The long lasting effects of a tragedy on a person will lead them to cover up and act sheltered in order to refrain from remembering that tragic event in which they had to deal with. If a certain thing brings up so many bad memories which wont allow a person to live their everyday life, that person will do everything in their power to block that memory out so they can go about their life as if it never happened. The scary part about trying to block a memory is that at any given point it can most likely be triggered if something at all even remotely relates to the past time that person once had. In “The Things They Carried” the main character Jimmy Cross is so reliable on Martha that he uses her as a cover for not being emotionally connected to the war and all that it comes with. He gives himself false hope by believing that she truly loves him and that when he is done with his tour that she will still be there waiting for him. He only wants to believe this because she is the only one in his life who keeps him connected to the real world along with keeps him sane. When he looses touch with her then Jimmy Cross is sure to fall apart, which is clearly seen in The Things They Carried” When in a situation where at any given moment a tragic event can happen, that person will only be able to not deal with what has happened around them if they put up a void that they can focus on and can keep their attention away from the tragedies happening around them.

In the things they carried Jimmy Cross had a void which blocked out all the tragedies that would come with being a high ranking position in the war and being responsible for other people and the protection of those people. That void was Martha who he believed was the love of his life and he constantly raved about how she was so good. She gave him false hope by saying in letters that she loved him almost as if she felt bad for him. This void, however beneficial at some times also was somewhat an interruption to the work that needed to be done by Jimmy Cross. At times during the day Jimmy Cross would let the void hurt him because he would be so focused on whether or not Martha was a virgin, because he wanted to be her first. As this is happening and he is day dreaming his comrade Lavender is shot and killed. Even then he is still focused on Martha, because now in his mind it is second nature to think about her when any situation around him gets too hard to handle or he cant deal with all the misfortunes that are bound to come by following whatever is about to happen in front of him. Jimmy Cross took this seriously and wouldn’t allow himself to believe otherwise until a tragic event happened. After smoking all of Lavenders marijuana along with burying him he came to the realization that as a member of his team had just been gunned down and murdered and he played it off as if it were nothing. So he goes to the only thing that wasn’t keeping him focused and made it a thing that he wasn’t going to let this alter his focus anymore. He burned all the photos he had of Martha along with the letters that he had from her. He tells himself that he will never again have fantasies as they have caused too much damage and then he decided to call all of his men together and assume blame for the death of Lavender. Now that he has no void to keep his mind scattered he has to focus on the problems in which are in front of him. With the changing of mindset to Jimmy Cross it will surely make it harder to focus on things unrelated to war and will surely be harder for him to be in touch with the real world. Now that he has forgot about Martha he has no connections to the real world, which will ultimately lead to his demise and self-destruction through posttraumatic stress disorder. He now realizes the seriousness of what had occurred around him and it will lead him down a path he has never gone.

Since 2006 1100 veterans have killed themselves following a tour due to post traumatic stress disorder. With the amount of tragic events happening along with the environment alone it can be too much for people to handle and drive them over the top and make it hard to live their everyday life. A handful of veterans have nothing to come back to once they make their tour and come back and have no connection to the real world because they haven’t been accustomed to it for so long. There was a study that showed that in 2014 approximately 50,000 veterans were homeless which is approximately 9 percent of the homeless population. These people have nothing to come back to and no ties to the world leading them to struggle in life when they comeback because they are letting the terrifying events that happened in war haunt them still and run their life. This is what is going to happen to Jimmy Cross unless he finds another void to block out the negative memories he shares with his comrades. He needs something like Martha again but not Martha because she was too much of a distraction. Once Jimmy Cross can find a healthy medium to keep his mind off the tragic events but not fully on that medium, he will be able to strive again in the world where he will have to try and hide how he truly feels. 

All in all post traumatic stress disorder is a terrible disease in which someone can have because it can truly change the way a person acts.  PTSD can cause someone to fully eradicate someone from their memory in order to help themselves in their mind. This is what happened in “The Things They Carried” with Jimmy Cross and Martha. He was a man who felt that he had love and when he lost hope of that he lost himself. Everyone needs a connection and a purpose for being on the earth. When a person looses that what is their reason for doing anything anymore?