As a veteran of Vietnam, Tim O'Brien has a uniquely personal perspective of the Vietnam War. Most Americans back home were unclear as to the purpose of the Vietnam War.  What's more is that the soldiers themselves were not sure of their own goals as they blindly followed orders. Tim O'Brien employs the use of verisimilitude, the blurring reality with fiction, and a random skipping around of stories to replicate the feelings of uncertainty suffered by American soldiers. This combined with the lack of goal clarity and the emphasis on the of hump in The Things They Carried helps readers to understand the failures of the war and vicariously experience the uncertainty of the war that O'Brien felt as a common grunt. 

In an excerpt of The Things They Carried, O'Brien stresses the ambiguity of the objectives of the war from a soldier's standpoint. "It was just the endless march, village to village, without purpose... They had no sense of strategy or mission. They searched the villages without knowing what to look for, not caring" (O'Brien, 229). In this way, he makes it evident that the soldiers were not fighting for a specific purpose, whether or not that purpose was known. They simply droned on in their missions while fighting for their lives. O'Brien wrote, "they carried their own lives" (229), indicating that the soldiers' only real mission was to look after themselves. On a higher level, the Commanders, Generals, and top officials were unclear as to the political goals of the war themselves. In an interview with Colonel Harry Summers, Summers states that, "Hugh Arnold of the University of Nebraska found twenty-two separate objectives for why we were in Vietnam" (Kreisler, 2). The lack of an overall mission in favor of several goals doomed the war to failure from the beginning. Summers describes this as, "a great logical edifice built on a foundation of gas" (2). Colonel Summers compares the many U.S. goals in Vietnam to a building. In the same sense, he compares the main objective to accomplish these goals to a foundation made up of gas. This implies that the lack of an objective caused the American goals to come crashing down.

O'Brien's style in The Things They Carried helps the reader to understand the experience of war. Through implementation of Verisimilitude, O'Brien is able to challenge readers to believe or disbelieve his stories.  The confusion this creates within the reader mimics the feeling of not knowing what is going to happen that was felt by the soldiers in the Vietnam War. O'Brien's style of randomly combining short stories adds to the confusion and gives the book a sense of unpredictability. This mirrors the experiences of the soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War. The Viet Cong, North Vietnam's army, employed the use of guerrilla warfare, a style of war where the land is used to hide and launch surprise attacks on the enemy. American soldiers never knew when they would be attacked. "Right then Ted Lavender was shot in the head on his way back from peeing" (O'Brien, 227). O'Brien presents his death on the aftermath of a suspenseful scene where the attention is focused on a character that survives a dangerous situation. Presenting Lavender's death as a surprise helps the reader relate with the feelings of the stunned soldiers as they react to the unexpected. "Almost all of the literature on war, both fictional and nonfictional, makes clear that the only certain thing during the Vietnam War was that nothing was certain" (Kaplan, 43). Trying to keep up with this uncertainty kept soldiers on a constant alertness. O'Brien's use of blurring the truth forces readers to remain alert to attempt to distinguish between fiction and reality. The style of The Things They Carried forces the reader to stay alert and attempt to predict the unpredictable, much like how a soldier would feel in the war. O'Brien writing style places the reader directly in a soldiers shoes, and forces them to feel the emotions that plagued soldiers fighting in Vietnam.

Tim O'Brien repeatedly employs the word hump throughout The Things They Carried to emphasize the burden the soldiers carry.  "To hump meant to walk, or to march, but it implied burdens far beyond the intransitive" (O'Brien, 223). A large portion of O'Brien's book is devoted to describing the things that they humped with them in great detail. "Among the grunts, some carried the M-79 grenade launcher, 5.9 pounds unloaded... A single round weighed 10 ounces. The typical load was 25 rounds. But Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried 34 rounds when he wad shot and killed outside Than Khe" (224). O'Brien focuses in on even insignificant details like the weight of the gun to give the reader a sense of what the soldiers are going through. He includes specific weights of all the equipment as if to emphasize the protective ability of the gear. However, O'Brien also includes Lavender, and how his specific equipment was not enough to save him to show that they are still just grunts in great danger, humping around a hostile country. Humping is not only used to describe the physical burdens the soldiers carry. "Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war" (230). This shows that the soldiers carried their emotional burdens with them as well. O'Brien also uses hump to show that the army provided them with a random assortment of equipment. "They carried all they could bear, and then some" (225). Once again, O'Brien attempts to portray safety in the array of weapons offered to the soldiers. However, the fact that the army has to provide this extensive variety of weaponry suggests that it doesn't know what it is up against in Vietnam. Hump is employed throughout The Things They Carried to show all of the hardships that the soldiers had to face.

O'Brien portrays the failure and experience of the Vietnam War through his style of verisimilitude and randomness, along with the exclusion of a central goal and repeated use of the word hump. Through his writing style, O'Brien is able to portray some of the emotions that were felt throughout the Vietnam War. Being a veteran of the war gave Tim O'Brien a unique understanding of the role of a grunt soldier and the emotions that came with that role.
