The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a collection of non-fiction short stories that give remarkable accounts about the author’s experiences with the Vietnam War. Though some of the facts in the stories are exaggerated, each one of them sheds new, awe inspiring light on not just the Vietnam War, but the topic of war as a whole. What O’Brien was trying to do with this book was not to trivialize war with exaggerated stories. Nor does he try to scare the reader through his experiences with the war. What O’Brien attempted, and achieved, through The Things They Carried, was to really make the reader feel as if they were there. Sitting in the foxholes, sleeping in the mud, that constant feel of paranoia as if somebody is going to appear out of nowhere and kill you; that is what O’Brien wants us to feel and experience. But to add on to that, O’Brien also takes us into the life of his friend, Norman Bowker, after coming home from war. Although it is apparent that war in itself is frightening, O’Brien does a fantastic job of showing that the horrors of war do not just come from the gunfights and violence, but rather through the post-war feelings of PTSD, depression, and isolation.

“Speaking of Courage,” the entry right before “Notes,” takes us to a small, isolated prairie town in Iowa with Norman orbiting around a lake with a perimeter of seven miles. There appears to be really nothing going on in his life anymore now that he is home from war. All that he wants to do, and has been doing, is drive around this particular lake. All the while, Bowker keeps harping on a few specific details. One of those being a girl named Sally Kramer. All he wants to do is chat with her, “for a moment he’d almost pulled over, just to talk, but instead he pushed down hard on the gas pedal. She looked happy. She had her house and her new husband, and there was really nothing he could say to her” (O’Brien 167). It’s almost like Bowker feels he isn't important to this girl anymore. In his mind, she is happy and does not want to be bothered by conversing with Bowker. It doesn't seem that he is pitying himself during these rotations around the lake, but rather being honest with himself. He really just needs to talk to somebody; to have them understand what it is he went through during those countless, seemingly endless days in Vietnam. His recollection of the only person that would listen to his stories brings up a troubling memory of his best friend drowning in the lake which Bowker keeps driving around. Perhaps he spends every day at this lake because he finds harmony and clarity because of that connection he has with his late best friend. His friend was the only person he could truly talk about anything with. His futile attempts to converse with his father end up in nothing but silence, “And a pity about his father, who had his own war and who now preferred silence” (O’Brien 168). It is truly a scary thought indeed to have all of these bottled up emotions about a war that you just fought and not have anybody to share them with, especially one’s own father. Bowker’s constant mentioning of Sally and his father while driving in his car make it seem that at one point in his life, a life completely different than his post-war self, he could have found trust and comfort with his father and Sally, but now it seems as if everything had changed now that he is back from Vietnam. Take the mini-series, “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific,” for example. These shows depict what it is like to come home from war and have nobody who truly understands what it was like to talk to. There is this overwhelming feeling of isolation that these men experience, and when they return home, they are expected to act like normal civilians again; to act like nothing ever happened to them. You want to tell everybody about all the times you and your fellow soldiers were shooting the shit, or about how one of them would always try their best to keep the morale of the company up even in the hardest of times. You try to explain how you witnessed one of your soldiers die and there was nothing you could do about it. No matter how hard he tried, Bowker just could not find a clear way to express watching his fellow soldier die, “He would've talked about this, and how he grabbed Kiowa by the boot and tried to pull him out. He pulled hard but Kiowa was gone, and then suddenly he felt himself going, too. He could taste it. The shit was in his nose and eyes. There were flares and mortar rounds, and the stink was

everywhere—it was inside him, in his lungs—and he could no longer tolerate it. Not here, he thought. Not like this. He released Kiowa's boot and watched it slide away” (O’Brien 170). For Bowker, all he wanted to do after he came home from the war was to find trust in somebody, to have somebody there to speak with about his hardships and his triumphs while in Vietnam, but all he could do was contain everything inside himself and pretend like everything was alright, which to be honest, is truly terrifying.

The following short story, “Notes,” is an epilogue of sorts to “Speaking of Courage.” O’Brien starts out by informing the reader of Bowker’s suicide three years after O’Brien wrote “Speaking of Courage.” It is such a harsh reality that this has become so common with soldiers. They feel as if suicide is their only way to escape the pain and loneliness they feel after coming home from war. Bowker tried to keep busy, “He had worked briefly as an automotive parts salesman, a janitor, a car wash attendant, and a short-order cook at the local A&W fast-food franchise. None of these jobs, he said, had lasted more than ten weeks” (O’Brien 173). And he tried to get an education, “At one point he had enrolled in the junior college in his hometown, but the course work, he said, seemed too abstract, too distant, with nothing real or tangible at stake, certainly not the stakes of a war. He dropped out after eight months” (O’Brien 175). No matter what he did, Bowker could not escape his true feelings of depression and isolation. He had no idea what to do with himself now that he was not in Vietnam. Strangely enough, it seems like all he wanted to do was go back to those days in Vietnam when he could actually find purpose in his life. 

Why these two stories represent O’Brien’s entire work the best is because they don’t show the obvious horrible things when one thinks about war. He seldom brings up violence in these two stories, save for Bowker’s suicide. What O’Brien does is capture that frightening post-war feeling that the unlucky experience. To find no purpose in one’s life after coming home from war has such a negative impact on the mental state of that person. But unfortunately, it happens so often and is not discussed often, and O’Brien gives such a strong account on a friend of his that had to deal with this. This shattered mental state is sometimes more terrible than almost anything one has to experience while he is in war, and O’Brien demonstrates it very well.
