Taylor Faust

Professor Smith

English 101 – 029

8 December 2016

Essay 3

Knowing and understanding the military culture and unique challenges of war that the soldiers faced during the Vietnam War is essential to correctly interpreting Tim O’Brian’s essay, “The Things They Carried”. Influences from soldiers’ home lives during the Vietnam War continued to play a major role in their actions and attitudes while they served overseas. Taking into account the societal norms at the time and the ways in which the war disrupted peoples’ lives explains why many soldiers battled with PTSD and often refused to take the easy way out by shooting off their own toes or fingers. It is critical to have an understanding of what PTSD is, how it can affect soldiers in and out of combat, and the way in which a person’s character is affected by their culture and family life. Soldiers would go into the war with a strong sense of self that was ingrained in them by their culture at home, but return broken with PTSD, often accelerated by those same influences. 

PTSD, also known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, is a disease that impacts thousands of veterans in the United States. The terrifying disorder is the price that so many brave soldiers pay in order to fight for their country. In “PTSD and Vietnam Veterans [with Responses]”, Vermetten argues that the causes of PTSD and its prevalence in Vietnam War veterans are greatly unknown and underestimated by most researchers. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that around 2.2% of veterans suffer from PTSD after the war, whereas, the accurate number is significantly higher. This means that hundreds of thousands of veterans have been living with PTSD without support from any sort of government aid or potentially any assistance at all. Vermetten’s research also found that the common belief that PTSD only stems from seeing or doing gruesome acts in combat is false. There are many cases in which the soldier has seen the deaths of his comrades via roadside bombs or random shootings similar to Lavender’s death in “The Things They Carried”. Vermetten reports that only about 41% of PTSD afflicted veterans had experienced actual combat. The overall goal of his research is to show scientists what they have been missing and to highlight the need for a new system that can better identify the signs of PTSD and assist those veterans in finding sources of help. 

Tim O’Brian’s work, “The Things They Carried”, illustrates parts of the life stories of several Vietnam soldiers who are actively engaged on the battlefront. O’Brian discusses how each soldier carries different components. His descriptions of the physical aspects are meant to represent all of the baggage that soldiers have to carry whether it is actual physical objects or the emotional effects such as PTSD. Vermetten’s work is significant to Tim O’Brian’s essay because it shows the relevance of PTSD in the Vietnam War scene. Lieutenant Cross took complete responsibility for the death of Lavender and blamed it on his obsession with a woman named Martha. O’Brian continued to address how Cross became very depressed and retreated to focusing on self-blame. This is an example of how PTSD can adversely affect even those soldiers not necessarily in direct combat because they see the effects of combat on others or take on the blame for those in battle. In Cross’ case, his burden was even larger because he had been responsible for the safety of Lavender and his other officers because he was in a higher-ranking position. O’Brian wrote, “They all carried ghosts” (332). He writes of a time when the officers had to “search villages without knowing what to look for, not caring, kicking over jars of rice, frisking children and old men, blowing tunnels... then forming up and moving on to the next village” (335). These types of mechanical behavior, without much regard for human life, is what Vermetten argues can have an impact on the soldiers and cause various versions of PTSD after the war. Putting aside their own moral standards and beliefs in order to complete their job played a major role in the effects of PTSD on the soldiers.

In Ackerman’s “Psychological Dynamics of the Familial Organism”, he discusses how the societal roles of each gender changed during the Vietnam era and how the newer decade of parents felt lost in transition from early adulthood to an older generation. His work is centered on changing family dynamics throughout the years. He highlights the change from an individual unit of growth to one that is rooted in family. He limits his topic even further and focuses primarily on the female gender as a whole. Ackerman brings attention to the new desire of the women at the time to achieve gender equality when taking on a new role in the industry, emancipation, and their own sexual awakening. Ackerman relates this spark of reform to how the male figure in the household moves away from working at the home, and the mother assumes their position. The traditional values transition to a more self-selection program in which marriages are based on compatibility, and the family is focused on the children.

Ackerman mentions that, during this gender role transition, the mother becomes a homemaker in every way. She takes care of the kids and the house so that the father can assume his respectable role in either the military or in a more industrial setting. In his essay, O’Brian highlights the guilt that the soldiers feel toward leaving their families and the sense of responsibility that they hold toward them. According to O’Brian, being a soldier was an honor, and they would rather “die so as not to die of embarrassment” (339). He hints that knowing that their families were counting on them at home was what helped them to push on and keep going. Depicted through Cross’ view on returning to Martha, family had started to become a higher priority for people at the time, and the main objective for soldiers was to serve their country to the best of their abilities and bring honor to their family but return home to loved ones as soon as possible. 

Ackerman’s emphasis on the transition from marriage based on convenience to marriages based on love and compatibility gives one possible explanation for why Lieutenant Cross was extremely distraught over Martha. Around this time in history, marriages started being based on actual love and attraction for the other person instead of logic or family politics. Cross felt that he and Martha were passionately in love and used a false image of their love as a coping mechanism to comfort him when the war got to overwhelming. O’Brian spoke about a particular exchange with Cross and Martha that involved a rock she had sent him as a good-luck charm. He wrote, “Lieutenant Cross found this romantic… He imagined a pair of shadows moving along the strip of sand where things came together but also separated. It was a phantom of jealousy, he knew, but he couldn’t help himself. He loved her so much” (332). He made his perceived value of their love carry him through many difficult times in the war. O’Brian explains how he thought about her all the time and, similar to how many soldiers felt a sense of responsibility to honor their families back home, he felt the same way about his true love. The love of a family is what kept soldiers’ motivated; however, Cross’ problem arose when Martha did not reciprocate his feelings. He lost his motivation for survival in an instant and fell apart emotionally. Due to the fact that he was distracted by heartbreak, Cross completely blamed himself for Lavender’s death even though there was nothing he could have done. Cross no longer had something to fight for back home, which, according to Ackerman, was often the only thing that allowed soldiers to carry on.

O’Brian’s style of switching from reality to fiction helps to illustrate the realities of PTSD during the war and the influences from home that affected the soldiers’ minds and actions. In order to correctly interpret the resiliency of soldiers during the Vietnam War, the culture at the time must be taken into account. O’Brian’s discussion of family dynamics at home as a influencer on the soldiers is critical because those values that they carried with them are what made PTSD and other wartime hardships heightened. According to Ackerman, life at home was transitioning to a focus on the value of people and relationships. Seeing those they cared about, such as Cross did for Lavender, perish destroyed many soldiers emotionally. Along with their own personal values, the soldiers had to carry and cope with many burdens brought on by the war that they had never experienced before.

Works Cited

Ackerman, Nathan W. “Psychological Dynamics of the Familial Organism.” Public Health Reports (1896-1970), vol. 71, no. 10, 1956, pp. 1017–1019. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4589591. 

Vermetten, Eric et al. “PTSD and Vietnam Veterans [with Responses].” Science, vol. 315, no. 5809, 2007, pp. 184–187. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20035182.