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 soldiers witnessing violence supports research on how the psychological effects of the Vietnam War of had an everlasting impact on the soldiers. 

In the Draft lottery, being randomly chosen to go to war highly impacted people’s perspectives of the war and their motivation to fight. 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 looking at the article compared to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, we can assume due to how the story is written, Lieutenant Cross is in a situation which he does not believe in, and is forced to fight anyway, just as many of the soldiers were forced to do in the article. Though in the story O’Brien does not mention anything about the soldiers being drafted in particular, a possible assumption is that Cross and many of the soldiers who had a negative attitude in the story may have been ones who fell victim to the draft lottery. Cross throughout the story is entangled in the countless distractions in his mind, and obviously misses home a lot adding evidence to the possibility of him being a victim of the draft. O’Brien describes Cross’s rough 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 lets us as readers see how Cross felt individually about the war knowing he could not do anything about himself being there. 

The buildup of negativity that lead up to the draft is felt in Bergan’s article and is a key theme on showing how the Vietnam War progressed with morale throughout time and had an everlasting impact on the soldiers. This sense of negativity was not always felt, and people were optimistic about the war in the early years (Bergan). However, views began to change quickly as people were beginning to be forced to go to the war involuntarily. Through O’Brien’s description of Lieutenant Cross’s love life, and him saying that he needed things to remind him of home (O’Brien 329), we may assume that his decision to go to war may not have been his own.  This aspect of the draft and soldiers not having control of their lives negatively impacted the soldiers, causing them to carry horrible memories with them for the rest of their lives.

 Through learning about the draft and the Vietnam War history in the article, research may make us think about the connection that there was maybe no backstory in The Things They Carried for a reason, and we were made to infer that the soldiers came together through the one thing that united them; the draft. The morale felt from the soldiers was that of unwelcomed, unsupported, and unappreciated (Bergan), which helps support the inference that they may have been drafted. The Draft would come to destroy the lives of many both physically and mentally through what they were forced to witness, and the years that they wasted, which became the reason why morale became so low at Vietnam. The soldiers in Cross’s section all had the same goal, and that was for the war to end. In the end, Cross decides to put his distractions of Martha aside to become a better leader to help finish the war faster in efforts to leave the place in which he did not want to be in so badly (O’Brien 340).  Because they were all so unprepared mentally most likely 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. 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 to be one of the most difficult mental health problems there is to handle, which shows the stress the soldiers’ minds had to endure.

 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 fear can directly relate back to Lieutenant Cross’s experience through how he describes his situation of witnessing Lavender’s death, and how the simplest of actions like going to the bathroom on your own can get you killed (O’Brien 334). The trauma that the soldiers witnessed during the war were terrible, and would come to stick 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. 
