Sympathy In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

There were about thirty eight million collective casualties in World War 1, and about 1.4 million casualties in the Vietnam war. Nonetheless, despite the different time periods and combat tactics, it appears that the amount of compassion and sympathy for the unmasked enemy remained relatively constant; time and the inhumanity did not quite numb all the emotions that could be invoked thereafter. When Paul Baumer, stabbed a soldier in a shell hole, and witnessed his slow death, he became overrun by guilt and grief and began explaining himself, "Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called

forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me.” (AQOTWF, 223)
Although The Things They Carried is a fictional novel, it is based off O’Brien’s war experiences, and in a certain chapter, he continually retells the fictional story about a man he killed.

He attempts to justify his reasoning by saying, “There were no thoughts about killing. The grenade was to make him go away—just evaporate—and I leaned back and felt my mind go empty and then felt it fill up again. I had already thrown the grenade before telling myself to throw it” (TTTC, 126). Nonetheless, even then, the guilt does not rid itself from his thoughts, and this is the type of realization, ending someone’s life, and witnessing all the gore, is what continually haunts soldier. This is also one of the concepts that overly patriotic people who have never been to war yet indulge themselves in political affairs fail or refuse to

understand.
In both novels, the soldiers joke about dead people, comrades even, and it isn’t because they are ruthless, on the contrary, it is subsequent to the ideology that they are generally benevolent people with altruistic fundamentals as well as the capability to experience very real emotions. However, these three things considered as a whole have minimal if any meaning on the battlefront. It would be unbearable and possibly even dangerous for a man to acknowledge each individual who died or was injured as a result of their action. This is something that soldiers unanimously understand. Therefore, the crude jokes made against dead people are a coping mechanism, or as Tim O’Brien notes, “The use hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness” (TTTC, 19)
The time period between unmasking the enemy and still failing to acknowledge the human within, is almost instantaneous because the trauma that follows leads soldiers to question the futility of war.

In All Quiet on the Western Front, it becomes very apparent that some of the soldiers do not feel as if World War I was their fight, when comrades begin discussing the origin of war. One comrade, Albert states that a war is initiated by “one country badly offending the other” (204). This lead to a discussion over why the soldiers are fighting when truly it is one person or a small group of people that are directly offended by an opposing group in a similar position of power. Therefore, why must they discover the true horrors of war while simultaneously putting their lives on the line, when the ones who began the predicament, propelled false advertisement with propagandas that romanticized and glorified war don’t have to live as if the next second may be their

last.