
Prior to the Vietnam War, veterans of previous wars who exhibited psychological distress were said to be experiencing “shell shock” or “combat stress.” After the 20-year-long American conflict in Vietnam, so many soldiers came back to the states with extreme emotional trauma such that these psychological symptoms were formally diagnosed as post-traumatic-stress disorder, or PTSD. PTSD is defined as a mental disorder that a person develops after experiencing a severely traumatic event. (Landrum 35) This disorder is commonly experienced by war veterans because of the brutal conditions of war that often have a great effect on the mental health of a soldier. Interestingly enough, the alarmingly high percentage of veterans who returned from the Vietnam War suffering from PTSD was remarkable. The large fraction of Vietnam War veterans that were diagnosed with the disorder can be attributed to the fact that the war was one of the cruelest wars in American history. That being said, the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien tells a story about a group of young soldiers who are fighting in the Vietnam War. By understanding PTSD, the reader is able to further understand O’Brien’s story of these young men who are changed irrevocably by war.

In the text, the soldiers experience shock as they witness the death of a comrade and PTSD is evident. After a fellow soldier named Ted Lavender was shot down unexpectedly on a mission, the narrator explains a soldier’s reaction, “Oh shit, Rat Kiley said, the guy’s dead. The guy’s dead, he kept saying, which seemed profound—the guy’s dead. I mean really.” (O’Brien 334) In this scene, Ted Lavender was on his way back from relieving himself in the woods when he was suddenly shot in the back of the head and fell to the ground in front of his comrade Rat Kiley. Instead of grieving or showing any remorse for Lavender, Kiley stoically repeats the fact that “the guy’s dead.” He does not express any emotion, but instead, by repeating the same words over and over again, the reader can induce that he feels shock. When a person experiences a traumatic event, they undergo extreme emotional distress and this is what causes PTSD. (Landrum 35) Rat Kiley’s reaction to the death of his comrade displays the presence of post-traumatic-stress disorder because the shock he feels shows his inability to emotionally process the death of his friend and this illustrates the extent of which the death affected him psychologically. Moreover, Kiley’s shock shows how traumatizing the murder of his friend was for him and this causes him to experience great emotional suffering which in turn proves the presence of PTSD. The post-traumatic-stress that is manifested in Kiley by the death of his comrade is important to understand because it allows the reader to fully comprehend the emotional distraught that he feels and therefore, knowledge about PTSD allows for a better understanding of the characters as men affected by war. 

Also, evidence of PTSD is delivered to the reader through the soldiers’ impassive reactions to death. The narrative describes, “When someone dies, it wasn’t quite dying…They kicked corpses. They cut off thumbs. They talked grunt lingo.” (O’Brien 338) This quote explains how the men have become emotionally numb to the presence of death. The soldiers no longer feel saddened or disgusted by a dead body; they act like death means nothing. One characteristic of PTSD is emotional dysregulation, emotional numbing or detachment. People who experience trauma tend to force themselves to avoid any stimuli associated with what they went through so not to experience it again and, therefore, they push their emotions away. (Landrum 35-36) Initially, as young men, the soldiers must have gone into battle greatly traumatized by their first encounters of death. Now that they have grown used to being at war, they no longer allow themselves to be emotionally aroused by death. Because they previously experienced the pain of admitting to their emotions, they now think of death as something different, as something unrealistic so to escape the interminable pain it would cause otherwise. When witnessing men being murdered or venturing across corpses becomes commonplace, the soldiers react indifferent because they know from experience that to feel something would mean to feel pain so burying their feelings is what they believe they must do as soldiers trying to survive. By refusing to let their emotions surface, the soldiers confirm the presence of PTSD because their refusal to feel anything proves the fact that embracing their emotions has caused them traumatic psychological pain. It is essential to recognize the presence of PTSD in the soldiers’ decisions to suppress their emotions because it illustrates how war forces the soldiers to let go of part of their humanity; and how PTSD forces the soldiers to change internally because of the mental trauma they experience as result of war and the death war creates.

While PTSD is exemplified in the soldiers’ way of shutting off their emotions, the disorder is also evident by the emotional weight the soldiers still carry inside. O’Brien writes, “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were tangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.” (O’Brien 338) In this quote, the narration sheds light on the fact that the soldiers don’t only carry the weight of their supplies, but they also carry the heavy emotional burden of war. The emotions created by the conditions of war have as much tangible weight to the soldiers as the physical objects that they carry through the Vietnam jungle. For example, a Vietnam War veteran of many years, who struggles with PTSD, distinctly remembers his constant feeling of fear and his psychological struggle with the idea of “kill or be killed” as he reflects on his time at war. (Raynor 9) Even though this veteran has been long since retired from his time in Vietnam, he can clearly remember what he felt during his time there. The fact that this soldier can so easily connect with his past emotions that he felt at war indicates the depth at which he felt these specific feelings. The men in the novel and the Vietnam veteran have all shared a similar experience of war and, therefore, feel similar emotions. The Vietnam veteran was diagnosed with PTSD because the emotions such as fear and anxiety struck him so deeply that he can’t forget them. The significant weight of the veteran’s emotions directly correlates with the substantial magnitude of the emotions the soldiers carry in the story. By further understanding PTSD and its lasting effects on soldiers, the reader can uncover just how deeply the soldiers in the novel feel the emotions of fear, grief, and longing and how the magnitude of these emotions have a significant impact on the soldiers psychologically.

In the The Things They Carried, O’Brien stays true to the title and focuses on the things that the soldiers carry throughout their time at war. He explicitly lists off individual objects that the soldiers hold on their bodies, but by focusing on what the soldiers carry on their backs, the emotions that they carry within reveal a greater importance in comparison. O’Brien is an acclaimed writer who found his fame through writing fictional, but realistic, works about life at war. In this particular novel, O’Brien focuses on the Vietnam War, but not on the physical battles that occur in the Vietnamese jungle. He draws the reader’s attention to the hidden, but oh-so-present, battles that occur within the soldiers’ human minds. Through the understanding of PTSD and its presence within the text, the reader can fully grasp how what the soldiers feel emotionally furthers O’Brien’s argument about soldiers at war. O’Brien uses his fictional work, set within the cruelest war America ever experienced, to expose to his audience the raw reality of war which is while soldiers may live or die in battles fought with guns, for those who do survive are forever chained to their horrid memories and are invariably emotionally distorted by the psychological effects of war. 
