Thesis For The Things They Carried

“They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing— these were the intangibles…” (pg. 109). Although the men serving in the Vietnam War carried several pounds of gear and necessities on their bodies, there was something much heavier within their souls. The theme of “The Things They Carried,” is the burdensome mental weight of the war. This theme can be established by the guilt, fear, and the longing for home that is evident throughout the story.
One element that establishes the mental weight of the war is the soldiers’ longing for home. O’Brien uses many illustrations detailing how each soldier longed to be away from the war and carried with them sentimental things from home. Lieutenant Cross, longs

for and fantasizes about a woman back home. He carries with him her two pictures and her letters. Kiowa, a Native American, brings a feathered hatchet, moccasins, and an illustrated new testament. Another character, Henry Dobbins carries his girlfriend’s pantyhose around his neck. These things they carried, although physical in nature, represent each soldier’s desire for the familiar and their yearning to be back where life feels normal.
Another example that alludes to the longing for home and their inner distress is the soldiers’ drug use and their hallucinations of being back in the United States.

There are several reasons why the soldiers use drugs to escape the reality of war; but one purpose is to imagine going back to normal life and leaving the atrocities they’ve witness behind them. O’Brien writes that at night they would “give themselves over to lightness” and imagine flying “that big silver freedom bird over the mountains and oceans, over America, over the farms and great sleeping cities and cemeteries and highways and the golden arches of McDonald’s, it was flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through the vast, silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything weighed exactly nothing- Gone!.” (pg. 110) In his description, it’s plausible that something as ordinary as McDonald’s and wanting to be free from their anguish is representative of the yearning for home. As we imagine their circumstances, their wish to be back home was part of the mental burden they carried and one of their only sources of relief came in the form of getting

high.
The fear that these young soldiers’ carried is an additional burden that establishes the theme of the psychological weight of the war. Interestingly, the fear of death itself was not the heaviest burden that these men carried, but rather their fear of showing this weakness. Throughout the story, fear is one of the most coyly disguised mental afflictions of war; primarily because the author emphasizes that to show fear is to be a coward. O’Brien writes, “They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed and died because they were embarrassed not to.” (pg 110). Due to their fear, they sometimes privately imagined shooting off a toe or a finger to escape the war, but mocked and ridiculed anyone who would do so. Instead of acknowledging their panic in times of intense battle, they found themselves making crude jokes and laughing as a coping mechanism for immense stress they felt. Although fear invaded all corners of their brains, it was their inability to express this emotion that made it a substantial psychological burden.
The guilt that many of the characters feel is an additional component that relates to the psychological burden of war.

One form of guilt that the soldiers face is the weight of not being able to save their friends. As always in the case of war, there are several casualties that rock the platoon of men and each feels responsible in one death or another. After Ted Lavender is shot and killed while Lieutenant Cross is busy daydreaming about a girl back home, Cross is unable to keep himself from shaking and sobbing in his foxhole. Cross feels such guilt for not protecting his soldiers that he decides to burn the pictures and letters from Martha, so as to not be distracted by the thought of her. The fatality of Kiowa also weighs heavy on the mind of Norman Bowker. After another failure in leadership by Lieutenant Cross, the platoon sets up camp in a low lying field of human waste. As the rain pounds the soldiers and raises the depth of muck, a mortar hits Kiowa and buries him. Norman Bowker attempts to rescue his friend, but is overwhelmed by smell and taste of the sludge. He loses his grasp of Kiowa’s boot and Norman’s friend is lost in the mud. Although Lieutenant Cross and another unnamed soldier carry some feelings of guilt for Kiowa’s death, it is Norman Bowker who cannot forgive himself for letting go of Kiowa’s boot. Later in the story, O’Brien discloses that Norman hangs himself in the local YMCA after years of guilt. The author also shares his own personal feelings of

guilt from the war when he writes, “I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now, and the war has been over for a long while. Much of it is hard to remember. I sit at this typewriter and stare through my words and watch Kiowa sinking into the deep muck of a shit field, or Curt Lemon hanging in pieces from a tree, and as I write about these things, the remembering is turned into a kind of rehappening. Kiowa yells at me. Curt lemon steps from the shade into bright sunlight, his face brown and shining, and then he soars into a tree. The bad stuff never stops happening; it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.” (pg 110). For the characters in this story, the guilt that the feel does not end with the war. Instead, they are forced to endure a lifetime of tragic memories in which closure and forgiveness is difficult to find.
Whether it be physical reminders or drug-induced fantasies, the soldiers’ longing for home was one burden that added to the mental weight of the war. Fear of showing their own fear, and guilt for the things they could not change also contributed to the psychological load the soldiers carried within their mind. Tim O’Brien takes the time to detail the tangible weight of each item a soldier carries. However, the main theme of “The Things They Carried,” is that the things we carry inside of us are often heavier than the physical weight we bear.