Coping Mechanisms: Dealing With War

Sherman Alexie once said, “When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing.” When humans are faced with struggle, he or she has two options: to cope with what they are faced with or to fall prey to the struggle. In the story, “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, the author narrates the experiences the soldiers of the Alpha Company as they traverse through the fields of Vietnam during the Vietnam War. War is traumatic, and it often changes people permanently. The soldiers deal with emotional, mental, and physical trauma more than most people ever have to endure. They encountered death, disease, and destruction on a weekly basis. The men deal with the uncertainty, fear, and death around them in surprisingly tender, humorous, or horrifyingly brutal ways in order to cope with what they have seen. When faced with war, each man reacts in his own way and changes based on the circumstances he stumbles upon.

Throughout the story, Azar along with the other soldiers used humor as form of coping. Jokes are continually made throughout the war in order to remove the reality from the situation and make it less real than it actually is. The jokes covered the fears they carry around. It creates the distance necessary to allow the war to not get to them. Finding things to joke around about helped the soldiers have a sense of purpose and existence even while everything around them was crumbling. According to Tim O’Brien, “They found jokes to tell. They used a hard vocab to contain the terrible softness…. When someone died, it wasn’t quite dying because in a curious way it seemed scripted…”. They choose to mock their experiences rather than face the pain associated with it as shown through their ritual of...

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... how he chooses to take out his pain. The buffalo was the embodiment of his pain, and he needed something to take their pain out on, so he begins to shoot pieces and pieces of the buffalo. According to the narrator, “it wasn’t to kill; it was to hurt… The whole platoon stood there watching, feeling all kinds of things, but there wasn’t a great deal of pity for the baby water buffalo.” Their aim was never to kill the buffalo, instead it was to make the buffalo experience the slow and killing pain that all of them had felt since the beginning of the war. A similar incident occurred immediately after Lavender’s death, as the Alpha Company chose to obliterate the town to release the pain brought on by the death of Lavender. In situations such as these, although violence is often not the best choice, it is one of the only ways they are able to move on from tragedy in war.