by Vanessa Breedlove

Created on: January 21, 2009

"The Misconception of 'Love' During War"

In Tim O'Brien's short story "The Things They Carried", the characters themselves probably could not tell you why they carried many of the things they did. O'Brien moves beyond the horror of fighting in the Vietnam War to examine the nature of courage and fear. The short story may seem like just a list of physical things that the soldiers are carrying, but is really about what they carried mentally. Though each character is very different from the next, each of their individual stories is interrelated. The main character is Jimmy Cross who undergoes a transformation, in which he matures from infantry to a lieutenant. The antagonist is not a person in this story, but the war itself. O'Brien provides his audience with a very descriptive image of both the physical and mental "things" the characters in the story carried. The things the soldiers carried can be divided into three basic groups, the things that everyone had to carry in order to survive, the things that individuals chose to carry for personal comfort, and the mental burdens that many of them carried without choice.

Lieutenant Cross carried more than just his letters from Martha. He also carried maps and compasses which symbolized his responsibility for the men in his unit. Early in the story, his daydreams and responsibilities collided creating a moral dilemma for Cross.

The story portrays how "The Things They Carried" were weightless in comparison to their feelings of love and loss, fear and shame, and the torturous memories of death. "They all carried emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing- these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight." Each soldiers experience in the war was devastating in its own way. The men would go home carrying the pictures and memories of their dead companions, as well as the enemy soldiers they killed. These were the things that weighed the most, the burdens that the men wanted to put down the most, but were the things that they would forever carry, they would never find relief from the emotional baggage no matter where they went.

Jimmy Cross ultimately blamed himself for the death of Ted Lavender, one of the men in his unit. He believes that Ted died because of his own irresponsibility. He feels this way, because when Ted was dying, Jimmy was fantasizing about himself and Martha buried "...under the white sand at the Jersey shore." Jimmy tried

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