Story Review: The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

Story Review: “The Things They Carried”
What do you carry? What do you carry with you on your person? How about what you carry in your heart? Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carries with him more than just letters from his beautiful pen pal, Martha. He luges around the weight of the world, his men’s lives sit on his shoulders. Everything is up to Lieutenant Cross, yet he finds himself distracted and lusting over a woman who only signs love. The story "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien is an engaging read that encourages you to dig deeper and reevaluate what you are “carrying” around with you everyday and how if effects those around you.
Tim O’Brien’s story transports us to world full of gunshots, bombs, and uncertainty. Telling the story of

a group of men in the heart of the Vietnam War surrounded by orange- red dust and fear. The story talks of the literal things each man carries with them but also the mental connections they have with these objects. They carry the fear that haunts them at night and keeps their guns tight in their hands. They carry tranquilizers, M&M’s, photographs, and magazines to try and easy their minds of the mental things they carry. Lieutenant Cross learns that sometimes the things they carry with them in their hearts and minds can be heavier than what they carry in their packs.
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Being in love can make you do crazy things and there’s no exception to a young man fighting war. Carrying with him the letters of a young woman attending Mount Sebastian College and two pictures. One of her standing against a brick wall staring
dully at the camera oblivious to the war going on across the sea and one of her clipped from a yearbook of her froze in motion playing volleyball. Lieutenant Cross couldn’t keep his mind off of her as her trekked through Vietnam. He allowed his men to be carefree blowing through unused ammo, and killing senselessly when they entered villages. Jimmy Cross took advantage of his men letting them carry the burden of war while his head was in the clouds. Everything came crashing back to the ground when his carelessness let one of his men die. How would it feel to know that it was your fault that someone whose life was trusted in your hand was killed because you were blinded by love? Blinded by a love for a woman who does not even acknowledge that she knows how you feel? Lee Strunk was stuck deep in an enemy tunnel outside of the village of Than Khe and Ted Lavender was shot in the head, killed instantly, “boom- down” all while Lieutenant Cross was thinking of a women. A woman in another world, Martha had no idea that a war was even going on.
(The Vietnam War started around 1955 and ended in 1975.) The men fighting the Vietnam war where forced to battle on someone else’s land. They were away from home and away from their families carrying with them only hopes of making it home. Many of the men pulled from their homes were deployed not even knowing what they were fighting for. The Vietnam War was the first highly televised war giving viewers a front row seat at what their boys were doing over seas. This lead to Americans boycotting the
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war and turning their backs on all who were fighting in it. Vietnam veterans were not met with praise when they came home battered from war instead they were met with picket signs. These Veterans were already carrying with them the guilt of what they were forced to do under the governments hand and the horrors of what they saw now they were being forced to carry yet another burden. The hatred for a war they did not want to fight.
Continuing, “The Thing’s They Carried” is an engaging read that encourages everyone to dig deeper into the things they are “carrying.” As in the story the soldiers carried many things with them including a PRC-77 scrambler radio that weighed thirty pounds and Claymore antipersonnel mines that weighed 3.5 pounds, with it’s firing device.

They also carried personal ideas like chessboard, good-luck-charms, and bibles. None of these physical weights however matched up to the mental weights they were carrying with them. They carried panic with them when under enemy fire with nothing to do but fire blindly into the sky, they carried the grief of losing friends, and they carried with them the shame of wanting out of the war so bad that they thought of shooting off their own fingers.
This story gets you thinking, what do I carry around with me? Is it the worry of paying bills on time? How about where your next meal is coming from? Everyone carries with them some for of baggage, whether it is from something that has happened in the past or that is happening now. We all carry a weight on our shoulders that no one else can see. “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien brings this into prospective by tell us a story of a solider, Lieutenant Cross, who’s carried burden gets in the way of his

job
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leaving him with even more regrets pilling up on all the other things that he “carries.”
Another thing that “The Thing’s They Carried” elicits is, the though of how the things we “carry” effect the people around us. For Lieutenant Jimmy Cross the burden of
Martha’s love or lack of love lead to one of his men getting killed. The sadness that filled the hearts of the men after awards lead to them ransacking a village killing everything in sight and calling in artillery for no other reason but to let off steam. So how do the things we carry effect those around us? Are you stressed about work or did you kid just really tick you off this morning? How does that affect the way you treat others throughout the day? Snapping at the women in the grocery store whose kid is fussing and laying into your car horn, when the car in front of you did not move fast enough, are both ways that people release some of the strain. That doesn’t relieve the pains on our backs instead it adds to the pain of others. Causing them to carry around more emotional stress too.
Again the reading “The Thing’s They Carried” engages readers with its smooth flow of details and interesting content. Telling readers about the physical things that Lieutenant Cross’ platoon carries allows readers to full imagine the situation they were in. Forced to carry the supplies with them that their lives depended. The most burdensome item having to be their rain ponchos, how would you like to carry around with you the item itself that means death? Yes, the men used these coats to protect them from the rain but it was also the first thing pulled from backs when a man was pronounced dead. These coats were carried in by the living and in the end carried out the dead. “The Thing’s They Carried” keeps the readers attention by describing these things in detail. Telling us what each item weighed and what its purpose was. O’Brien also
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describes what the men carry with them to help keep their minds off of things and what importance they had. Like the luck white and brown speckled peddle that Martha sent Lieutenant Cross. They also carried rabbit’s feet, and severed thumbs that told a Moral. These physical things combined with the mental baggage of fear, love, grief, and longing. The heaviest felt emotion carried by the men in the story however is the fear of dying. The story pulls readers along as they try to discover the secrets of what each man carries.
In conclusion, the story "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien is an engaging read that encourages you to dig deeper and reevaluate what you are “carrying” around with you everyday and how if effects those around you. Lieutenant Cross found himself carrying around with him what many others carry with them, the love for someone who doesn’t love you back. This lack of love leads him to neglect his duties as leader getting one of his men killed. This story gets readers thinking about the thing they carry with them everyday both physical and mental. How these things are aloud to affect those around them can mean a lot.