
In 1990, Tim O’Brien wrote “The Things They Carried.” The story describes the things soldiers carried, both physically and mentally. Based on my research of the Vietnam War, the things soldiers had to endure were not caused by just war itself, but caused by the aggressive decision making of American leaders that failed to acknowledge and conform to the enemy. There was also a lack of proper leadership and purpose in the U.S. military and in the government during the war. During Vietnam, soldiers suffered hardships due to a failed military strategy. This is evident with Tim O’Brien’s first hand experiences because they demonstrate how the failed strategy affected the soldiers on the frontlines.

The U.S. failed to alter their strategy to conform to the new war and new enemy being fought in Vietnam. Vietnam is considered to be a military failure for the United States. The commanding general from 1968-1972 was General William Westmoreland. According to Lorenzo Crowell, there were four major battles during the war, the battle of Ap Bac (January 2, 1963), the battle of La Drang (November 14-18, 1965), the battle of Khe Sanh (January 21-April 9, 1968), and the Tet Offensive (January 30-March 28, 1968). All four of these battles were major loses for U.S. forces and yielded the most casualties throughout the war. There were a total of 58,220 military deaths during the war (Crowell 343-355). The main factors, which contributed to the failure of the military strategy, were two ideologies the Americans had going in the war. The first was an ideology carried over from a WWII mentality of “the U.S. could defeat anybody, anywhere. The only questions were how long it would take and what it would cost” (Crowell 341). The second ideology was the U.S. leadership’s focus on the Cold War. “What U.S. decision makers cared about was the Cold War and containment of monolithic communism” (Crowell 342). The U.S. was in Vietnam on their own agendas and not there solely to protect the South Vietnamese people. “A rigid Cold War conceptualization of U.S. security interests and responsibilities drew the U.S. into a war between factions of Vietnamese in the name of containment” (Crowell 357). That American mentality caused the U.S. ground troops to be overly exposed to wartime occurrences which created more hardships for them than what was necessary.

My historical aspect of the failed military strategy during the Vietnam War, is evident in O’Brien’s story.  The story is about an infantry platoon and its people during the Vietnam War. Since the strategy was aggressive, this forced the troops to carry more than what would have been necessary if the strategy was more conservative. O’Brien describes what type of weaponry the troops had to carry; their service rifles or machine gun along with - up to 14 lbs. of ammunition for it, as well as another weapon system and its ammunition, M-79 grenade launchers and the ammunition to go with it, frag grenades, smoke grenades, and gas grenades. Along with their specific weapons, the soldiers had to carry job specific items like a medical kit, if the soldier was a medic; a radio if the soldier was an RTO; all the protective gear; and all of the standard issued gear for surviving in the jungle (O’Brien 328-332). The lack of proper leadership and purpose is evident in the story as well. With O’Brien’s platoon leader character, Lt. Jimmy Cross, readers see that he lacked proper leadership skills and failed to give his soldiers purpose for carrying out their missions. A soldier dies because of his irresponsible leadership style. He also has no idea what the purpose of his missions are or how to affectively carry them out because of his infatuation with a girl back home (O’Brien 328-341). These hardships the troops faced were effects of the failed military strategy. 

The first failure of the strategy was its aggressiveness in its approach on how to defeat the Viet Cong. It was all about using the most firepower possible and finding the enemy as quickly as possible. No matter how much money it costed, the purpose was to contain communism from spreading to South Vietnam (Crowell 340-357). Since the U.S. never encountered an insurgency type war or fought in jungles, they could only fight the way we had previously fought in wars that came before. This meant the U.S. produced massive quantities of munitions in preparation of displaying the might of the U.S. force’s firepower ability. This meant that soldiers carried over one hundred pounds in gear and ammunition. Frequently they did not come close to using all of it. This is shown in O’Brien’s story. “They would often discard things along the route of march. Purely for comfort, they would throw away rations, blow their Claymores and grenades, no matter, because by nightfall the resupply choppers would arrive with more of the same, then a day or two later still more…” (O’Brien 335). Many platoons would be on patrol for weeks or months at a time because of the aggressive show of force required by the strategy. Since they were out in jungles for such long periods of time, it began to wear on the troops. “They Carried infections… They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds” (O’Brien 335). The soldiers endure all of these hardships because of the failure of the U.S. leadership to make a proper strategy of how to fight the war.

Another failure on behalf of the U.S. leadership was that they did not use the small amount of knowledge known about the enemy to their advantage. U.S. leadership also did not implement better conformity of their tactics to defeat the Viet Cong. As said by James McAllister, the United States had knowledge of effective counterinsurgency tactics. Politics played a role in the decision making on how to approach the war. Lyndon Johnson’s administration rejected the idea of a more labor intensive counterinsurgency type strategy for an aggressive type strategy, which they knew would be less effective, but it reflected the preferences of the average voter (McAllister 98). In “The Things They Carried,” there is a part of the story where the platoon happens upon some Viet Cong tunnels. The platoon leader sends a guy into the tunnel to clear it out of any enemy men. Once the guy finishes his search of the tunnel, the Viet Cong ambush the platoon and one of the soldiers is killed on his way back from using the restroom (O’Brien 333-334). The troops in the story would have known that many of the tunnels systems used in Vietnam were decoys and were spots of ambushes if the strategy was not so aggressive and the troops were taught the insurgency tactics of the Viet Cong. Another failure to address the insurgency tactics of the enemy was by not integrating and passing the war off to the South Vietnamese. “Effective counterinsurgency by the United States will always be difficult because success can be achieved only through a partnership with the local government” (McAllister 123). At no point in O’Brien’s story was there mention of working with the South Vietnamese army. U.S. soldiers suffered because of the unwillingness to apply knowledge of how to affectively defeat the Viet Cong, thus causing the overall military strategy to fail.

Many soldiers during the war lacked a true purpose. All they were told, by military high command and their immediate chain of command, was to find the enemy and kill them. They also had poor leadership that did not help in guiding or finding more purpose for the lower level soldiers. “In Vietnam, given the lack of coherent military strategy, men whose peacetime careers centered on the efficient management of schedules easily fell into the trap of scheduling the war” (Crowell 351). What this means is that during military training, a soldier is taught how to carry out a mission. The mission has a purpose, a certain target, how to carry out the mission, where to go, what to do when the mission is over, and what to do if the mission goes badly. Due to the failure in strategy, the soldiers during Vietnam did not receive any of these elements for their missions other than they were supposed to kill the enemy. Once a soldier encounters what war is like, they can get into a tunnel vision of sorts and all they know and want to do is kill. Soldiers also tend to get bored easily if they do not have a set direction of action that is given to them and reinforced by their leaders. For example, in O’Brien’s story he talks about how the soldiers just walked endlessly never really in a battle, but encountering stuff here and there: 

It was just an endless march, village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost… They had no sense of strategy or mission. They searched the villages without knowing what to look for, not caring, kicking over jars of rice, frisking children and old men, blowing tunnels, sometimes setting fires and sometimes not, then forming up and moving on to the next village, then other village, where it would always be the same… They burned everything. They shot chickens and dogs, they trashed the village well, they called in artillery and watched the wreckage, then they marched for several hours… (O’Brien 335-336)

Actions such as these caused many men to suffer mentally about the things they did or had to witness. These hardships not only occurred during the war, but also had lasting effects on many of the men for the rest of their lives. This firsthand experience by O’Brien demonstrates how the failure of the military strategy affected the troops.

“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien confirms the knowledge we have on the U.S. military strategy during the Vietnam War. It also confirms the knowledge of how and why the strategy was a failure. There are still relevant criticisms of the military strategy during the Vietnam War that has to be paid attention to by our military leaders today. Today’s military has addressed the issues found and fixed the problems that occurred during that era. Our military today conforms to the enemy and the environment that is being fought in. This prevents our troops from enduring additional hardships that are not already encountered during war and also prevents having a failed military strategy. This is all possible by the lessons learned from having a failed strategy during Vietnam and how that effected our soldiers during that time. 
