Tim O’Brien’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Things They Carried, illustrates the trauma and horrors veterans face during war, especially during the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War ushered in a new era of soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but unlike the veterans of wars before, there has been more research to help those suffering from the mental disability. Two articles written by psychologists and scholars mention how difficult the transition from the war to American life is to many veterans. O’Brien, like many veterans, uses writing as a medium to help ease the pain of the trauma he has suffered through the war.

In an article written by Lori Daniels, James Boehnlein, and Phillip McCallion about post-traumatic stress disorder, the practice of life review has shown to significantly lower post-traumatic stress disorder among aging veterans suffering from the mental disability. Awareness of this disorder has gradually increased since veterans returned from the Vietnam War, but there has yet to be a breakthrough in how to properly treat post-traumatic stress disorder. The authors state that the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder on someone growing old will not result in successful aging, which is a person’s ability to be more emotionally flexible in social and personal environments. Post-traumatic stress disorder creates potential barriers against successful aging because it causes the person affected to feel anxious, less confident, and have a higher tendency for grief. They add that war veterans may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder for weeks or months without seeking treatment, which by that point, the disorder will have rooted itself into the mind of the veteran, making it more difficult to treat. In the article, the authors conducted a study with some war veterans by having them do a life review starting from before the war, during the war, and after, which they called autobiography intervention. From their studies, the authors concluded that the use of life review and autobiography intervention has significantly improved the mental health status of some veterans. The authors conclude that a group life review treatment program would work best to treat this disorder among all war veterans. This provides insight to what Tim O’Brien must have felt when writing The Things They Carried, since most of the book focuses on how he reacted in situations and his loss of comrades.

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is written from the point of view of a Vietnam War veteran. Although O’Brien states that the events he wrote about were not completely true, according to the studies of Lori Daniels, James Boehnlein, and Phillip McCallion, he is using a coping mechanism to treat his PTSD by writing down what had happened. One could argue that his writing could be considered a form of the life review technique, as O’Brien mentions that writing about the war helped him adjust to civilian life in one of his chapters. For example, in his chapter, “Speaking of Courage”, he follows the story of one of his comrades, Norman Bowker, who is trying to readjust to normal American life. The conflict in this story is that Bowker is struggling to talk about his traumatic experiences with people from his hometown, and no one understands what he has been through. It is later revealed that Bowker had written down his experience and sent it to O’Brien before committing suicide three years later. In the next chapter, O’Brien states that Bowker struggled greatly when readjusting to civilian life, and that if he had someone to talk to about his experiences in Vietnam or some way to express himself, he probably would have adjusted better and would not be dead. O’Brien’s many stories about his experiences in Vietnam show that the life review treatment for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder does work, as O’Brien commented on the fact that he was able to easily transition from the war to going to school at Harvard. In conclusion, life review has statistically shown to benefit sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder and allow them to grow in a healthy and positive way.

Cristina Risquez talks about how Many Vietnam War veterans write about their experiences as a form of therapy to heal the mental wounds they suffered from the horrors of war. She adds that the Veterans tend to write fictional stories because it allows them to not sound too political. Cristina Risquez, the author of the article “Dissent As Therapy: The Case Of The Veterans Of The American War In Vietnam”, states that her article is trying to emphasize the dissent among Vietnam War Veterans. She cites the movie The Big Lebowski as a good example of the social turmoil between veterans coming back from the war with psychological wounds and the counterculture citizens during that era. She explains how the two main characters, Walter and The Dude, represent the two sides since Walter is a veteran and the Dude is a counterculture hippie. She explains that the dynamic between the two is often strained and states that at the end when the Dude leaves Walter behind, it is mirroring the way that citizens saw Vietnam War veterans. Due to the strong counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, many citizens believed that the soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War were some of the most heinous people on the planet, even though many of the soldiers, like Tim O’Brien, did not have a choice because of the conscription. Many people who came back from Vietnam found it difficult to assimilate to normal American civilian life after their service, like O’Brien’s comrade Norman Bowker. It became clearer that the veterans were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as they found it difficult to adjust to normal life in America. The Department of Veterans Affairs failed to help veterans with PTSD by claiming that the soldiers did not get PTSD while serving in the military. This lack of treatment led many veterans to be branded as insane and incapable of living in American society. This also shows the lack of awareness on the issue of PTSD since in The Things They Carried, no one noticed that Norman Bowker was suffering from the mental disability.

There are many cases of O’Brien and his characters suffering from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder all throughout The Things They Carried. For example, O’Brien suffers from guilt over a slain enemy in the chapter “The Man I Killed”. This impacted O’Brien enough for him to write about the man he killed and his regret as he thought about the man’s life before the war. Many times, veterans suffer from survivor’s guilt, which is when a comrade dies in a battle while the other survives. Norman Bowker, a comrade of O’Brien’s and the main character in the chapter “Speaking of Courage”, struggles with survivor’s guilt over his friend Kiowa, who was buried alive in sewage in a field during a storm while holding onto Bowker. According to Bowker in a letter he writes to O’Brien, he feels as if he was still in the sewage field with his fallen friend, Kiowa, even though he is back in America doing normal things like driving. This guilt and inability to think of things other than the war eventually leads to Bowker hanging himself. O’Brien states that through writing, he was able to talk about his experiences in a healthy way. O’Brien also reveals that he fabricated some aspects of the story because he believes that a true war story is about the experience and not about the all the facts. This could also be because he was not trying to be political in his book, something that Risquez mentions as a reason why veterans make fictional stories of the war. 

In the end of the novel, O’Brien states that he writes his stories as a way to keep all his fallen friends alive in a sense. This allows O’Brien to share his experiences in Vietnam with his readers while helping himself cope with the horrors he suffered while fighting in the war. Although the Vietnam War has been over for decades, post-traumatic stress disorder is still a gigantic problem among current veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although treatment for this mental disability has improved with the rise of more mental health focused research, post-traumatic stress disorder affects those who have fought valiantly to protect the United States of America, and it is time that the United States of America protects them.
