Lieutenant Jimmy Cross Analysis

Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, a soldier in The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, had extremely strong feelings for a girl back home, Martha. He carried her letters and her pictures with him in his rucksack because they gave him an escape from the terrors of the war and they helped him to remember he has a life after the war.

Cross’ feelings for Martha were made evident by the way he thought of her. The letters he received from her, “Were signed Love, Martha, but Lieutenant Cross understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant.” (O’Brien, 2) He was constantly reading these letters and imagining what Martha had been doing when she wrote them.

Although he knew Martha had boyfriends, Cross was always jealous of who she was with. “At night, sometimes, Lieutenant Cross wondered who had taken the picture, because he knew she had boyfriends, because he loved her so much, and because he could see the shadow of the picture taker spreading out against the brick wall.” (O’Brien, 4) He almost seems to become just as obsessed with the people she might be with, as he is with her. When she sent him the pebble she described it as representing the separate-but-together aspect of their relationship and then sent it to him as a token of her truest feelings for him. This made him doubt their

relationship, which seems to exist only in his head. It also took his mind off of what he was doing in the war. He was having a daydream about Martha on the beach finding the pebble, which was interrupted by him giving an order to his men, then he returned to his day dream.
He became so distracted from his duties as a leader on his patrol, that when he realized one of his men, Ted Lavender, was dead he blamed himself for getting distracted. He hated himself and felt ashamed for letting him die. He thought it was because he loved Martha more than his men and Lavender’s death was the consequence. At that point, Cross finally realized Martha would never love him like he loved her. Martha represented the baggage that all men carry in their minds, and the baggage that prevents jobs being done properly. Cross needed to get her out of his head so he could do his job properly. Sadly, Lavender had to lose his life before he realized this.
He became determined to fulfill his duties without failure.

This meant he had dispose of Martha. So he burned her pictures and her letters. He kept her good luck pebble for a while, but eventually decided he had to dispose of it too. He considered shooting it in the slingshot carried by one of his men, dropping on the path and even swallowing the pebble. He wanted to keep his unit as safe as possible so he instilled a stricter discipline and confiscated the marijuana that had been carried by Lavender before his death. He even eventually accepted the blame for Lavender’s death, which helped him to lead his unit safely home after the

war.