One of the least favorite wars for Americans to talk about is the Vietnam War because face it, the United States lost and failed its troops by not truly supporting them because they were fighting an expensive war that they were not winning. Instead of sending love and hope to the soldiers, people ignored the fact that the soldiers were going through a very rough war, and all the citizens could focus on was how they were fighting in a dying war with the United States not being the victor. History does not disclose how much weight the soldiers of the Vietnam war carried on their shoulders because they try to cover up their mistake of going into this unpopular war. American soldiers not only struggled physically fighting a war on ground that they did not know and could not protect themselves against at all times, but the soldiers also struggled mentally by watching their fellow soldiers around them die and lacked a feeling of being truly supported back home. By reading the excerpt from the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, the reader is given an insight of what it was like to be a soldier in the Vietnam War and just how much they had to carry both physically and mentally. 

Service men and women had to make conscious decisions on what they could and could not physically carry because the more they carried, the longer the day seemed. Sometimes the soldiers would get rid of different items during their march because it helped lighten their load since later that day, there were planes and helicopters that would bring more supplies to them (O’Brien 335). Because they had so many things that they needed to protect themselves with such as guns and claymores (O’Brien 331), they had to limit the amount of personal objects they could bring such as pictures and comic books (O’Brien 329). Their gear weighed the most causing discomfort since the helmet weighed 5 pounds, the boots weighed another 2.1 pounds, and so on which shows that even what they were wearing caused discomfort since it was burdensome (O’Brien 328). Whenever they did not have room in their bags they would find different ways to carry things that had symbolic meaning to them like how Cross did not have room in his bags, so he carried the pebble that Martha sent him in his mouth to save space, and so he could feel more in touch with her (O’Brien 332). Each mission required different items because they did not know much about the land, so they had to make their best guesses at what they would need. For example, on more complicated missions they had to carry explosives to blow tunnels while during dangerous missions they would take “turns carrying a 28-pound mine detector” (O’Brien 332). The toll on the soldiers’ bodies made them even weaker since they had to carry so many things, but they continued on even when the day seemed like it was never ending. 

Halfway through the excerpt, the ideas change from actual physical things that they carry to non-tangible things they carry such as disease and poise which shows that their lives were not only held by physical issues, but they also had other problems they had to battle with which contrasts the ideas of civilians that believe wars are only physical battles. Soldiers fight both people and themselves. On page 335, Jimmy Cross says how “They carried their own lives” which shows how the soldiers mostly had to rely on themselves because in the end they only could protect themselves. The other troops helped protect each other, but they knew that if it came down to it, they would go for their safety instead of protecting the others in their platoon. Most did not have someone who wrote them while others had someone but never had a true connection with that person. For example, Martha never talked about the war other than telling him to be safe, but never asking him how he is actually doing or that she supports him throughout everything that he goes through in the war (O’Brien 340).When Lavender died, O’Brien explained how Cross would now carry a rock in his stomach for the rest of the war because he now felt the emotional toll of losing someone, and Cross felt personally responsible for Lavender’s death since he was not paying attention to him and thinking about Martha instead. This also shows how the servicemen had to carry guilt with them since they felt personally responsible if one of the other soldiers died. They were also concerned with staying alive themselves, yet they felt guilty for being alive since they think that they could have saved the person who had died instead of freezing and panicking (O’Brien 338). The soldiers felt that they had to stay composed at all times because they felt that they had to maintain their poise and not be an embarrassment in front of the other soldiers which could take a toll on the soldiers mentally since they could never express themselves (O’Brien 337-339). Cross finally understood that war was taking a toll on all of the soldiers when he says “It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do” (O’Brien 340). This quote shows the inside thoughts of one of the soldiers so the reader can understand that they had to carry so many more things than just physical things which in the end, was very hard on the service men in this story. 

Throughout elementary school, students learn mostly about the Civil War and the Revolutionary War because the United States came out on top, and they changed history forever, but they do not go into much detail about the problems that soldiers had to go through such as PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder). Later on in school, teachers teach students more about some of the unpopular wars such as the Korean War or the Vietnam War because those wars were not socially popular and did not end in the United States winning. The Vietnam War was more of a psychological war because America did not win, and they were not willing to accept the fact that they cannot win every war they fight in (Lawrence 6). The soldiers fought this war without knowing the land at all and had to engage in guerilla warfare against people who had lived there all their lives “pursuing flawed strategies in fighting the war (Lawrence 5). Every place they went, they knew very little about and could not protect themselves as much as the native people could. The soldiers did their best by specializing what they carried for different missions, but the weight slowly became too great. When Americans realized that they were not winning the war, the war started losing momentum since the United States stepped into a place that they were not originally invited into all in order to stop communism in a country that had already started adapting to communism. 

Ultimately, this book changes the reader’s perspective of the Vietnam War because it shows that they carried so much physically and had to carry the things they felt emotionally. It shows a side of history that teachers hid from their students since America was not the ultimate winner. Half of the Vietnam War was physical with actual fighting, and the other half was all psychological with dealing with loss, the chance of someone killing them every moment of every day, and the threats of different chemical agents that the competitors used to wipe out each other such as Agent Orange. This is still important today because people need to see that the soldiers go through hell and back during war time, and civilians need to appreciate what the soldiers have given up to serve this country because the soldiers come back with not only physical scars but also emotional scarring that cannot always be fixed easily (Taylor 57). Although the war was not easy for the service men and women who were fighting in it, civilians should see how the soldiers felt during the war because civilians lack the empathy needed to understand what the soldiers had to carry since they not only had the physical weight of their gear, but they also had emotional and mental battles that they had to go through on a daily basis in order to survive in the new and unfriendly environment.  
