
The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, is a short story about Lieutenant Jimmy Cross’s platoon that is fighting in the Vietnam War. O’Brien’s short story is comprised of many lists of what soldiers carry during their experience in Vietnam. Upon first reading, Jimmy Cross’s burning of Martha’s photos seem like an elementary effort to forget about a lost girl. After discovering and applying the causes/effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, it is clear that the burning is a representation of Jimmy Cross’s desperate effort to unload part of the mental burden he carries as a result of his stress from the Vietnam War.

Tim O’Brien’s creation revolves around the simple word “carry”. When reading about a soldier, the word “carry” does not come across as extremely important and neither does burning a picture of a girl that a man wants to get over. The title “The Things They Carried” (O’Brien 328), along with the destroying of a personal item, holds no profound meaning to a reader without a prior understanding of war-driven mental disorders. Tim O’Brien’s story includes lists of what soldiers carry. His examples include a combination of physical and mental items that a soldier humps or carries around the battlefield. In terms of mental items, a Lieutenant obviously carries the responsibility of leading his men through combat. Due to the mental and physical hardships of war, all soldiers carry a very heavy responsibility. When O’Brien begins his description of physical items, he notes that, “almost everyone humped photographs” (O’Brien 329). Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried two photos of a girl named Martha who he loved very much. Martha was never actually Jimmy’s girlfriend; she was more of a dream girl that never worked out. Soldiers in war constantly think about specific memories of back home; it is often what gets one through the especially hard times. Martha occupied Jimmy Cross’s thoughts of home. She was Jimmy’s main link to society because she sent him letters along with a “good-luck” pebble (O’Brien 331). Items such as the pebble helped by Jimmy provide a connection and gave him a constant reminder of what he was in Vietnam fighting for. It seems fair to consider the photos and pebble to be one of the easiest things for Jimmy Cross to carry. With a lack of knowledge about PTSD, the mental load of a soldier seems miniscule compared to an individual’s physical load. The sheer quantity of government issued equipment in addition to personal items make a soldier’s physical carrying load seems extreme. A few of the larger items include, food, water, guns, radio, med kit, ammunition, helmet, gun cleaner, explosives, and many others smaller objects (O’Brien 328). A soldier carries well over fifty pounds of these physical items throughout all of his or her movements everyday. To an uninformed audience, O’Brien’s list of physical items can often hold more significance than any mental item that an average soldier typically carries around. Developing an understanding of the mental impacts of Vietnam changes a readers view on what soldiers, specifically Jimmy Cross, have a tough time carrying in O’Brien’s story.

The combat period between a soldier’s deployment and his/her return home (if alive) can mentally change an individual in many ways. Amongst the approximate four million American soldiers deployed in Vietnam, almost half a million came home with mental disorders (Roberts, 159). Most people comprehend that PTSD is a prevalent problem but the majority do not know why. The sources of this illness are slightly more complicated than blaming everything on a bad set of experiences in war. “Diagnosing PTSD is complex” because there are so many attributing factors to its development (Smith 506). When a soldier comes home, he/she is finally able to put down all of the items they physically carried while deployed. They have the opportunity to return to a life without guns or explosions. The problem is that soldiers often come back different than they were before deployment. People tend to forget that the things a soldier carried mentally aren’t released as easily as those that were physically held. PTSD is not curable; it is something a soldier must learn cope with. The coping of PTSD varies between cases. Some soldiers can find a way to continue on with society, while others struggle for the remainder of their lives and sometimes end up taking their own lives in the process (Roberts 161). With a small understanding of PTSD, a reader can instantly bring more meaning to O’Brien’s focus on the kinds of things that soldiers carry. Mental hardship makes soldiers vulnerable to being changed in negative ways prior to returning home. Being away from one’s home, family, society, language, and typical routine for an extended period of time allows for a lot of thinking. In Jimmy Cross’s case, “whenever he looked at the photographs, he thought of new things he should’ve done” (O’Brien 330). For most civilians, the removal of one of these things is difficult but very few people experience all of them at once like a soldier does. Something you regret doing back home can be replayed over and over again in you head while under the stress of a war (Smith, 507). Stress amplifies feeling of regret such as Lieutenant Jimmy Cross’s regret of not “doing something brave” with Martha while he had an opportunity to do so (O’Brien 330). 

Because soldiers are in an environment that already is viciously testing their mental strength, all it takes is one event to push a soldier over the edge. Jimmy Cross runs into this exact experience when his soldier, Ted Lavender, is shot and killed. This horrible death happens while the Lieutenant is thinking about the girl back home named Martha. The confinement of Vietnam seems to have put Jimmy Cross into a similar state that solitary confinement does. Lavender’s death was not Cross’s fault. There was no way of knowing that the enemy was about to strike (O’Brien 340). The understanding of PTSD allows one to understand the reality that Cross is not burning Martha’s photos because he wants to move on from this girl. Instead he does this burning because his mental load is far too great than he can possibly carry. This is Jimmy Cross’s initial way of coping with his traumatic experience. Jimmy Cross destroyed Martha’s photos because he realizes that every time he sees her face, he will blame himself for letting Martha take priority over his men just for a second. The reality behind the burning of Martha’s photo raises concern for the future of Jimmy Cross. This “invisible wound” will follow Lt. Cross forever (Xenakis 8). Cross can burn photos all he wants but he cannot “burn the blame” (O’Brien 340). Martha was an attempt to cope and unload. Unfortunately, the next time Cross’s mental load becomes far too heavy to hold, he will not have those photos to burn. This is absolutely worrisome to an educated audience in terms of a soldier coping with a traumatic experience. For Lt. Jimmy Cross, the future is uncertain. He could end up falling under the demographic of soldiers who commit suicide because of PTSD but one would never pick up on it without being contextually informed.

Readers who acquire additional context about PTSD receive a deeper message that the hardest load to carry in a war is a mental one. Events, isolation, pressure, and memories all build up to a position which soldiers reach a breaking point. This situation progresses to a point where one must unload stress in ways such as burning a photo. This burning does not end the problem but simply rather reveals it. Through this analysis, it is clear that the contextual information about PTSD truly does help develop a better understanding that the soldiers carry much more than a physical load in Tim O’Brien’s story.
