to be less obsessed with the war. She
accompanies him on a trip back to Vietnam.

Eddie Diamond

Diamond is a soldier assigned to the same medical detachment as Rat Kiley before the latter joins
the Alpha Company.

Elroy Berdahl

An elderly man who owns the lodge on the border with Canada. He knows that O'Brien is there
trying to decide whether to evade the draft, but does not push the matter or make the boy talk about
the decision.

Sally

Norman Bowker's ex-girlfriend.

Max

Norman Bowker's best friend, who is dead.

Major Themes
The Things They Carried
Courage

Courage and the cult of manhood are familiar themes from earlier war novels and stories, but
O'Brien turns the concept completely on its head. In "On a Rainy River," he describes how he forced
himself into the "courageous" act of going to war through shaming himself by imagining what others
would think of him if he did not go. Once in Vietnam, the idea of courage becomes laughable.
Everyone jumps at the slightest noise, everyone fears for their life. Macho characters like Curt
Lemon seem absurd to O'Brien, because O'Brien believes no one is actually courageous. It is a
physical impossibility.

Sexual Longing

The Vietnam War was mostly a man's war, and this book is populated mostly by men. But the
adolescent soldiers are obsessed by sex, and miss their virgin girlfriends desperately. The one soldier
who ships in his girlfriend sees the relationship go horribly sour, so he is sexually frustrated, too. Yet
the promise of women is always in the air; one of the draws of going to Japan are the cute nurses
there. In fact, nurses are the ultimate sex symbol, because they are one of the few sexual outlets open
to the men. But they are scarce, and sexual longing becomes just another source of tension.

Burdens

The single uniting theme of this book lies in the burdens that soldiers bear, both physical and
emotional. The title points this out, and most of the stories -- in one way or another -- are about
burdens the war forces upon the soldiers. The burdens almost always seem too much for them to
carry. Jimmy Cross is responsible for the lives of all of his soldiers, but he is unable to keep all of
them alive. The soldiers carry drugs and lucky pantyhose and Bibles but most of these fail to keep
them safe. Many of their burdens seem primal, almost biblical. "Well, that's Nam," says one
character. "Garden of Evil. Over here, man, every sin's real fresh and original" (76). Part of the
reason the burdens seem unbearable, the evil so fresh, is that the men are so young. They have many
more years to carry the same burdens. Tim O'Brien must carry the burden of having killed a man for
the rest of his life.

Religion/Superstition

Religion is something some of the soldiers carry around with them, like a talisman that may have the
ability to save them. But the most religious character, Kiowa, ends up dead, face-down in a shit field.
Similarly horrific things happen to the non-religious, too. War and death seem to make no
distinction. The value of religion seems not to be preservative, but rather as an indicator of how
decent the men may be while still alive. Especially in “Church,” the two most decent men turn out to
be the company’s two most religious men: Henry Dobbins and Kiowa. As for superstitions, most of
the soldiers believe in them. O’Brien writes that it was difficult not to be superstitious in a country as
"spooky" as Vietnam. The superstitions give the soldiers some illusion of control. By adhering to
certain traditions they think they can control their own fates. This, like the promise of religion in the
book, turns out to be an illusion.

Escapism

The Vietnam War was the least popular war of all time among the American public. But it was also
deeply unpopular among the soldiers themselves, most of whom were drafted. More than 50 percent
of troops engaged in active disobedience, much politically motivated. Discontent is threaded through
O’Brien’s account of the war, although his comrades don’t seem particularly political. Instead, they
are escapist. They play checkers, they smoke dope, they watch movies, and they masturbate to Jane
Fonda. They will do anything to take their mind off war. The very premise of The Things They
Carried involves the the things the soldiers are forced to carry, many against their will, as well as the
small talismans or entertainments the soldiers hang onto to engage in escapism from a terrible
situation. For O’Brien, writing is a form of escapism. As he writes in the last story in the book, he
thinks and hopes that through this particular form of escape he can make the impossible happen. In
this form of escape he can make the dead live again.

Innocence

The Vietnam War both defiles and preserves the innocence of those who participate. Most of the
men at war are young, not yet twenty. Many have peachy skin and blonde hair. But O'Brien is
relentless about pointing out that although they are young and innocent, they are killers. They kill on
command, which makes their crimes seem somehow mitigated. But there is also the sense that they
are in a primordial jungle of sorts and are somehow inventing evil anew each day. Perhaps the
clearest parable of the loss of innocence is the story "The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong", in
which a young blonde soldier's girlfriend is brought over from America only to become intoxicated
with Vietnam and become a killer.

Revenge

In the quagmire of an incomprehensible war, one imperative is clear-cut: revenge. Revenge is not
trained on the enemy. The soldiers have little to no sense of what the enemy has done “wrong.” So
they wreak revenge on one another. The central motivation of “Enemies” is the standoff between
two friends, one of whom seeks physical revenge. Revenge seems to be one of the few emotions
other than shame that drive the young O’Brien when he is a soldier. “The Ghost Soldiers” is all
about the revenge O’Brien wreaks on a young medic who he thinks didn’t treat him in time when he
was wounded. (One of the most gripping qualities of the book is the narrator’s honesty about his
own shortcomings.) His greed for revenge is fueled by an unattractive sense of his own worth. It
blinds him, distorts his morals, and makes him temporarily seem a monster in the reader’s eyes. But
he does not flinch at recalling his actions, nor does he decline to tell them to the reader.

Quotes and Analysis

The Things They Carried
"A dark theater, he remembered, and the movie was Bonnie and Clyde, and Martha wore a tweed
skirt, and during the final scene, when he touched her knee, she turned and looked at him in a sad,
sober way that made him pull his hand back..."

"The Things They Carried"

Lt. Jimmy Cross is obsessed by memories of Martha, who writes him letters but is not exactly his
sweetheart. This is physically the closest he ever gets to her, although he dreams about her the whole
time he is in Vietnam, and possibly it is his laxity that gets Lavender killed. Tweed is an appropriate
fabric for Martha, who was always very proper. The sadness has to do with a "secret" that Martha
keeps, possibly that she has been raped. She always holds herself distant, physically and
emotionally.

"I tried to will myself overboard.

I gripped the edge of the boat and leaned forward and thought, now."

I did try. It just wasn't possible."

"On the Rainy River"

This is the climactic point of the story in which Tim O'Brien has decided to flee the war and run
away to Canada. A friendly man has rowed him all the way across the river at the border, but
O'Brien just cannot get out of the boat and swim the rest of the way. He imagines the FBI after him,
he imagines the disappointment of his parents and of his girlfriends. And he succumbs to
embarrassment. This is why he goes to war, and it is the book's signature moment of cowardice.
O'Brien always regrets the decision.

"Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you
can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when
memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

"Spin"

O'Brien constantly questions what it is to be a writer, a teller of war stories. He worries about
honesty, about what happened as opposed to what makes a good, true story. His daughter, Kathleen,
implores him to give up the topic of the war, to find something else to fixate on. She wants him to
find a happy story. But O'Brien thinks that stories have the power to help people escape from
repeating the past. Or at the very least to ease his own troubled conscience.

"He lay face-up in the center of the trail, a slim, dead, almost dainty young man. He had bony legs, a
narrow waist, long shapely fingers. His chest was sunken and poorly muscled -- a scholar, maybe.
His wrists were the wrists of a child."

"The Man I Killed"

This is the description of the man Tim O'Brien killed with a hand grenade. The details all mark the
observer as a humane man, a man who recognizes the humanity in others. The dead Vietnamese man
is not a casualty, but another human being who had a story that can be imagined. The details of his
child-like figure show O'Brien's guilt. Although the soldier finds ammunition on the dead man, he
still feels he shouldn't have killed him.

"She had crossed to the other side. She was part of the land. She was wearing her culottes, her pink
sweater, and a necklace of human tongues. She was dangerous. She was ready for the kill."

"Sweetheart of the Tra Bong"

Mary Anne was the girlfriend of a soldier who he had shipped over to Vietnam to accompany him.
She started out as an innocent blonde, wearing culottes and a pink sweater. She was visibly
feminine. But she soon became fascinated with killing, fell in with a group of Green Berets, and
vanished into the countryside. She is a symbol of what Vietnam could do to a person. It could
completely change their mind about everything. She abandoned her boyfriend for the country, for
killing.

"A while later, when we moved out of the hamlet, she was still dancing. 'Probably some weird
ritual,' Azar said, but Henry Dobbins looked back and said no, the girl just liked to dance."

"Style"

For one soldier, Azar, the dancing girl symbolizes the unknowability and otherness of the
Vietnamese. Her village was just burned, her family was killed, and she is dancing. Azar finds it
strange, exotic. But Dobbins, who is the more sympathetic character, sees the girls' innate
humanness and tries to understand her as he would understand an American, as someone with a will
and tastes.

"Kathleen had just turned ten, and this trip was a kind of birthday present, showing her the world,
offering a small piece of her father's history."

"Field Trip"

In this ironically titled story -- a trip to Vietnam is hardly as innocuous as a day out at the natural
history museum -- O'Brien returns to Vietnam with his daughter. It feels like the return to the scene
of a crime. The trip does not help ease the author's obsession, but it does help Kathleen to
understand. Her father wants her to be more worldly than he was when he shipped out to Vietnam.

"'Easy does it,' he told me, 'just a side wound, no problem unless you're pregnant.' He ripped off the
compress, applied a fresh one, and told me to clamp it in place with my fingers. 'Press hard,' he said.
'Don't worry about the baby.'

"The Ghost Soldiers"

O'Brien gets shot and wounded, and Rat Kiley, his best friend the medic, takes care of him in this
quotation. It is representative of the soldiers' attitude to death. They are both terrified and try not to
take it too seriously. Kiley uses humor to try to help his friend deal with the scare.

"Before the chopper came, there was time for goodbyes. Lieutenant Cross went over and said he'd
vouch that it was an accident. Henry Dobbins and Azar gave him a stack of comic books for hospital
reading. Everybody stood in a little circle, feeling bad about it, trying to cheer him up with bullshit
about the great night life in Japan.

"Night Life"

After a while, the war gets to Rat Kiley and drives him crazy enough to shoot himself so he will get
shipped to a hospital in Japan. Cross' attitude represents the solidarity of the soldiers: they will do
anything for one another. The soldiers always joke about the cute nurses in Japan, but what Kiley
has done is actually the ultimate transgression in his circle: He has given into fear, and everyone can
feel his shame.

"But in a story I can steal her soul. I can revive, at least briefly, that which is absolute and
unchanging. It's not the surface that matters, it's the identity that lives inside. In a story, miracles can
happen. Linda can smile and sit up. She can reach out, touch my wrist, and say 'Timmy, stop
crying.'"

"The Lives of the Dead"

Throughout the book, O'Brien returns to the story of Linda, his elementary school sweetheart who
died of a brain tumor. She, like those who died in Vietnam, died a senseless death. By remembering
her and by telling stories, O'Brien tries to revive the dead and to impose some order and sense onto
his own life.

Summary and Analysis of "The Things They Carried" and

"Love"
The Things They Carried

Summary of “The Things They Carried”

The first story in the collection introduces the cast of characters that reappear throughout the book.
The cast is made up of the soldiers of the Alpha Company, led by First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross. The
platoon is deployed to fight in the Vietnam War. The narrator, O’Brien, is one of the soldiers, and he
distinguishes one soldier from another in this first story by the items that they carry.

O’Brien lists the things the soldiers carry -- both physical and emotional. All carry basic military
goods and personal items: provisions, ammunition, and special ponchos that they may be wrapped in
if they die. Army slang for carrying goods is “humping” them. Aside from the basic goods, explains
O’Brien, all of the men “hump” slightly different things. One wears his girlfriend’s stockings around
his neck, another carries a bible, another carries a slingshot, another comic books, another condoms.
Cross carries letters from a gray-eyed English literature student named Martha. He is in love with
her, but he is obsessed with whether or not she is a virgin. He remembers taking her out on a date,
trying to put a hand on her knee, and being rebuffed. He wishes he had carried her up to her room,
and “kept his hand on her knee all night.” After she sends him a pebble he keeps it in his mouth and
imagines it is her tongue. As lieutenant, O’Brien points out, Cross “carries” responsibility for the
lives of all of his men. Cross considers this a heavy burden.

The first casualty for the company is Ted Lavender, a soldier who is shot dead outside Than Khe.
O’Brien recounts that he hits the ground solidly, fast, weighed down by all the things he was
carrying. He was more afraid of the enemy than most soldiers, so he was carrying more ammunition
than was required. He had gone to relieve himself while his comrades were blowing up a tunnel.
Kiowa, a part native-American soldier in the company becomes obsessed by the death of his
comrade. “Boom-down,” is how he describes the sound of the death to anyone who will listen.
“Dead weight” puns O’Brien. 

Kiowa is horrified by his comrade’s death. But it does serve to make him better enjoy being alive.
As he settles down to sleep that night with his Bible as a pillow, he enjoys the smell of the glue and
paper and the feeling of his own living body.

Lavender is one of the only soldiers who dies in combat. The soldiers rarely see enemy fire -- mostly
they sit around and play checkers. All of the men walk around in a state of constant boredom and
constant tension. They are aware that they might die at any moment, which drives them crazy. But
O’Brien describes how they try to cover their fear with tough talk about the “pussies” who shoot off
their own fingers and toes to be discharged from the army. They all secretly long to do the same,
explains the narrator, but are too embarrassed to try. 

Meanwhile, the person hit hardest by Lavender’s death is Cross, who essentially blames himself. He
feels he may have a hard time focusing on the war because he is so wrapped up in thoughts of
Martha, and may have not taken the proper precautions, thereby letting Lavender's death happen.
The morning after Lavender is killed, Cross burns the letters he has received from Martha. Then he
burns his photographs of her. But still he feels responsible. Setting the photographs on fire strikes
him as a futile gesture.

But even as he beats himself up over Lavender’s death, Cross can’t help returning to his obsessive
thoughts about Martha. He convinces himself that he no longer loves her or cares whether she is a
virgin. He feels both love and hate for her. He resolves to think less about Martha and more about
his men, resolves to pull his raggedy crew together and make them abandon the equipment they
don’t need so that they will be able to travel lighter, decides he should be less of a friend and more of
a leader. 

Analysis

The author uses a familiar and ancient trope in this first short story, which provides the title for the
collection. Authors as far back as Homer described soldiers going into battle by naming the things
that they carried: goatskins filled with water, spears, locks of hair from their beloved ones. O’Brien
updates this literary strategy. His characters carry the modern implements of war. But the feeling
evoked is similar: static lists make the characters seem already dead, prematurely mourned. The lists
are like wills.

The first story is told in third person, with some insight into the mind of Jimmy Cross. This
movement between perspectives is called free indirect discourse, and serves to distance the reader
from the soldiers. The reader sees them as if they were in a movie, moving slowly across an
unfamiliar landscape, carrying their various burdens. The ancient movement of men going to war is
juxtaposed with the rough, modern language of the soldiers themselves. They use slang, swear at
each other, and try to diffuse the feeling of danger and helplessness by describing death as being
“zapped” or “torn up.”

Often dramatic narratives are driven by conflict -- frequently two characters butting heads. A war
narrative needs none of these traditional sources of pressure because the war itself provides the
conflict. O’Brien describes the atmosphere as tense at all times. The men know they might die at any
moment. When the inevitable happens and a soldier is killed, extra tension stems from the fact that
Cross knows he is responsible. Guilt becomes the most pervasive emotion of all. 

Summary of “Love”

Years after the war, Jimmy Cross goes to visit the narrator, Tim O’Brien, at O’Brien’s home in
Massachusetts. They look at pictures, reminisce, drink coffee, and smoke cigarettes. Cross says he
has never forgiven himself for Lavender’s death. He worries about how O’Brien might portray him
if he ever writes a story about Cross. His former leader asks O’Brien to describe him as a brave and
handsome man if he ever decides to put any of their experiences together into writing.

Cross shows O’Brien the photo of Martha playing volleyball. The image is the exact same one that
he burned after Lavender’s death (see “The Things They Carried”). O’Brien is surprised to see it, so
Cross explains how he came to have another copy. He had run into Martha after the war. She had
never married, had trained as a nurse, and gone on Lutheran missions to the Third World. She was
unreceptive when Cross confessed that he had always loved her. When the conversation took a
slightly sexual turn, she shut her eyes and rocked back and forth, seeming very disturbed. She gave
him another copy of the photo of her playing volleyball and told him “not to burn this one.”

Analysis

The shift from the first story to “Love” is one of the most jarring in the book for the reader who
expects a traditional novel or a collection of short stories. In a novel, it is unlikely that there would
be a shift in geography (Vietnam to Massachusetts), time (many years) and narrator (third person
omniscient to first person) all at once. In a collection of short stories, on the other hand, two stories
would not normally share the same characters, themes and events. “The Things They Carried” jars
by doing all of these things.

“Love” serves to tie up the narrative strings of “The Things They Carried,” but also to call into
question the whole process of storytelling. The Things They Carried is as much about why one
would tell stories at all as it is about war. This preoccupation of fiction with its own role is often
called “meta-fiction.” Meta-fiction consciously points to its own status as fiction and anxiously asks
what purpose fiction might serve. In “Love,” when Cross asks that he be portrayed as a hero, there is
an emotional content in the request: the reader feels Cross’ hurt and sorrow that he has not acted as a
hero. But the reader is also forced to wonder: Has O’Brien acceded to his character/friend’s demand?
Or is the fiction in some other way warped or untrue?

Summary and Analysis of “Spin” and “On a Rainy River”

The Things They Carried

Summary of “Spin”

“Spin” is a collection of disjointed memories. Azar, a soldier, gives a crippled boy a chocolate bar.
Mitchell Sanders pries off his own body lice and puts it in an envelope to send to the draft board in
Ohio. Norman Bowker and Henry Dobbins play checkers every night to restore a sense of order into
their lives. Lavender takes too many tranquilizers and says “we’ve got ourselves a nice mellow war
today.” But aside from a few colorful events, O’Brien mostly remembers being bored and
intermittently scared when he was at war.

The war was like a Ping-Pong ball, O’Brien writes: “You can put a fancy spin on it.” He is a 43-
year-old writer. He can’t remember some things about the war. But the bad memories, like Kiowa
sinking into a field or Curt Lemon being blown to pieces, keep playing over and over. O’Brien feels
guilty about remembering these things and only writing war stories. His young daughter, Kathleen,
tells him he should find a new topic and learn how to write a happy story. But O’Brien thinks that
this task is almost impossible.

O’Brien tries to think of a happy war story. All he can remember is a man who deserted the army
and went to live with a Red Cross nurse. But even that soldier eventually went back to the war
because he wanted something to which to compare all the peace and quiet. O’Brien says the contrast
made the soldier enjoy peace more. 

Some of O’Brien’s strongest memories involve the personal quirks of his company of 19- and 20-
year-olds. Bowker said he wishes his dad would write him a letter and say it’s ok if he doesn’t win
any medals. Kiowa taught a rain dance to some of the other soldiers, who were disappointed when it
didn’t instantly produce rain. Lavender adopted a puppy and fed it by hand until Azar took it,
strapped it to a grenade, and pulled the pin. The grenade exploded, killing the dog.

Analysis

“Spin” is a classic accusation usually made against journalists. When a journalist “spins” a story,
they highlight certain facts and leave out others in order to manipulate the reader into believing
whatever the journalist wants them to believe. Writing is inherently an act of exclusion. By stringing
together a series of fragmented images and seemingly random memories, O’Brien demonstrates that
spin is unavoidable.

The Things They Carried is of course related to works of journalism, as “Spin” points out with its
very title. But it was published at a crucial time for journalism, when the medium itself was
changing. Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote and others were introducing a “new journalism,” where the
reporter and his or her biases were an integral part of the story. The influence of this on O’Brien's
journalistic fiction is clear. New journalism also affected Michael Herr’s novelistic and intensely
personal journalism about the Vietnam War. O’Brien was not the only writer testing boundaries at
this time and with this subject matter.

“Spin” is made up of sentence fragments, figments of ideas, and bits and pieces of stories. But many
of the fragments foreshadow later events in the collection. Bowker turns out to be obsessed with
medals (see “Speaking of Courage”), Kathleen turns out to be the most difficult audience for her
father’s war stories (see “Field Trip”), Kiowa’s death is the emotional crisis of the book (see
“Notes”), and Azar’s cruelty foreshadows his complicity in O’Brien’s most shameful act (see “The
Ghost Soldiers”). The most poignant symbol in this story is that of the checker board. O’Brien
implies that the soldiers play the structured game in order to bring order into their chaotic life. But
war is not like a game of checkers. As it becomes increasingly clear, there are no fixed rules.

Summary of “On The Rainy River”

O’Brien prefaces this story by saying that it is a hard series of events for him to recount. He thinks
that the story proves him to be a coward. It is the story of how he ended up serving in Vietnam.

After graduating from Macalester College in 1968, O’Brien planned to attend Harvard University.
But on June 17, 1968, he received a draft card. He had to make the decision whether or not to go to
war.

O’Brien had protested the war, but not strongly enough to be considered a pacifist. O’Brien is
shamed to remember that he thought he was too good, too smart for the war -- so he considered
running away to Canada. He was split between the instinct to run, and the instinct to do what
everyone expected: go to war. At the time, he worked at a meatpacking factory hosing down pig
carcasses. O’Brien recalls that summer that he always smelled of pig. He felt depressed and alone.
He was angry that everyone in his town expected him to go to war, but no one knew the first thing
about Vietnam or its history.

O’Brien recounts that he decided to run away to Canada. He left a note for his parents, and took the
car and headed north. He found a fishing resort called the Tip Top Lodge, and the owner, Elroy
Berdahl, took him in without asking questions. Berdahl never asked O’Brien questions, he just
played Scrabble with the boy, gave him odd jobs to do, and ate meals with him. But O’Brien
concluded that the old man read the paper, he was “no hick;” he knew that O’Brien was
contemplating dodging the draft. 

One day Berdahl took O’Brien out fishing one. Berdahl steered the boat all the way to the border
with Canada and then waited. He even turned around, away from O’Brien, while the boy made his
decision. The boy thought, Now’s my chance. He almost jumped out of the boat. He considered
fleeing.

But he imagined a huge crowd of people in the mountains around the river. O’Brien writes that he
imagined his parents watching, his town watching, Linda watching, all of the people from his past
and future watching him make his decision. He imagined being hunted down by the FBI. In the end
he couldn’t bring himself to jump out of the boat. O’Brien cried, but told Berdahl to take him back to
the lodge. He paid Elroy for the room and drove home to his parents. “I was a coward,” he writes. “I
went to war.” (55)

Analysis

The story is told in a mix of first person narrative and flashback. The narrator telling the story is the
mature O’Brien, but he sometimes slips back into the voice and tone of his younger self. The
younger O’Brien’s voice is less mature, more entitled, and less morally complex. The tension
between the two narrative voices, the young and the old O’Brien, gives dramatic intensity to a story
that would otherwise merely relate a young man’s thoughts about an important decision. The
interplay between the young and the old O’Brien lend dialogue to a story in which there isn’t much
other dialogue. 

“On the Rainy River” contains the main existential and moral crisis of the book. The turning point at
the river is a classic Freudian scene. The boy wants to jump out of the boat, his ego and his id (his
authentic desires) strain to go. But his superego (what society orders) constrains him. In this story,
the superego is symbolized by O’Brien imagining large crowds of people watching him make his
decision. The scene takes place on a river; water for Freud often symbolizes the unconscious, where
the battle between the superego, id and ego takes place.

Ultimately others’ expectations of him are more powerful than O’Brien’s own moral compass. His
deference to his superego is O’Brien’s tragic flaw. Tragic heroes in Greek plays also have a tragic
flaw: the one shortcoming from which all of their other misdeeds flow. O’Brien’s tragic flaw is
caving to society.

The image of O’Brien working at the meatpacking factory foreshadows of what is to come in
Vietnam. The stench of dead pig hangs on the boy, just as the stink of death will permeate war. But
both are tragic-comic situation. The troops joke around; O’Brien with a hose washing down dead
pigs is absurd in a humorous way. Both the experience of the factory is isolated by both experiences,
and finds it hard to talk to other people about them afterwards.

After a long buildup, and the climactic decision in the boat, O’Brien ends the story with a paradox.
The fact that he was a coward made him do the bravest thing imaginable: place himself in a life-
threatening situation. The New York Times book review of O’Brien’s book was titled “Too
Embarrassed Not to Kill." Embarrassment and shame turn out to be the pervasive themes of the
book.

Summary and Analysis of "Enemies, "Friends," "How to Tell

a True War Story," and "The Dentist"
The Things They Carried

Summary

“Enemies” and “Friends”

One day, when they are out on patrol, two members of the company get into a fistfight over a
missing penknife. Dave Jensen wins the fight and breaks Lee Strunk’s nose. Jensen is worried about
retaliation, though. Revenge could be dangerous, because all of the troops carry guns. Jensen keeps
an eye on Strunk and gets more and more paranoid. One day, he can’t stand it anymore. He goes
temporarily crazy, firing his gun into the air, and yelling Strunk’s name over and over again. 

That same night, he borrows a pistol and uses it to break his own nose. Then he seeks out Strunk to
ask him if they are “square.” Strunk says yes. Strunk privately laughs at Jensen because he was the
one that had stolen Jensen’s knife in the first place.

“Friends” is set a few months after “Enemies.” After the penknife incident, Dave Jensen and Lee
Strunk had learned to trust one another. They made a pact that if either were seriously injured or
crippled the other would find a way to kill him. As far as O’Brien can tell, the two were serious
about the deal. 

In October, Lee Strunk steps on a mortar, and half of his leg is blown off by a mortar round. The rest
of the leg must be amputated. When a helicopter arrives to take him away to be treated, Strunk
wakes up from his faint and sees Dave Jensen standing over him. He is terrified of his friend,
thinking that Jensen will kill him. Jensen repeatedly tells him to relax, but Strunk remains petrified.
Later the men find out that Strunk has died in the helicopter. Jensen is relieved.

Analysis

Much of the book is made up of short character studies, one- or two-page at most. These can and do
stand separate from the book as a whole; O’Brien published some of them in magazines on their
own. Together, “Friends” and “Enemies” serve to display the absurdity of war. Roles shift fluidly at
war. Your worst enemy may become your fastest friend. Your fastest friend may become your
executioner – which is Lee Strunk’s fear. Social codes and norms break down completely. Even a
retreat to “eye for an eye” Biblical law (Jensen breaking his own nose) doesn’t seem to make sense.
There are no social norms or codes governing the troops. O’Brien points out that war is essentially a
state without laws. But stories are simple, spare, opaque enough to seem like moral parables,
communicating universal truths regarding all wartime friendships -- so that the critique of war seems
to range farther than just Vietnam and deeper than this particular moment in history.

“How to Tell a True War Story”

Rat Kiley and Curt Lemon invent a macho game to play together. They toss smoke grenades back
and forth to each other. One day the game goes wrong and a grenade explodes, killing Lemon.
Lemon had been standing under a tree in the shade, and stepped out into the sunlight to catch the
grenade. He must have thought he was killed by the sunlight, reflects O’Brien, who witnesses the
event. O’Brien has to go up into the tree to pick out the remains. A soldier makes a bad pun on
“lemon tree,” one of the many morbid jokes in the book.

After Lemon is killed, Rat Kiley sits down and writes his sister a long letter about how brave and
funny her brother was. The sister never writes back. For this Rat Kiley dismisses her as a “dumb
cooze.” O’Brien says you can tell a true war story by its “absolute and uncompromising allegiance to
obscenity and evil.” This is a true story, he writes, because Kiley calls the girl a “dumb cooze.”
O’Brien leaves aside the story of Lemon’s death to explain to the reader how they can discern what
is a true war story. One way, he writes, is if the story seems too crazy to believe, or if it never ends.
O’Brien relates a story told to him by fellow soldier Mitchell Sanders: a group of soldiers went out at
night into the mountains on patrol. They heard what sounded to them like a large orchestra, or a
large enemy cocktail party. The sound drove the troops crazy, and they ordered an enormous air
strike on the empty mountains. O’Brien writes that this is a good example of a “true” story, whether
it happened or not.

Another “true” story that O’Brien tells is that of a water buffalo. The day that Curt Lemon died, the
company found a baby water buffalo in the woods. Rat Kiley tortured it. He shot it in all the places
in its body where a wound would not be fatal. Kiley had just lost his best friend, O’Brien explains, to
help justify the story. He tortured the buffalo and cried. Back home, when old women cry listening
to that story, O’Brien says they don’t understand. They understand that war is about beauty and
friendship, too. They only understand tired generalizations: “war is hell", etc.

Analysis

“How to Tell a True War Story” passes judgment on the very act of storytelling. There is a right way
and a wrong way to do it, an authentic way and an inauthentic way. O’Brien frowns on telling stories
with a macho perspective, as Lemon would have done. But he also objects to the polar opposite:
telling tear-jerking stories for an effect. This short story acts as a guide to the style of the entire
book. O’Brien tells only what he believes are “true stories”: absurdist stories that never end, stories
that could not possibly have happened. What he is asking for from his reader in return is a minimum
of sentimentality. Not only is there a right and a wrong way to tell stories, this chapter tells the
reader, but there is a right and a wrong way to listen to them.

Identifying varying methods of storytelling is also a way for O'Brien undercut his own narrative.
One of the projects of the book is to put readers on guard against unreliable narrators. This is a
deeply political agenda. O’Brien is angry with his generation of young men and women for not
asking enough questions of authority figures. He blames them, at least partially, for being blindly led
into the quagmire of Vietnam. He wants to teach his readers to do better: to ask questions, not to
believe too easily.

“The Dentist”

Curt Lemon was one of O’Brien’s least favorite fellow soldiers. After Lemon was killed, O’Brien
had a hard time mourning him. Lemon liked to act the macho man and take unnecessary risks. He
once went trick-o- treating in a Vietnamese village on Halloween, to the horror and amazement of
the villagers. 

O’Brien says that it is not a good idea to glorify the dead or become sentimental about them. He tells
the story of Lemon’s visit to the dentist to illustrate the point. One day a dentist came in on a
helicopter to check up on the men’s teeth. Lemon was so afraid that when it was his turn he passed
out in the dentist’s chair. Later, he was so ashamed that he woke up the dentist in the middle of the
night. After rousing him out of bed, Lemon insisted that he had a toothache, and forced the dentist to
remove one of his perfectly good teeth.
Analysis

Lemon provides a comic example of conventional machismo. His swagger and bravado provide
much needed humor to the troops. They considered his trick-and-treating caper a great joke. “The
Dentist,” however, is a flashback. The reader already knows that it is precisely this bravado that will
get Lemon killed. This provides dramatic irony, a literary technique by which the reader knows more
about the character’s fate than the character himself.

O’Brien objects to both macho swaggering and trite aphorisms. He grants war a privileged status as
a topic by circumscribing the ways in which it may be described. (He makes no such
pronouncements, for example, about how to describe love, which is also dealt with in the book.)
“War is hell,” does not qualify as a worthy war story, because it has no impact, according to
O’Brien. Macho tales of violence and heroism like Lemon’s have too much impact, and are also
unworthy. O’Brien argues that there is a right and a wrong form of storytelling.

Summary and Analysis of “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,”

"Stockings," and "Church"
The Things They Carried

Summary

“Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”

O’Brien says that some of the least believable stories from Vietnam are the most important and
enduring ones. In the platoon, Rat Kiley had a reputation for lying and overstatement. Some of the
soldiers in the Alpha Company had a hard time believing his stories. But Kiley told a story about his
first assignment in the mountains of Chu Lai that he insisted was true. 

Before joining up with the Alpha Company, Kiley was stationed at a medical detachment near the
village of Tra Bong. The detachment shared the area with a unit of Green Berets. The highest-
ranking officer was Eddie Diamond, whose idea of a good time was to talk about a plan to import
some prostitutes for the troops’ entertainment. (He never actually went through on the plan.) 

But a young medic named Mark Fossie picked up on the idea, and didn’t see why he shouldn’t
import in his American girlfriend instead. The girl turned up six weeks later on a helicopter
delivering supplies. She was blonde and young, wearing a pink sweater and culottes, and her name
was Mary Anne. She was mildly flirtatious and all around rather good for morale, says Kiley. Mary
Anne was curious about the natives, and about the war. In her first few weeks in Vietnam, she
learned how to use a gun, she helped patch up the injured, she stopped wearing makeup, and she
arranged a sightseeing trip of sorts to the nearest village. She thought the enemy couldn’t be so bad.
“They’re human beings,” she reasoned, “aren’t they? Like everybody else?” (92).

One night she went missing, and Fossie was out of his mind with worry and jealousy. He thought she
was cheating on him. She returned back to camp in the morning, and it turns out that she was out on
ambush patrol with the Green Berets. Fossie confronted her, and she agreed to dress up and wear
makeup again and not to go out on patrol. The two became engaged. 
But she quickly got restless and kept staring at the hills. Finally, she disappeared again. Fossie set off
to find her and burst into the Green Beret encampment, where he heard Mary Anne singing. There
was a terrible stink and the bones of dead Vietnamese soldiers were lying around the tent. There was
a leopard skin hanging from the roof. Mary Anne was wearing her culottes and, as Fossie drew
closer, he saw that she was wearing a necklace made of human tongues. Mary Anne told her fiancée
he didn’t belong in the tent. She said she felt like herself for the first time in her life. She pleaded
with Fossie to understand, saying: “it isn’t bad.”

Kiley left Song Tra Bong shortly thereafter. As he tells the story, he says he was partly in love with
Mary Anne, and that all of the troops were. He heard about Mary Anne again later from some
friends. Her love of Vietnam had only increased -- until she finally went off into the mountains by
herself. She is still out there, he says, “ready to kill.”

Analysis

They Things They Carried is mostly devoid of women. Women exist only on the margins of the
narrative. They are scarcely remembered girlfriends, or they are beloved girlfriends who are only
present in photographs. They are distant objects of sexual longing: Japanese or Red Cross nurses,
Jane Fonda in a movie. “The Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong” is the only story in which a female
character is the protagonist. Even then, the woman’s own sensibility remains a mystery. Her
narrative is filtered through a man’s (Rat Kiley’s) retelling.

The lesson to be drawn from Mary Anne’s story is that the war affects women exactly the same way
it does men. Women, too, can be driven mad. In this story, the madness takes the form of a
transformation from one familiar literary stock figure to another: the innocent Madonna figure to the
sexy seductress. Not only does Mary Anne become a killer, but she also becomes a sexually
liberated femme fatale.

In her sexy sweater and innocent pants-skirt combination, no one could seem more innocent, or more
American than Mary Anne. In the beginning of the story, she is something recognizable to both the
soldiers and the reader: a normal American girl who wants a family. The story of her mutation into
something foreign, a killer, mirrors the transformation of all of the soldiers. They go to war as boys
and return from war as killers. 

Before Mary Anne’s transformation in complete, she begins blurring the line of recognizable gender
roles. She stops showering, covers her feminine long hair, and stops wearing makeup. She is
transformed into a mannish figure and she enjoys the transformation. The soldiers are horrified and
titillated by her transformation and subversion. Mary Anne may have stopped thinking of herself as a
woman, but she does not wholly kill her sexual appeal. Even, or especially, after mutating into
something almost unrecognizable, a mixture of the femme fatale and the killer, she remains sexually
desirable, even lovable. Riley claims: “We were all in love with her.” 

Summary of “Stockings” and “Church”

According to O’Brien, Henry Dobbins was one of the more likeable soldiers in the platoon. He was
overweight, rather sentimental, and very kind. His one eccentricity was that he kept his girlfriends’
stockings wrapped around his neck for good luck. He credited the stockings with the fact that he
never got shot. Dobbins thought that they made him invulnerable. 

Dobbins got a big blow in the form of a letter from his ex-girlfriend. She wrote to end their
relationship.. All the soldiers in the company were nervous about what this might mean for Dobbins.
But he turned out to be resilient. “No sweat,” said Dobbins. “I still love her. The magic doesn’t go
away.” (112) He continued to wear her stockings around his neck.

In “Church,” the company sets up camp at a pagoda that seems to function as a church. A few monks
bring them supplies. Kiowa explains that he was brought up Christian and carries a Bible with him
everywhere. He is made uneasy by camping at the pagoda, arguing that it is bad luck to camp at a
religious site.

But the monks don’t seem to mind, and shower the soldiers with small gifts. The monks especially
like Henry Dobbins, who talks about possibly joining their order when the war is over. Dobbins says
he always wanted to be a minister, but didn’t think that he had enough brains to think up sermons.
He thought that he would be good at understanding and connecting to people, though. As a parting
gift, Dobbins gives the monks some chocolate and peaches – his favorite desserts.

Analysis

“Stockings” is, with "Sweetheart", one of the few stories that deals, however indirectly, with gender.
The object in the title is a symbol of feminine secrets and sexuality. But from Dobbins’ perspective,
the stocking is a protector, a lucky charm, not a token of sex. His use of the stocking is consonant
with the troops’ idea of a woman’s place in the world: an object used for escapism or comfort or
superstition. Women are pinup girls in movies, or women are chaste Madonna figures who wait at
home for their men. Women become symbols of home, rather than people, to the soldiers.

Coming directly after “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” “Stockings” confirms the traditional role
of women for these men, after the narrator has just related an exception to the rule. One of the
disturbing (and sexually exciting) things about Mary Anne is that she has her own agency as a
character, meaning that she seems to operate based on her own wants and needs, not merely as a plot
device. She has an arc, a spine, a story of her own. This sets her apart from not only the other female
characters in the book, but also many of the males. Her independence highlights that of the soldiers’
-- if only by contrast.

Compared to Mary Anne, Dobbins’ girlfriend represents a return to normalcy. Even though she does
assert some power by breaking up with him, her role as a symbol of home does not change. He still
continues to think about her in the exact same way, as an inert lucky charm. 

The pagoda in “Church” is a symbol for the country of Vietnam. It is a beautiful, peaceful place.
Dobbins enjoys staying there, Kiowa does not. This split represents the soldiers’ different feelings
toward the war. The occupation of the pagoda represents the occupation of the entire country. Some
of the soldiers (Kiowa) feel that it is imperialistic. Others do not. This story is told in third person,
but the reader gets the sense that O’Brien is inclined to agree with Kiowa on the subject of
imperialism.
“Church” is one of the only stories to deal directly with religion. Part of the narrator’s horror at the
senselessness of Vietnam is that he is not religious. Not believing in a Hereafter makes senseless
killing during a mortal lifetime even worse. Although religion does not seem to help the religious
characters in this book (they are killed in horrible ways alongside those who are atheists) the narrator
does obliquely hint at some benefits it may confer. Dobbins is one of the most likeable of the men.
Kiowa also seems more at peace because of his religion. And, of course, if the pagoda is a symbol
for Vietnam, the fact that it is monks who live there, not lay people, makes the soldiers’ intrusion
even worse.

Summary and Analysis of “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,”

"Stockings," and "Church"
The Things They Carried

Summary

“Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”

O’Brien says that some of the least believable stories from Vietnam are the most important and
enduring ones. In the platoon, Rat Kiley had a reputation for lying and overstatement. Some of the
soldiers in the Alpha Company had a hard time believing his stories. But Kiley told a story about his
first assignment in the mountains of Chu Lai that he insisted was true. 

Before joining up with the Alpha Company, Kiley was stationed at a medical detachment near the
village of Tra Bong. The detachment shared the area with a unit of Green Berets. The highest-
ranking officer was Eddie Diamond, whose idea of a good time was to talk about a plan to import
some prostitutes for the troops’ entertainment. (He never actually went through on the plan.) 

But a young medic named Mark Fossie picked up on the idea, and didn’t see why he shouldn’t
import in his American girlfriend instead. The girl turned up six weeks later on a helicopter
delivering supplies. She was blonde and young, wearing a pink sweater and culottes, and her name
was Mary Anne. She was mildly flirtatious and all around rather good for morale, says Kiley. Mary
Anne was curious about the natives, and about the war. In her first few weeks in Vietnam, she
learned how to use a gun, she helped patch up the injured, she stopped wearing makeup, and she
arranged a sightseeing trip of sorts to the nearest village. She thought the enemy couldn’t be so bad.
“They’re human beings,” she reasoned, “aren’t they? Like everybody else?” (92).

One night she went missing, and Fossie was out of his mind with worry and jealousy. He thought she
was cheating on him. She returned back to camp in the morning, and it turns out that she was out on
ambush patrol with the Green Berets. Fossie confronted her, and she agreed to dress up and wear
makeup again and not to go out on patrol. The two became engaged. 

But she quickly got restless and kept staring at the hills. Finally, she disappeared again. Fossie set off
to find her and burst into the Green Beret encampment, where he heard Mary Anne singing. There
was a terrible stink and the bones of dead Vietnamese soldiers were lying around the tent. There was
a leopard skin hanging from the roof. Mary Anne was wearing her culottes and, as Fossie drew
closer, he saw that she was wearing a necklace made of human tongues. Mary Anne told her fiancée
he didn’t belong in the tent. She said she felt like herself for the first time in her life. She pleaded
with Fossie to understand, saying: “it isn’t bad.”

Kiley left Song Tra Bong shortly thereafter. As he tells the story, he says he was partly in love with
Mary Anne, and that all of the troops were. He heard about Mary Anne again later from some
friends. Her love of Vietnam had only increased -- until she finally went off into the mountains by
herself. She is still out there, he says, “ready to kill.”

Analysis

They Things They Carried is mostly devoid of women. Women exist only on the margins of the
narrative. They are scarcely remembered girlfriends, or they are beloved girlfriends who are only
present in photographs. They are distant objects of sexual longing: Japanese or Red Cross nurses,
Jane Fonda in a movie. “The Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong” is the only story in which a female
character is the protagonist. Even then, the woman’s own sensibility remains a mystery. Her
narrative is filtered through a man’s (Rat Kiley’s) retelling.

The lesson to be drawn from Mary Anne’s story is that the war affects women exactly the same way
it does men. Women, too, can be driven mad. In this story, the madness takes the form of a
transformation from one familiar literary stock figure to another: the innocent Madonna figure to the
sexy seductress. Not only does Mary Anne become a killer, but she also becomes a sexually
liberated femme fatale.

In her sexy sweater and innocent pants-skirt combination, no one could seem more innocent, or more
American than Mary Anne. In the beginning of the story, she is something recognizable to both the
soldiers and the reader: a normal American girl who wants a family. The story of her mutation into
something foreign, a killer, mirrors the transformation of all of the soldiers. They go to war as boys
and return from war as killers. 

Before Mary Anne’s transformation in complete, she begins blurring the line of recognizable gender
roles. She stops showering, covers her feminine long hair, and stops wearing makeup. She is
transformed into a mannish figure and she enjoys the transformation. The soldiers are horrified and
titillated by her transformation and subversion. Mary Anne may have stopped thinking of herself as a
woman, but she does not wholly kill her sexual appeal. Even, or especially, after mutating into
something almost unrecognizable, a mixture of the femme fatale and the killer, she remains sexually
desirable, even lovable. Riley claims: “We were all in love with her.” 

Summary of “Stockings” and “Church”

According to O’Brien, Henry Dobbins was one of the more likeable soldiers in the platoon. He was
overweight, rather sentimental, and very kind. His one eccentricity was that he kept his girlfriends’
stockings wrapped around his neck for good luck. He credited the stockings with the fact that he
never got shot. Dobbins thought that they made him invulnerable. 

Dobbins got a big blow in the form of a letter from his ex-girlfriend. She wrote to end their
relationship.. All the soldiers in the company were nervous about what this might mean for Dobbins.
But he turned out to be resilient. “No sweat,” said Dobbins. “I still love her. The magic doesn’t go
away.” (112) He continued to wear her stockings around his neck.

In “Church,” the company sets up camp at a pagoda that seems to function as a church. A few monks
bring them supplies. Kiowa explains that he was brought up Christian and carries a Bible with him
everywhere. He is made uneasy by camping at the pagoda, arguing that it is bad luck to camp at a
religious site.

But the monks don’t seem to mind, and shower the soldiers with small gifts. The monks especially
like Henry Dobbins, who talks about possibly joining their order when the war is over. Dobbins says
he always wanted to be a minister, but didn’t think that he had enough brains to think up sermons.
He thought that he would be good at understanding and connecting to people, though. As a parting
gift, Dobbins gives the monks some chocolate and peaches – his favorite desserts.

Analysis

“Stockings” is, with "Sweetheart", one of the few stories that deals, however indirectly, with gender.
The object in the title is a symbol of feminine secrets and sexuality. But from Dobbins’ perspective,
the stocking is a protector, a lucky charm, not a token of sex. His use of the stocking is consonant
with the troops’ idea of a woman’s place in the world: an object used for escapism or comfort or
superstition. Women are pinup girls in movies, or women are chaste Madonna figures who wait at
home for their men. Women become symbols of home, rather than people, to the soldiers.

Coming directly after “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” “Stockings” confirms the traditional role
of women for these men, after the narrator has just related an exception to the rule. One of the
disturbing (and sexually exciting) things about Mary Anne is that she has her own agency as a
character, meaning that she seems to operate based on her own wants and needs, not merely as a plot
device. She has an arc, a spine, a story of her own. This sets her apart from not only the other female
characters in the book, but also many of the males. Her independence highlights that of the soldiers’
-- if only by contrast.

Compared to Mary Anne, Dobbins’ girlfriend represents a return to normalcy. Even though she does
assert some power by breaking up with him, her role as a symbol of home does not change. He still
continues to think about her in the exact same way, as an inert lucky charm. 

The pagoda in “Church” is a symbol for the country of Vietnam. It is a beautiful, peaceful place.
Dobbins enjoys staying there, Kiowa does not. This split represents the soldiers’ different feelings
toward the war. The occupation of the pagoda represents the occupation of the entire country. Some
of the soldiers (Kiowa) feel that it is imperialistic. Others do not. This story is told in third person,
but the reader gets the sense that O’Brien is inclined to agree with Kiowa on the subject of
imperialism.

“Church” is one of the only stories to deal directly with religion. Part of the narrator’s horror at the
senselessness of Vietnam is that he is not religious. Not believing in a Hereafter makes senseless
killing during a mortal lifetime even worse. Although religion does not seem to help the religious
characters in this book (they are killed in horrible ways alongside those who are atheists) the narrator
does obliquely hint at some benefits it may confer. Dobbins is one of the most likeable of the men.
Kiowa also seems more at peace because of his religion. And, of course, if the pagoda is a symbol
for Vietnam, the fact that it is monks who live there, not lay people, makes the soldiers’ intrusion
even worse.

Summary and Analysis of "Speaking of Courage" and

"Notes"
The Things They Carried

Summary

“Speaking of Courage”

Norman Bowker returns home after the war is over. On July Fourth, he kills time by driving his
father’s Chevy around the local lake. He muses about his high school sweetheart, Sally, who is
married. Bowker saw her recently, when she was out mowing the lawn, and decided against stopping
to talk to her. But he still has the urge to show off for her: he wants to show her his seven medals and
his newfound ability to tell time perfectly by the sun without looking at a clock. But she is married
now, he thinks, and she has no reason to listen to him. The person Bowker misses most is his best
friend, Max Arnold, with whom he used to discuss the existence of God. With Max dead and Sally
married, Bowker only has his father to talk to. Bowker imagines how he would tell his father the
story. 

He would begin with Cross’s orders to set up on the banks of a river. A local woman warned against
that place, but the soldiers set up there anyway. The place had a funny smell, and the soldiers soon
realized it was the village shit field. Aside from the smell, it was low-lying enough to be hard to
protect. When the enemy began to shoot at the platoon that night, it was all but indefensible. The
mortar made the surface of the shit field move and bubble and released even more of the fishlike
smell. Kiowa was shot and killed that night, and his body sunk slowly into the shit field. 

At this point in the story, Bowker breaks off to think about how he would describe to his father the
fact that his courage had failed him. Bowker saw Kiowa get shot. He saw him go down in the shit
field, face first. Bowker hung onto his boot, but started to sink in himself, weighed down by Kiowa’s
body. Bowker remembers that he panicked and let go of Kiowa’s boot. If it hadn’t been for the
smell, he thinks, he could have saved Kiowa and won the Silver Star.

The scene shifts back to his hometown, and Bowker takes a break from driving around the lake. He
pulls up to a takeaway burger joint called Eat Mama Burgers. He fumbles during his order and
doesn’t understand the new slang for root beer. After eating his meal, he considers telling his war
story to the person working in the burger joint. They have a momentary connection, but Bowker
decides to leave instead. He drives around the lake again, for the tenth time, and decides never to tell
the story to anyone. He thinks his father would tell him to focus on the seven medals he already has.
He imagines that his father would be proud of him anyways. On the twelfth time around the lake,
Bowker pulls over to enjoy the sunset. He gets out of the car and wades into the lake. He admires the
Fourth of July fireworks, saying they “aren’t bad for a small town.”

Analysis
This story contrasts with the other chapters in the collection because of its almost utter lack of
dialogue. The story is technically in third person, but is told almost entirely from Bowker’s
perspective. Bowker, broken, alone with his thoughts, is a symbol of the many veterans who could
not adjust after returning home to the US. Vietnam was a deeply unpopular war, and many of the
veterans felt dishonored for having fought in it. Kiowa’s death is the climax, the organizing tragedy
that comes up over and over again throughout the book. 

This intensive look at Bowker sets him up as a foil for the narrator, O’Brien. There are many doubles
in this book: the Vietnamese girl and Kathleen, Jensen and Strunk, Rat Kiley and Jorgenson. In most
cases they are each others’ opposites, but are still linked by some sort of commonality. The young
Bowker and young O’Brien were on parallel tracks that completely diverged after the war. Only then
did the two become opposites: the successful young man and the aimless, damaged vet. O’Brien
suggests a remaining similarity, though, by writing about how shaken he was by hearing about
Bowker’s experience. O’Brien recognizes that their paths could just as easily have remained the
same. This is one of the only stories in the book where O’Brien indicates that he is lucky.

The shit field is one of the powerful, recurrent symbols in the book. It represents the war in Vietnam,
an unpleasant struggle that is difficult to get out of. The war was often called a “quagmire,” and
O’Brien’s shit field is a vivid visceral symbol of that very stickiness. Even though the story is
filtered through Bowker’s memory, and retold by O’Brien, the smell and visual details of the shit
field seem very grotesque, very immediate. The lake in Bowker’s hometown is, in a sense, a parallel
symbol: Bowker’s immersion in the lake at the end of the story represents his immersion in
memories of the original quagmire -- that is, of Vietnam.

“Notes”

In “Notes,” O’Brien describes how he came to write the story “Speaking of Courage.” O’Brien
received a letter from Bowker telling the story of “Speaking of Courage” in 1975. Bowker said he
had gone through a few jobs but couldn’t quite find anything to do with himself. He said he didn’t
want to sound like “some jerkoff vet crying in his beer,” but life had been hard. He said he read
O’Brien’s memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, and liked it except for the “bleeding heart political
parts.” (156). The letter touched O’Brien, but also shook him up. The vet had congratulated himself
on adjusting so well. He had transitioned straight from Vietnam to Harvard. But receiving the letter
was in fact part of the process of O’Brien figuring out just how deep his own trauma cut.

O’Brien resolved to tell the story of Bowker’s perspective on Kiowa’s death. The writer tried to
incorporate the story of the shit field into the novel he was working on, but to make it fit he took out
the lake and most of Kiowa’s story. Bowker was disappointed with the result. O’Brien says that he
was frustrated, too.

Three years later O’Brien heard from Bowker’s mother. Bowker had hanged himself in the locker
room of a YMCA, using a jump rope. His mother said she thought he did it that way because he was
a quiet boy and “didn’t want to bother anyone” (158). O’Brien was shocked.

Later, O’Brien published Bowker’s story on its own in a magazine before including it in The Things
They Carried. The writer addresses the reader directly to emphasize that he made up the part about
Bowker failing to save Kiowa and worrying about medals. The rest was true, O’Brien writes.
Analysis

In “Notes,” the narrator speaks very candidly about his own narrative tricks. Again he calls attention
to the fact that the book is fiction. O’Brien points out that it is a constructed narrative, a piece of
artwork rather than a piece of “truth.” O’Brien was emotionally involved with the person, Bowker,
but emotional truth does not always indicate factual truth. Moreover, in this chapter, O’Brien writes
as a cold observer, as a writer, about what “works” and what “doesn’t work” in fiction. He worries
that by moving a literary element like a lake he cannot properly mirror the shit field. He does not
worry about why Kiowa is dead, as the character of O’Brien does. This literary doubling of character
(narrator) and author is kept up throughout the book. One possible influence for this is Argentinian
writer Jorge Borges, who also famously wrote about himself in ever-increasing mise-en-abime
patterns.

But even the writer O’Brien does have certain emotions: he is anxious that the reader understand he
is not trying to dishonor his fellow soldier. Because it is taken out of the context of “Speaking of
Courage” and placed in a purportedly non-fictional chapter (complete with accurate dates of
publication of the author’s other works), Bowker’s suicide has the ring of authenticity. This gives the
event an even deeper impact, perhaps, than had it been included at the end of “Speaking of
Courage.” In O’Brien’s dichotomy, it is a “happening-truth” rather than a “story-truth” (see “Good
Form”).

Summary and Analysis of "In the Field," "Good Form," and

"Field Trip"
The Things They Carried

Summary “In the Field” and “Good Form”

The morning after Kiowa is killed, all 18 soldiers begin to search for Kiowa’s body in the shit field
at daybreak. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross leads the search in the rain. The soldiers all want to be
somewhere else, but they feel it isn't right to leave Kiowa in the field. While the men search for the
body, Cross thinks about the letter he will write to Kiowa’s father breaking the news of the death. He
will write about what a splendid soldier Kiowa was... 

Azar tries to joke about dying while “eating shit” but the other soldiers ask him to be more sensitive.
Some of the men blame Cross for Kiowa’s death, saying he should have had better sense than to
encamp for the night somewhere so low-lying and indefensible. Cross thinks that he never wanted
the responsibility for his men’s lives. He thinks about writing a different letter to Kiowa’s father,
taking full responsibility for Kiowa’s death, saying that it was his mistake for choosing the wrong
spot to camp. 

Cross sees a soldier standing off by himself, shoulders shaking. The ponchos make them all look the
same, Cross thinks. He is irritated that he cannot remember the soldier’s name. The soldier is also
busy blaming himself for Kiowa’s death. The night before, he had taken out a flashlight to show
Kiowa a photo of his girlfriend and figures that this is what attracted enemy fire. “Hey, she’s cute,”
Kiowa had said, remembers the soldier. That was right before he was shot. 
Norman Bowker finds Kiowa after he sees the heel of his boot sticking out of the mud. All of the
men work together to pull him out, and the dead body is put into a helicopter and taken away. The
men feel “a secret joy” that they are all still alive, even if Kiowa is not. 

Cross muses that there must be someone else to blame for the death: the war, the command, Karl
Marx, some old man who forgot to vote. Maybe instead of writing the letter to Kiowa’s father, he
thinks, he’ll play golf instead. Maybe that he'd rather not take responsibility after all.

In “Good Form,” the narrator steps back from the war stories and tells the reader concrete details
about his own life. Tim O’Brien is 43 years old, he writes. O’Brien is a writer and a veteran of the
Vietnam War. Everything else is invented, he says. O’Brien saw a young man die in Vietnam. The
man’s eye became a star shaped hole, he writes. But O’Brien himself did not kill the man. Not
having killed the man is the “happening-truth” writes O’Brien. Or perhaps he did kill the man. That
is the “story-truth.” 

Because of the difference between “story-truth” and “happening-truth", O'Brien can tell his
daughter, Kathleen, with equal certainty that he has both killed someone and never killed anyone.
Both are honest statements in his eyes.

Analysis

The titles of both “Field Trip” and “In the Field” play with the word “field.” Indeed, the shit field
becomes totemic in these stories, but it is much less innocuous than the light titles would suggest.
The shit field is the site of a death. Kiowa is the second casualty for the Alpha Company attributable
purely to distraction. 

O’Brien holds Jimmy Cross at least partially responsible for the event. Composing variations on a
possible letter to Kiowa’s father is a metaphor for Cross’ indecision about whether he wants to take
responsibility or not for the death. The story ends on the dour note of Cross’ decision not to take
responsibility after all. The narrator suggests that it is this denial of responsibility that is one of the
cultural problems created by the very war. Cross muses:

“When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war.
You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going to it…You could
blame people who were too lazy to read a newspaper, who were bored by the daily body counts, who
switched channels at the mention of politics. You could blame whole nations. You could blame God.
You could blame the munitions makers or Karl Marx or a trick of fate or an old man in Omaha who
forgot to vote” (174).

The omniscient narrative settles fully in Cross’ mind for the first time since the first story. The list is
an effective literary device; it draws the reader in with its repetition of “you.” Some of Cross’
thoughts are plausible justifications, plausible options for blame. Others are comical (the hairy Karl
Marx). The arc of blame grows wider and wider throughout this list, which resembles a poem in its
repetition and intensity. By writing from Cross’ perspective, the author demonstrates that O’Brien is
not the only soldier grasping for justifications for the war. But, of course, O’Brien does suggest that
Cross is cowardly for not having decided to take responsibility.
Summary of “Field Trip”

A few months after writing “In the Field,” O’Brien returns to Vietnam with his daughter, Kathleen.
The trip is intended as a birthday present, but Kathleen is only ten years old and doesn't understand
what the trip is really about. She likewise doesn't understand what the war was about, and why the
people fighting were “mad” at each other. She describes her father’s obsession with the war as
“weird.” 

After visiting some tourist sites around the country, they take a trip to the shit field. Kathleen
complains that it “stinks.” O’Brien almost does not recognize it, because it is smaller than he
remembered. Kathleen stays in the car with a government interpreter, who keeps her giggling with
jokes. O’Brien wades into the shit field and goes for a swim, grossing out his daughter who threatens
to “tell mom.” The texture of the field brings memories rushing back for O’Brien. He buries a pair of
Kiowa’s moccasins where his friend died and says he cannot think of the right words to say
goodbye. A farmer across the field stops to stare at him. When he gets back into the car, Kathleen
asks if the farmer is mad, and O’Brien responds that he is not.

Analysis

Kathleen’s appeal for rationality in “Field Trip” is in its innocence as poignant as Cross’ appeal for
blame is in its despair. O’Brien’s daughter works as a stand-in for readers who have not experienced
the Vietnam War firsthand. By using her as a proxy reader, O’Brien points out the distance between
himself and other veterans, and people who have not experienced the war. He suggests that the war
is fundamentally incomprehensible for those who were not there.

The title, of course, is a pun. The two characters’ trip to the shit field is anything but a child’s fun
day out of school. The light pun is reflected in the tone of Kathleen’s innocent questions: she treats
what is a pilgrimage for her father as a fun field trip.

Summary and Analysis of "The Ghost Soldiers," "Night

Life," and "The Lives of the Dead"
The Things They Carried

“The Ghost Soldiers”

O’Brien recalls that during his time at war, he was shot twice. The first time, he was hit in the side. It
was a superficial wound, and Rat Kiley checked in on him a number of times, even though the
company was still being shot at. Kiley joked that the wound would only cause problems if O’Brien
was pregnant. 

With Kiley's help, O'Brien was only in the hospital for a month. When he returned to the Alpha
company, Rat Kiley was gone, and a young, inexperienced new medic, Bobby Jorgenson, had taken
his place. When O’Brien got shot the second time, in the rear end, Jorgenson was scared and took
ten minutes to crawl over to help him. O’Brien was furious. He thought that he had almost died of
shock, and he blamed Jorgenson’s delay for the infection that set in. The location of the infection
infuriated and humiliated O’Brien. 
O’Brien was evacuated to a more cushy location, a hospital, to recover. He had to lie on his stomach
and apply ointment to his backside. He was still fuming about Jorgenson, and was surprised to find
himself missing the excitement of the front. When the whole company came to visit him, he was
very depressed by the feeling that that he no longer fit in. O’Brien sat around with his former
comrades while they caught him up on what happened since he left. One soldier, Morty Phillips, had
since died of a strange tropical disease he contracted swimming in a river. O’Brien felt even worse
when he noted that Jorgenson seemed like he was now accepted by the other men as part of the
group.

Jorgenson sought out O’Brien to apologize for freezing up the time O’Brien got shot. But O’Brien
remained set on revenge -- and enlisted Azar, one of the nastiest men in the platoon, to help him get
it.

Azar and O’Brien decided to “spook” Jorgenson. “Ghost” was army slang for the Viet Cong, “don’t
get spooked” meant don’t get killed. O’Brien and Jorgenson decided to try to play on Jorgenson’s
fear of the enemy. They rigged up a few ammunition cans filled with rattling ammunition outside
Jorgenson’s hootch, and then drank some beer to pass the time until midnight. 

At midnight, the two men started pulling strings attached to the cans. The cans started to rattle, and
the plan worked: They heard Jorgenson yelp. They terrorized the man by continuing to make noise.
Three hours later, O’Brien wanted to stop, but Azar hadn’t had enough. They were still making noise
when Jorgenson came out and shot off a gun, shouting O’Brien’s name. He realized what was going
on. The two awkwardly made up the next day, decided the score was even, and joked about
"spooking” Azar together.

Analysis

“The Ghost Soldiers” is the only chapter in which O’Brien is a protagonist in the real sense of the
word -- rather than a mute, sometimes stunned, observer and narrator. A protagonist is a character
who acts, who directs the action of the story. In this case, O’Brien is motivated to seek vengeance,
and this quest helps make his character more rounded; character is defined by action, by goals, and
here O'Brien's aims are clearer than in other parts of the book. By this point, the reader has grown
accustomed to thinking of O’Brien as somewhat weak-minded (see “On the Rainy River”), as
fundamentally a victim. In his acts of revenge against Jorgenson, O’Brien becomes a perpetrator.
O’Brien himself recognizes this transformation -- but does not like it. He recalls:

“The night was absolute. Slowly, we dragged the ammo cans closer to Bobby Jorgenson’s bunker,
and this, plus the moon, gave a sense of approaching peril, the slow belly-down crawl of evil” (206). 

The “belly-down crawl” here is literally O’Brien and Jorgenson approaching the bunker. The
narrator compares himself to pure evil. How has O’Brien been reduced to this sort of sneaking
around? O’Brien implies that the war has poisoned even the narrator. This story extends a
distinctively spooky tone, one that up until now has been associated only with foreign troops and the
war, to the narrator himself.

The story also illustrates one of the central themes of the book, that no matter how terrible war may
be, it provides something wonderful: camaraderie. The book has a philosophical streak; O’Brien
weighs abstract questions such as the absolute moral justifications for going to war. The narrator is
too much of a dualist in his philosophical outlook to see only the negative points of the war. He
observes that the men help each other through with humor and with medical aid. But “The Ghost
Soldiers” shows the dark underbelly of this camaraderie: what happens when someone (Jorgenson)
fails in his duty to the group. The relationships among soldiers are a social contract, which can be
broken.

Summary of “Night Life”

By the time O’Brien gets back in touch with the company, Rat Kiley, the medic, is gone. O’Brien
finds out about his departure when some former comrades visit him at the military camp. One tells
about a period of time when the Alpha Company had only been moving at night because of
increased enemy presence in the area. Psychologically, it was hard on everyone, says the soldier.
Some of the men took drugs, and Rat Kiley started to go crazy. According to the soldier, Kiley said
that when he was looking at the other soldiers, he imagined what they looked like after they were
shot. Kiley was talking about how much the soldiers would weigh when they were dead, about how
hard it would be to heave them into the rescue helicopter. After a few days like this, says the soldier,
Kiley started imagining himself as a dead body, too. Kiley couldn’t take the strain anymore so he
took drugs and shot himself in the foot. The last anyone in the platoon had seen of him was when he
got on the helicopter. The soldiers had all said goodbye, and Cross promised to say that the bullet in
the foot was a mistake, so that Kiley would get an honorable discharge from service. 

Analysis

O’Brien recounts the dramatic events of “Night Life” with a flat, matter-of-fact tone. Kiley’s
struggle represents the fall-out of the vital importance attached to “courage” throughout the book. He
does what all the men wish they could do, but none dare try. More to the point, he does what the
other men consider cowardly but are too cowardly to undertake themselves. In this sense, Rat Kiley
fits comfortably into neither normal literary role: he is neither hero nor anti-hero. According to the
rules governing war and soldiers he has “failed.” But he wasn’t enough of a moralist to avoid going
to war altogether, which would have made him a hero within O’Brien’s moral parameters. 

The matter-of-fact language with which O’Brien recounts the events of “Night Life" creates
distance. The reader is left to imagine whether O’Brien is sympathetic to his friend’s decision. Like
so many other emotions in the book, the narrator does not explore this one outright. Detachment and
simple language are key, and show the influence of Ernest Hemingway.

“The Lives of the Dead”

Just after he joins the Alpha Company, O’Brien is confronted with one of the first dead bodies he
has ever seen in his life. Enemy fire hits the company and Cross orders an air strike on the
Vietnamese village. The soldiers watch the village burn. They enter the town, which is empty except
for a few dead bodies. 

The soldiers joke around with one dead man. They shake his hand and say hello and encourage
O’Brien to say hello. He becomes a company mascot of sorts. The soldiers sit him up at meals with
them and pretend to feed him. O’Brien finds the humor grotesque and disturbing and retreats to his
tent. Kiowa follows him to give him a Christmas cookie from a care package and to tell him he
thinks he’s a decent person. This conversation marks the beginning of a close friendship. O’Brien
decides to tell his new friend the story of his first love, Linda.

Linda and O’Brien were classmates in the fourth grade. They went on a date together, accompanied
by O’Brien’s parents, for which Linda wore a new red cap. They saw a rather violent movie (Linda
did not seem to mind the deaths) and then they went for ice cream. O’Brien knew that he loved
Linda, and he says she loved him back with a rich, mature love. A few days later, at school, a bully
named Nick Veenhof pulled the cap off her head and the whole class saw that she had lost all of her
hair.

Linda had been undergoing chemotherapy for a brain tumor, and she died a few days later. O’Brien’s
father took him to see her in a funeral home, an event which traumatized the young O’Brien. He
thought that the body didn’t look like Linda: she was too large, too bloated to be real. After that, the
boy made dates with Linda in his dreams to hold hands and go ice skating. He gave up on asking her
what it was like to be dead, because she seemed to think it was a stupid question. The only thing she
could compare it to was being in a book that no one read.

This is the purpose of the stories, writes O’Brien: To make the dead live again, to help Timmy
become Tim O’Brien, and to keep the book from closing on Linda.

Analysis

The central motif of The Things They Carried is death. Death reappears again and again, in the form
of a young Vietnamese man and a fellow soldier. “The Lives of the Dead” finally explains what has
formed O’Brien attitude toward death. This attitude is best characterized as visceral horror and
intellectual disbelief. Instead of turning his disbelief into religion, or a belief in the afterlife, O’Brien
seeks solace in his dreams. If he can dream Linda, is she really dead? When Linda dismisses that
same question as irrelevant, O’Brien has his answer: as long as he imagines her, she is not dead.

Dreams and sleep are close cousins of death, as poets from Shakespeare on have observed. One goes
to sleep not knowing what one will dream or when one will wake up. In the last story in this
collection, O’Brien explores the image of transforming one into the other. O’Brien as a young boy is
like an alchemist or a resurrector – he brings Linda back to life in his dreams. The older O’Brien is a
storyteller. A storyteller is a sort of God, who gets to control the parameters of his fictional universe.
In O’Brien’s fictional universe, Linda is still alive. Fiction is the most potent weapon in O’Brien's
arsenal, with which he may fight against that perennial obsession: death itself.

Marijuana and Heroin Use During the Vietnam War

The Things They Carried

One of many elements that set the Vietnam War apart from other wars up until that point was drug
use, which was rampant among soldiers. Marijuana was grown all over Vietnam, and many soldiers
had their first experiences smoking it overseas. It helped them mellow out, it helped them continue
fighting. It took their mind off what the war was about and helped if they didn'tt necessarily believe
in the cause for which they fought. In The Things They Carried, drug use is treated matter of factly:
it is another not-too-wonderful strategy for trying not to see what is going on around the users. Some
soldiers have religion, others have girlfriends waiting for them at home, others have dope.

Although smoking marijuana -- the drug of choice among soldiers -- was a punishable offense under
army rules, many soldiers still indulged. Precise statistics are not available, but army records suggest
that marijuana use at the time was much more widespread in Vietnam itself than it was in the United
States. After outraged, sympathetic and bemused newspaper reports drew international interest to the
issue, the southern Vietnamese government took steps to make marijuana harder to obtain in 1968.
The problem was soon overshadowed, though, by the rise of heroin as a popular drug among
soldiers.

Some leaders chose to ignore the problem. Others encouraged marijuana use, because it kept their
men mellow and focused, because it diffused social problems in the group, because it had fewer side
affects than alcohol use and abuse, or because they simply could not imagine trying to prohibit it. It
is unclear whether a crackdown, ordered from above, on marijuana use helped feed a switch to
heroin. What is clear from army documents is that heroin was a larger problem. Heroin is
debilitating. And when soldiers returned to America they were sick for months because they no
longer had access to the drug. This was often in addition to post-traumatic stress disorder, an illness
portrayed in many of O'Brien's stories.

In O'Brien's fiction, all drugs are grouped together under the term "dope." As when writing about
many of the other aspects of the book -- casual sex, killing, to name a few -- O'Brien the narrator
remains non-judgmental. They are things that happen. Some people are drug addicts, others carry
their girlfriends' stockings. In the moral balance and the wider craze of the war, these small
transgressions hardly seem to matter.

Drug use in the book is even used to fuel some of the troops' humor. Ted Lavender is the group's
habitual drug user. When he is high, the other men like to ask him how the war is going. Lavender
responds: "...real smooth. Today we've got ourselves a real mellow war." (18) This is always good
for a laugh. When Lavender is killed, the others try to convince themselves that he is just high, is in
a higher place, has taken so much dope that he's up there floating in the clouds somewhere. To help
themselves believe this, the soldiers all partake in smoking what's left of Lavender's dope. This
anecdote illustrates that drug use, though it may have been insubordination according to strict army
definitions, was also simply a form of escapism for the soldiers.

Suggested Essay Questions

The Things They Carried

Is the book told in first person or third person? How does this affect the seeming reliability of
the narrative?

The Things They Carried is narrated, alternately, in third person and first person. The first person "I"
narratives feel trustworthy and personal, but O'Brien warns the reader against this very pitfall. He
writes that war stories should always be mistrusted, no matter who is telling them.
What is the role of shame in the soldiers' lives? Does shame propel them to heroism or
stupidity?

Shame is the reason that Tim O'Brien decided to go to Vietnam. Many of the characters feel shame
as a primary motivator, too. Not only does it lead them to war, but it keeps them there. It is the one
thing that keeps them from shooting themselves in the foot so that they would be discharged from
the army or some similar such act. But some characters, like Curt Lemon, think that shame impels
them to heroism, not stupidity.

In "The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong how does gender seem to affect reactions to war?

Mary Anne is one of the few females featured in the book, and her experience seems to suggest that
war is a great equalizer between the genders. When she arrives she is innocent, sexy, and very
feminine. After the war "gets to her" she becomes a killer like the others.

The central topic of The Things They Carried is the Vietnam War, but the book is also about
writing and storytelling. How would you describe O'Brien's conception of the role of fiction?

O'Brien writes that fiction serves a higher purpose than merely recounting what happened. He writes
that a good war story makes you wonder "is it true?" It makes you care about the answer to that
question. After having provoked that authentic feeling, it does not actually matter if the story is true
or not. Fiction is as good as experience.

A reoccuring theme throughout the book is expressed by the title. What do the characters
carry aside from physical objects?

The characters carry emotions like sadness and fear. Jimmy Cross carries responsibility for the lives
of his men. O'Brien sets up a dichotomy between weight and lightness, with war always described in
terms of weight, love in terms of lightness. His characters are condemned to carry the war for the
rest of their lives.

What role does Kathleen play in this book? Does she make her father feel guilty?

Kathleen, O'Brien's daughter, is a stand-in for the reader. She listens to her father's stories just as the
reader does. But because she is a character she can ask him questions, including whether or not he
has ever killed anyone. O'Brien's makes a guilt-tinged decision whether or not to lie, or make up
stories for his daughter.

Soldiers' tales are often an opportunity for the teller to swagger, to play the hero, to seem
macho. How does O'Brien portray this macho culture?

Because O'Brien is so ambivalent toward the whole project of war, it is not surprising that this book
disapproves of macho storytelling. Curt Lemon is the most macho character, a man who asks a
dentist to pull out a perfectly good tooth to demonstrate that he is not a sissy. Lemon dies the most
horrible death imaginable, but he is still the least likeable character in the book.

Read the dedication page of the book. How is it part of the narrative?
O'Brien dedicated his book to his characters, the men he served with in Vietnam. This exemplifies
the uneasy position of the book with regard to fiction and non-fiction. The author insists it is a
fictional account. But elements like the dedication continue to point to the reality of what happened
in Vietnam.

O'Brien writes that a story is "like a kind of dreaming." How so?

O'Brien tells war stories partly so that he can relive them again and again. He argues that each time
time one tells or reads a story one breathes life into the characters. When the story is over, they are
dead again, he writes. For O'Brien, fiction also resembles dreamingbecause both are involuntary: he
cannot help that his experiences haunt him.

What is the role of death in this book? Is it a release from a nightmarish life, or something to
be feared?

O'Brien, the narrator, is a profoundly non-religious man. For him, death is the end of the story. The
sense of senselessness pervading this book is rooted in two things: the Vietnam War seems to have
no real cause or justification, and the young men killed there reach the end of their lives and
effectively disappear. O'Brien's non-belief in the afterlife lends a special tinge of horror to the
already horrifying events.

Sources and ClassicNote Author

The Things They Carried

Tim O'Brien. The Things They Carried. London: HarperCollins, 1991.

Michael Herr. Dispatches. New York: Vintage, 1991.

Myra McPherson. A Long Time Passing: Vietnam and the Haunted Generation. New York: Anchor,
1993.

William Appleman Williams, Thomas McCormick, Lloyd Gardner, W. Lafeber. America in

Vietnam: A Documentary History. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989.

Tim O'Brien. "Author's Home Page." 2009-01-02. <http://www.illyria.com/tobhp.html>.

"Complete Index." 2009-01-02. <http://www.brtom.org/tttc/tttc1.html>.