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 of reality with fiction, and non-chronological timeline to replicate the feelings suffered by American soldiers. This combined with the lack of goal clarity, the emphasis on the word 'hump', as well as O'Brien's specificity in "The Things They Carried" helps readers to understand the failures of the war and vicariously experience the uncertainty of the war that soldiers felt as common grunts. 

In an excerpt of "The Things They Carried", O'Brien stresses the ambiguity of the objectives of the war, and how that lack of clarity affected the soldiers. O'Brien wrote, "they carried their own lives" (O'Brien 229), indicating that the soldiers' only real mission was to look after themselves. They simply droned on in their missions while fighting for their lives. "It was just the endless march, village to village, without purpose" (229). In this way, the author makes it evident that the soldiers were not fighting for a specific purpose, whether or not that purpose was known. 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. This resulted in "[the soldiers having] no sense of strategy or mission. They searched the villages without knowing what to look for, not caring" (O'Brien 229). The top officials' attempted to accomplish too many objectives and were unable to create concrete goals, which led to the soldiers' confusion. The soldiers were unaware of what they were trying to accomplish, and therefore were not motivated to fight this war. Colonel Summers compared the many U.S. goals in Vietnam to a building. He described the war as, "a great logical edifice built on a foundation of gas" (Kreisler 2). In the same sense, he compared the main objective to a foundation made up of gas. He was saying that without a strong foundation, the whole building comes crashing down, as was the case with the Vietnam War effort. This implies that the lack of an objective caused the American goals to collapse around the soldiers in the war.

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 uncertainty that soldiers in the Vietnam War felt on a daily basis. "Lieutenant Cross gazed at the tunnel. But he was not there. He was buried with Martha under the white sand at the Jersey shore" (O'Brien 227). His use of verisimilitude forces readers to remain attentive in order to predict what is to come. Similarly, American soldiers never knew when to expect attacks, as was the case when, "Vietcong forces launched the Tet Offensive, named for the Vietnamese holiday then being observed" (Anderson). The Vietcong attacked on a local holiday, surprising the U.S. forces, which was common in the war. The style of "The Things They Carried" makes the reader stay alert and attempt to predict the unpredictable, much like how a soldier would have felt in the war. 

Uncertainty was a common feeling among American soldiers due to the Viet Cong's war strategy. The Viet Cong, North Vietnam's army, employed the use of guerrilla warfare, a style of war where the land is utilized to hide and launch surprise attacks on the enemy, and"By 1961, guerrilla warfare was widespread in South Vietnam" (Anderson). In combatting this style of war tactics, American soldiers never knew when they would be attacked. This is exemplified in the excerpt from O'Brien's novel when he writes, "Right then Ted Lavender was shot in the head on his way back from peeing" (O'Brien 227). O'Brien presents Lavender's death in the aftermath of a suspenseful scene where the attention is focused on a character that survives a dangerous situation. Lavender had been conducting a daily ritual when he suddenly, shockingly lost his life. Presenting Lavender's death as a surprise helps the reader to relate to 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). This feeling of uncertainty due to guerilla warfare kept soldiers on constant alert. O'Brien's writing style places the reader directly in a soldier's shoes, and forces them to feel the emotions that plagued soldiers fighting in Vietnam.

O'Brien utilizes description in his writing; tediously detailing every item the men carry with them. In this way, readers obtain a more realistic image of scenes from the war. A large portion of the excerpt is devoted to describing the things that they brought 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 was shot and killed outside Than Khe" (O'Brien 224). O'Brien focuses on seemingly insignificant details like the weight of the gun to give the reader a sense of what the soldiers were going through. He includes specific weights of all the equipment as if to emphasize the protective ability of the gear. "They carried all they could bear, and then some" (225). O'Brien attempts to portray safety in the array of weapons offered to the soldiers. However, the fact that the army provides an assortment this extensive of weaponry suggests that they were unaware of the dangers Vietnam presented. O'Brien then describes Lavender's dead body, "He lay with his mouth open. The teeth were broken. There was a swollen black bruise under his left eye. The cheekbone was gone" (227-228). O'Brien's inclusion of Lavender's unexpected death ironically describes how his heavy and extraneous equipment was not enough to save him from his inevitable death. In this way, he shows that the soldiers are still just grunts in great danger, humping around a hostile country. 

O'Brien repeatedly employs the word hump throughout "The Things They Carried" to emphasize the many burdens the soldiers carried. "To hump meant to walk, or to march, but it implied burdens far beyond the intransitive" (223). Humping is not only used to describe the physical burdens the soldiers carry, but also the emotional ones. "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). Many of the soldiers in Lavender's unit had to attempt to cope with this news. "Mitchell Sanders said, there's a definite moral here" (228). Sanders' coping mechanism was to attempt to turn Lavender's death into a lesson. Hump, in comparison to a similar word such as carry, has a negative connotation with it. O'Brien chooses hump for that very reason, in an attempt to relay the feelings felt by the soldiers that are impossible to truly describe to anyone who never experienced the war. Hump is employed throughout "The Things They Carried" to show all of the hardships that the soldiers faced in the Vietnam War.

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