What is it like to be a soldier at war? For many of us, we don’t have the personal experience to answer that question. The only way for us to get a better grasp of what war is like is to read about it. Naturally, authors and their literature have the ability to make a story come alive; they give the reader a chance to experience and understand something that they can’t experience in real world. One of the most popular authors of war literature, and no exception to this ability, is Tim O’Brien. O’Brien has written many realistic, fictional novels about war. His most renowned work is called The Things They Carried. This book revolves around the experiences of a team of soldiers as they fight in the Vietnam War. Being that his book is so popular, it’s read by all ranges of people in the American society of which many whom don’t know the true nature of war because they haven’t experienced it for themselves. Therefore, he attempts to expose to his unknowledgeable audience the reality of a soldier’s life in the harsh conditions of war. The most significant aspect of war that he uncovers in his novel is the damaging effects of war on a soldier’s mental health. That being said, in order to fully comprehend what the soldiers in O’Brien’s The Things They Carried experience on a psychological level and how war changes them, the reader must understand the mental disorder that effects many real-life soldiers and veterans called Post-Traumatic-Stress Disorder, or PTSD. 

The effects of war can be uncovered by recognizing the presence of PTSD in the soldiers’ shock as they experience the death of a comrade. 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, it’s obvious that he feels shock. According to the social work scholar Sam Landrum in his article about recovering from trauma, 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 thus, illustrates the extent which the death affected him psychologically. The post-traumatic-stress that is manifested in Kiley by the death of his comrade is important to recognize because it allows the reader to fully comprehend the emotional distress he feels and how what he experiences at war is crippling his mental health. 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 narrator 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 indifferently because they know from experience that to feel something would mean to feel pain.  Burying their feelings, then, 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; 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 suffers from PTSD, was interviewed in a case study conducted by researcher Sharon Raynor. As he reflects on his time at war, he explains how he can distinctly remember his constant feeling of fear and his psychological struggle with the idea of “kill or be killed” (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 soldiers in the novel and this real-life Vietnam veteran have all shared a similar experience of war and, therefore, feel similar emotions. The Vietnam veteran was diagnosed with PTSD because 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 enormity of these emotions have a significant impact on the soldiers psychologically.

In 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 has written many works about life at war, but in this particular novel, O’Brien doesn’t focus 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 a better 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 cruel Vietnam War, to expose to his audience the raw reality of war which is: while soldiers may live or die in battles fought with guns, those who survive are forever chained to their horrid memories and are invariably emotionally distorted by the psychological effects of war. 
