by Erin K. Wiedemer

Created on: February 11, 2008

Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" is a horror tale of war. It follows the trail of Alpha Company led by Lt. Jimmy Cross. Throughout the story, what the men carried is chronicled in explicit detail. What they "humped" is vital to the story because it illustrates how the soldiers of Vietnam survived the atrocities and nightmares of the Vietnam War. All of the things the men of Alpha Company carried, from the dope to the peaches and cake, were items of necessity because they were means of escape. The soldiers needed routes of escape in order to survive the everyday guilt, shame, and terror that the Vietnam War inflicted upon them in malignant showers. They used the items they carried as passports to imagination and fantasy. It was through these means that the soldiers escaped the war and found their salvation.

The men's loads were a physical burden that served to take their minds off of weightier issues, such as their own mortality. "The hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility" (15). It was an opiate for their emotional pain. It dulled their questioning minds. The weight on their backs left them with no energy to ask "why?" It desensitized their once sensitive souls.

"Their principles were in their feet. They searched the villages without knowing what to look for, not caring, kicking over jars of rice, frisking children and old men, blowing tunnels, sometimes setting fires and sometimes not, then forming up and moving on to the next village, then other villages, where it would always be the same.(15)"

The heaviness of their loads left the soldiers with little but exhausted resignation to duty. The routine of destroying villages became an endless "hump," a greasy streak of time with no end in comprehension. The things they carried were the only sure things in their uncertain, war-torn lives. "For all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry" (16). It was their one stable factor. It was the one thing that they could count on, so they concentrated on it and clung to it for their emotional survival. It dulled their senses and never surprised them. It was the drug of Vietnam and everyone was hooked on it.

Every man in Alpha Company carried his own form of the "drug." Henry Dobbins carried extra rations with him because eating was his means

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