
During the period of the late 1900s, the psychology of how war impacts one’s self was still not fully researched. Through events like the Vietnam War during this time period, people were now starting to see the effects of violence on the brain and how people who were unprepared to go to battle suffered after witnessing such violence. Those who were drafted did not voluntarily sign up to go to war, and were bound to suffer the consequences of the impacts that war can have. The draft had a lot of controversy through this time period, based on the results of people who supported it versus those who did not. The feeling of negativity in the articles, The Draft Lottery and Attitudes towards the Vietnam War, and The Psychological Effects of the Vietnam War, goes to show how people’s opinions of the war differed and how they were similar. In the fictional story The Things They Carried, which based on real accounts and experiences, Tim O’Brien explains to us the morale and feeling of soldiers during the Vietnam War and how this controversy impacted them. A character he writes about named Lieutenant Cross represents the feeling of pain and agony that soldiers suffered during this time. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the element of the draft lottery and witnessing violence has an everlasting effect of trauma on the soldiers. 

In the Draft lottery, being randomly chosen to go to war highly impacted people’s perspectives of the war and their government. The morale during this time period felt on both the battlefield and Homefront was extremely low to begin with, and the draft added another factor of fear within the citizens back on the Homefront. In the article, The Draft Lottery and Attitudes towards the Vietnam War, self-interest is talked about on how and to what extent people supported the Vietnam War. Compared to past wars that were fought with patriotism and pride, the author, Daniel Bergan tells us about how the approval rate was much lower in the Vietnam War and how this problem would create future trauma for the soldiers that were drafted. When being compared to Time O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, we can assume due to how the story is written that Lieutenant Cross is in a situation which he does not believe in, and is forced to fight for it. The negativity felt in the article starts at the very beginning and is a theme until the very end. This sense of negativity displays how people felt about the draft and how it may have for Lieutenant Cross.  Though the story The Things They Carried did not mention anything about the soldiers being drafted in particular, the conclusion may be made that many of the soldiers who had a negative attitude in the story may have been ones who fell victim to the draft lottery. Through O’Brien’s description of Lieutenant Cross’s love life, we may assume that his decision to go to war may not have been his own.  O’Brien describes Cross’s situation and says, “He was just a kid at war, in love. He was twenty-four years old. He couldn’t help it” (O’Brien 334). This aspect of the draft may have been one of the things the soldiers carried with them that weighed on them through their whole experience with the war. The soldiers carried an immense amount of “emotional baggage” with them throughout the entire war, and the draft was included in this sense. Through learning about the draft and Vietnam War history, research makes us think about the connection that possibly there was no backstory in The Things They Carried for a reason, and the draft was why most of the soldiers were there. The morale felt from the soldiers was that of unwelcomed, unsupported, and unappreciated by their counterparts back at the Homefront. The Draft would come to destroy the lives of many both physically, and mentally through what they were forced to witness, which became the reason why morale became so low at Vietnam. The support of the war decreased significantly at the end compared to the beginning, though there was an overwhelming disapproval rate throughout the entirety of it due to the draft. The soldiers that were drafted most likely had a much different experience than what they expected, and were very unprepared. Because were because they were unprepared due to the draft, the soldiers in the story The Things They Carried  dwell on how much they missed things back at home, and it greatly effects their outlook on the war and trauma they would come to suffer.

Also, because of the draft, many of the soldiers who were young and innocent became ruined due to the things they were forced to witness. These horrible acts of violence witnessed often made the soldiers suffer from severe mental health issues. In The Things They Carried, Lieutenant Cross becomes preoccupied thinking of his girlfriend, Martha, and fails to keep track of one of his soldiers, Ted Lavender, who is coming back from the bathroom and gets shot and killed (O’Brien 334). Martha in this situation represents once again one of the things the soldiers carry in their emotional baggage. Lieutenant Cross after the incident finds himself trembling, and induced with shame because of what he let happen (O’Brien 336). He is severely damaged by this and feels that he will never forgive himself for this incident he felt he let happen. By witnessing the death of someone he cared for, the trauma he would come to suffer for the rest of his life would be was immense. O’Brien says about Cross, “He would come to accept the blame for what happened to Ted Lavender” (O’Brien 341). Cross would come back to thinking about this memory many times as a flashback, and now psychologists have identified this condition as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder has come back in research as one of the most difficult mental health problems there is to handle. Psychologically, the toll it takes on one’s mind is extreme. To understand the severity of the everlasting effect the soldiers had, an anonymous man was brought in to question in the article The Psychological Effects of the Vietnam War and said, "Every time I wake up I always think I'm in the jungle, but then I realize there is nothing.  I've divorced my wife.  All I can think of is getting back to the jungle” (Hochgesang, Lawyer, Stevenson). By seeing this level of effect that the war traumatized this veteran, one can really come to appreciate how lucky they are to have not had served in the Vietnam War. Due to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, many of the veterans who came back from war generally lost faith in the government and how they felt towards society. In the article, The Psychological Effects of the Vietnam War, written by Josh Hochgesang, Tracye Lawyer, and Toby Stevenson, they describe the ways the veterans were traumatized for the rest of their life and say, “They constantly feared death and were deeply traumatized as they saw their comrades being shredded to pieces by bullets and mines” (Hochgesang, Lawyer, Stevenson). This can directly relate back to Lieutenant Cross’s experience through how he describes his situation of witnessing Lavender’s death. The trauma that the veterans witnessed were terrible, and stuck with them for the rest of their lives. 

In The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien, the draft and violence witnessed by soldiers from the Vietnam War traumatized them for the rest of their lives. The draft forced those who were unprepared, and unwilling to fight for their country to do something which they did not believe in, in turn destroying their lives whether it was physically or mentally. Furthermore, this ties in directly with violence. The violence that the soldiers had to witness during this time period was unforgiving and brutal. Mental health disorders and psychological pains were rampant in this era, and the results for most of those who came out of the Vietnam War was being crippled mentally. By leaving the soldiers in the Vietnam War to deal with these psychological problems on their own, it makes us as people think what they did to have to deserve the harsh lives they would come to suffer. 
