After closely reading O’brien’s The Things They Carried I have come to consider the significance of what it was those soldiers really were carrying with them while they were in Vietnam. Of course we can consider the literal significance of what they carried, and the weight of these items: Assualt rifles, ammunition, radios, mine detectors and personal belongings, like bibles or photographs. However, the most significant element of this story would be what the soldiers carried internally, and the burden the soldier’s experiences have on them as human beings. Through the story, O’Brien tells us about the experiences of the platoon and how they carry different things on different missions and how their experiences affect them. The real story does not come from the tools of war and the personal items these men carry, it comes from what each one of them carry within themselves as a result of fighting in the war. 

After analyzing the text, the first example considering the importance of the internal burdens these men carried can be found in the character of Lieutenant Jimmy Cross. For the duration of the story, Cross is blinded by the love he carries for a girl he knows does not love him back. This character’s experience in the war was dominated by his feelings for this young woman. He often does not find himself focused on leading, or even on the war effort at all. He would be slipping in and out of daydreams with the girl, at times barely paying attention to the war being fought around him. He was simply focused on the thought of this woman and the love he had for her. This becomes Cross’s heaviest burden, mentally and physically, when he is responsible for the death of one of the men under his command.  He was too focused internally on this woman that he was putting his men at risk. Early in the story, we learn that Cross “carried the responsibility for the lives of his men.” (330). However this does not seem to be the case, as we know he was daydreaming about Martha (The woman he had fantasized about) moments before Ted Lavender was killed, and we know that he now has to carry the guilt of being responsible for Lavender’s death because he was in love. “He felt shame. He hated himself. He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war,” (336). The development of this character shows us that O’Brien wanted us to focus more on what the men were carrying mentally; and the way the events and experiences affected the men more than the events themselves. 

Lavender’s death and the way it affected the members of the platoon is another way the story emphasizes the importance of the mental state of the soldiers and the way the war has changed them. The men in the platoon all handled the death differently, yet it was something they would carry with them for the rest of their lives. The author took the moment of Lavender’s death as an opportunity to reveal just how much the war had dehumanized the men up to this point. The internal burdens these men carried after their experiences in combat had all but removed them from reality. O’Brien even writes “when someone died, it wasn’t quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had their lines mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and because they called it by other names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of death itself.” (338). These men had been so worn down by the weight of their own experiences in the Vietnam that they had lost their sense of reality. The constant exposure to conflict, death, and the ever-present fear of death had broken the men. They didn’t view what happened to them or what they were doing in a realistic light anymore, they had simply become pawns. These soldiers were going through the motions of deployment, and these motions over time took their respective tolls on the men psychologically until there was nothing left. This is even evident in the way they spoke to one another or the commentary they’d offer. “They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased they’d say. Offed, lit up, zapped while zipping. It wasn’t cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors” (338). The statement that they were just actors, and that their vocabulary represents both how detached they were from their own selves but also from the reality of their circumstances. The experience of the war and the life of a soldier in the war had been carried with each and every one of those soldiers until they did not even realize the reality of their circumstances. The text continues to show through the events that occur, and the way the author tells the story that the most important element to this text was the way the things they carried within themselves affected them.

After closely reading this text, it is evident that O’Brien tailored the story around the deteriorating condition of the individual. It can clearly be argued, then, that the way the war (and all of their experiences in it) affected and stayed with the soldiers for the entire story. As the author writes from the point of view of one character, he describes how the things they had to do in the war has eaten away their humanity. “It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.” (340). This passage stood out particularly as it recognized the transition these men had gone through as a result of what they witnessed and what they did in Vietnam. This emphasizes once again how the internal burdens or the ‘things’ the soldiers carried had a much more significant weight than the things they physically carried or the events they endured. 