Two Notable Stories Within The Things They Carried

Speaking of Courage

Tim O'Brien's The Things they Carried put both my logic and emotions to great test. As it is a novel composed of war stories, one may automatically assume that reading The Things They Carried would be an enlightening endeavor, and an educational experience. However, I never thought that a book could captivate me the way that the stories in this novel have.

Speaking of Courage, is a featured story in The Things They Carried. This particular story is a post-war insight into the life of a young Vietnam Veteran. The main character Norman Bowker returns to his hometown after the war had ended. With himself he brings home countless amounts of experiences, memories, and thoughts that place him in a setting abstract from what he remembered as "home." Norman finds himself driving around the seven-mile lake in his father's Chevy reflecting on the past and thinking of hypothetical situations. He drives twelve times around this lake, thus eighty-four miles of thoughts ran through his head.

He remembers the times before the war. When he used to drive around the same lake with his friends from high school. He recalls the girl he once dated, Sally Kramer, and the carefree fun they used to have. That was before the war, before he won seven medals, and before he almost won the Silver Star. Now Sally Kramer was Sally Gustafson, married with her own house set on that lake. He thought of what he would say to her if she were to listen to what he would like to say. He thought of how she would react to what was said, as if things were as they had once been before he had gone off to war. He thought of his best friend Max who had drowned in the lake before the war. Imagining what Max would have said if he was there to listen to Norman tell the tales he would like to tell. He would have told about how he almost won the Silver Star. Norman would have told this to his father too, if his father hadn't been so into baseball. There is so much he would have said...

Norman begins having the hypothetical conversation with himself as he continues to drive around the lake. He tells the story the way he would tell his father, and Max, and Sally.