Stress In The Things They Carried

Everyone has their breaking point. For soldiers in the Vietnam War, their breaking point escalated into Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a mental health problem triggered by an event that an individual views as traumatic. The Things They Carried is a war novel that primarily focused on how the Alpha Company, a deployed unit in Vietnam, coped and confronted the aftereffects that followed traumatic events from the Vietnam War. Told from O’ Brien’s retrospective, he chronicled the change of Rat Kiley, the nineteen-year old medic of Alpha Company in which O’Brien was stationed in, who transformed from a unsuspecting, young teenager to a marred soldier who became dissociated from the world and those around

The environment in which Kiley was first deployed to lacked rules since authorities were not present to enforce them, the highest ranking NCO’s favorite pastimes ran from “dope to Darvon...there was no such thing as military discipline...You could let your hair grow...didn’t have to polish your boots or snap off salutes, or put up with the usual rear-end nonsense” (91). Thus along with the medical unit, Kiley’s exposure in a medical detachment far away from the tropical warzone gave him a deceptive impression of the Vietnam war. His ingenuous attitude shows that as a young soldier, Kiley had entered the war with a simplistic worldview, unsuspecting of the severity the war brought on to everybody within its sphere of influence. In one of the early chapters, “How To Tell A True War Story”, O’Brien recalled the time Lemon and Kiley went off by themselves after the platoon marched for two days, “A nature hike, [Rat Kiley and Curt Lemon] thought…giggling and calling each other yellow mother and playing a silly game they invented” (69). Kiley is momentarily portrayed as a kid, who is untouched by the harsh realities of the Vietnam War. But the juxtaposition of placing an unsuspecting child in a hostile war zone sets an ominous tone for Rat Kiley. Like most soldiers who had been drafted into the war, Kiley initially did not have the emotional

During his deployment in Vietnam, Kiley experienced the dark elements of the war, indubitably changing his perspective of the war and him as a person-- from the deaths of his fellow soldiers to the unresolved issues, nightmares, and detachment from reality. What is left of Kiley is only a