
Tim O’Brien’s excerpt from the short story: The Things They Carried, revolves around an element of immaturity that was inevitably present due to a flood of nineteen and twenty-year-old inexperienced men into Vietnam to fight a truly horrific war. Being away from his love, Lieutenant Cross is deeply involved in trivialities relating to his partner, involving himself in constant questioning and daydreaming. The story highlights the innocence of these men through the first-person perspective of Lieutenant Cross who describes the characteristics of a war scene through vivid descriptions of his comraderies’ equipment and personal items. O’Brien cleverly relays through such descriptions, the escapist tendencies Lieutenant Cross and other soldiers resorted to as a path to escape the horrors of war and hard truths of life. American society in the sixties was shaped by the Vietnam War, increasing the disillusionment that the American people felt in the face of such pointless, tiresome conflict. Such a phenomenon is then also relayed through the experience of Lieutenant Cross, who finds no solace in the trivialities of American life after his horrifying experience in Vietnam.

                The love letters that Lieutenant Cross receives are heavily indicative of the state of young adults entering the Vietnam war. Lieutenant Cross is still preoccupied with his life back home, rife with the warm drama of his engagement with his love Martha, the girl of his dreams. Lieutenant Cross, like any other soldier, is still trapped in the powerful and comforting embrace of traditional American society. In love, he constantly questions trivialities such as his partners love for him, as well as through a traditionalist perspective, her virginity. These trivialities contend with the anxieties of war, driving a wedge between the reality of war and the experience of young adults like Cross. Such a barrier slowly disintegrates after the death of his comrade, in which Cross cannot further entertain his escapist, delusional fantasies that were common in 60’s America, an era of high culture, fantasy, excitement, and later disillusionment.  

                  The irreparable nature of such a devastating occurrence serves to then launch the Lieutenant into a state predominated by survival instinct. No longer can Cross fight off the pressure developing from his environment, the war has broken him here, rendering his highest priority one of survival, not of the trivialities he notices among his comrades. Such a stark contrast is revealing compared to his concerns before the tragic death of his comrade, in which Lieutenant Cross reveled in the fantasies of love and his descriptions of his comrades. An example of Cross’s description is when he describes one of his comrades: “As a big man, therefore a machine gunner, Henry Dobbins carried the M-60, which weighed 23 pounds unloaded, but which was almost always loaded” (page 330). Cross’s casual descriptions of his comrades lose their comforting aura when compared against the backdrop of severe trauma, leading to the state of disillusionment with a past life that occurs within Lieutenant Cross. Past his relief of surviving the shooting by the Vietcong, Lieutenant Cross sees no reprieve, no alleviation, from the horrors of life. This then leads to his intense despair and guilt due to his failure to save his friend, feelings almost overpowering by the end of the short story. His internal dialogue is no longer concerned with triviality, rather, such thoughts are replaced with a confusion and disillusionment that takes Lieutenant Cross farther from the clarity he desires. 

                Lieutenant Cross’s inability to contend with the death of his comrade leads to an introspective nightmare where he resorts to insanity. He no longer can distract himself with triviality, digging a hole for himself that is in equal parts tragic and symbolic. Cross seeks to escape from all his worries, the despair, his guilt, all his internal emotions that are eating away at his psyche. Thus, he digs a hole and lies in it, to detach himself from the struggles of reality. This action is also representative of the nature of American society at the time, a society which, caught in a War that is laden with devastation and immorality, cannot blindly entertain the artifacts of culture and enjoyment that it had so relished itself in before. American society becomes disillusioned, as does Lieutenant Cross, seeking an answer for such pointless and irreconcilable violence. This dynamic perfectly fits the tendencies of American society at the time, with the young resorting to drugs such as marijuana and the elder members of society resorting to denial. The stark contrast here is that Lieutenant Cross and his comrades lack the faculties to truly escape the horror of violence, and are each deliberately broken down by the harsh realities of life, leaving them in the purest form of disillusionment, confusion, and despair. 

             In Tina Chen’s “Unraveling the Deeper Meaning”: Exile and the Embodied Poetics of Displacement in Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”, the story is analyzed through the perspective that the bitter truth overbears all falsities seen in this line: “Although O'Brien's fictive project centers on the impossibility of ascertaining any one truth from the experience of war, Things is guided nonetheless by an impulse to tell the truth, though the truth is ugly” (page 80). Chen’s analysis ties close with the underlying argument that the preceding paragraphs establish speaking of the confusion and ambiguity trailing isolation and unfamiliarity of the protagonist who, within a matter of hours, completely changes due to the intensity of major truths and realizations. Furthermore, Chen connects O’Brien’s characteristic writing style to the story saying that rather than trying to invoke pity towards the protagonist, he emulates an experience that amplifies the central theme of accepting indeterminacy and adapting to a situation. In an interview between Larry McCaffery and Tim O’Brien, O’Brien speaks about how the raw indifferent nature of a war-torn area impelled him to write. The overwhelming experience was nearly a stigma for O’Brien who projects his experiences through his varying stories all progressing with a reformed and unique style.

             The story is highly compelling, matching the destructive nature of any war story with the unique writing style of O’Brien who incorporates experiences through first person perspective to aid readers in emulating feelings of despair and defeat that a soldier may experience. “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” (page338), here, O’Brien seeks to relate these overpowering emotions to some tangible feeling such as a heavy weight to further enhance the experience for the reader who has most likely never experienced war and its gloomy atmosphere. All the varying elements of O’Brien’s writing masterfully bring together these emotions to produce an enthralling story for both readers and scholars alike to experience. In some sense the indifference of war towards humans serves as a metaphor for readers and scholars alike who are captivated by the horrors of war prevalent in modern, reflective contemporary literature.
