
Imagine a scene where you are in a field of chaos. The bodies of your friends and fellow soldiers dropping left and right, a large bomb explosion destroying a group of people, bullets zooming through the air, and blood spatter everywhere. How would you cope with this image? Soldiers during warfare go through horrible, psychologically detrimental experiences. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a realistic fiction story that tells of Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and a group of his soldiers. The text talks about the different things that they “carried” throughout the Vietnam War, whether it be tangible or intangible, physical baggage or emotional baggage. Elements of The Things They Carried help readers to better understand the psychological culture of war by showing fictional, yet realistic examples of the lives of soldiers during the Vietnam War, and how the warfare affected them. 

The death of Ted Lavender greatly affected the soldiers psychologically, the ones who witnessed it, especially Jimmy Cross, mainly because he felt that he was partially the cause of it. While the platoon was on a mission to clear out a tunnel, one of the soldiers, Ted Lavender, was shot in the head and killed in front of the rest of his comrades. Cross felt that it was his fault because he was daydreaming about Martha, the woman he loves, and he got distracted from the situation at hand, which lead to Lavender dying. That death will have a strong impact on Cross, possibly in the form of PTSD, or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which is a condition that was not well known at the time of the Vietnam War. Symptoms of PTSD include flashbacks, fear, severe anxiety, mistrust, insomnia and nightmares. According to real studies, statistically, 30.9% of Vietnam War veterans will develop PTSD over the course of their life, with an additional 22.5% that will develop partial or less severe symptoms of PTSD; Also, those in a group of veterans that rated themselves as being exposed to higher war-zone stressors had a higher occurrence of PTSD among them (Dohrenwend et al., 2006). In the text, Lavender’s death and its effect on the other soldiers gives a great example of a situation that actual Vietnam soldiers had to experience. An ordeal comparable to that usually has a immense impact on a soldier’s psyche, especially since they are in combat and there is death surrounding and following them. Therefore, the development of PTSD in some veterans is inevitable. Unfortunately, veterans with some form of PTSD tend to have frightful flashbacks to specific scenes from their time in combat, like the deaths of their comrades, which can cause fear, anger, and irritability. Even with these horrific events happening around them, the soldiers still had to control their emotions to get through the war.

The soldiers in the text tried to “carry” themselves with a sense of poise and dignity as best they could, trying to stay “manly” throughout the terror and the fear that the chaos of war brings them. There was a stigma against outwardly showing emotion during and after a fearful situation among the soldiers. “They carried all the 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” (O’Brien 338). Many soldiers during the Vietnam War, especially the ones in heavy combat, had to contain their emotions as long as they could in order to not seem feeble or cowardly to the other soldiers, like the ones in the text; “They [Grinker and Spiegel] argued that ‘it would seem to be a more rational question to ask why the soldier does not succumb to anxiety, rather than why he does.’ According to them, every man had his breaking point; they estimated this breaking point to occur anywhere between 100 days and 1 year of active combat duty” (qtd in Pols et al. 2007).  All of the different traumatic experiences that a soldier has during the war will eventually cause him to break down. The text illustrates realistic circumstances that show the universally understood taboo among the soldiers with them outwardly showing their emotions, and the text gives the reader a better insight on the different emotions that actual soldiers during the Vietnam had to experience. Since it was kind of taboo to show emotion among the men, each of them had to use sometime of coping mechanism to stay somewhat mentally sound.

Many of the soldiers used different coping mechanisms during their time in warfare. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross used Martha, a girl back home that he was in love with, as a primary coping mechanism during his time during the war; Kiowa, a devout Christian, always carries his illustrated New Testament that his father gave him, but he also carries his grandmother’s old hunting hatchet; Ted Lavender always had some type of premium dope with him. These different coping mechanisms fall under a type of coping, which is emotion-focused coping. Studies show that emotion-focused coping, particularly avoidance coping, are related to higher levels of PTSD (qtd in Karstoft et al. 2015). The different things that fall under emotion-focused coping include avoidance coping, which is the version of coping that Cross used whenever he would fantasize about Martha and revert to different memories he had of her during different missions. Ted Lavender and his marijuana usage was also a kind of avoidance coping mechanism. Many actual soldiers used other coping mechanisms like this during the Vietnam War, especially drug use and alcohol use. 

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a realistic depiction of the lives of soldiers that participated in combat during the Vietnam War that explicitly illustrates different traumatic events that the soldiers had to experience during warfare, like death, the emotional baggage that they had to carry all throughout, and the various ways they coped with their emotions in order to moderately stay mentally sane. The text helps readers to greater understand its cultural context, the damaging psychological effects of war on military veterans. The soldiers in The Things They Carried and in the actual Vietnam War went through horrendous and terrifying experiences that caused a lot of emotional weight that they had to cope with.
