The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien is a story of an American Platoon in Vietnam during the height of the Vietnam War. O’Brien began The Things They Carried with a short story titled “Speaking of Courage,” that was originally written for his book Going After Cacciato. O’Brien then expanded upon The Things They Carried by writing an additional twenty-one interconnected stories exploring the relationship of the soldiers with war, each other, and the effects of the war on them. The narrator and protagonist describes people, events, and the emotion through a stylistic catalog-like narrative. Author Tim O’Brien was drafted shortly after graduating university, and based many events in The Things They Carried off of his experiences from his time in Vietnam. The Things They Carried is ultimately an anti-war story that displays the loss of innocence resulting from being forced to fight in the Vietnam War.

Anti-war feelings ran extremely high during the Vietnam War, with a number of individual movements united under the single cause of ending American military involvement in Vietnam. According to Mark Barringer in his essay on anti-war movements, in 1965 the anti-war movement “gained national prominence” and continued to gain notoriety until its peak in 1968 and continued strong until the end of the war. O’Brien began attending Macalester College for a BA in Political Science in 1964, and was very active in anti-war protests and group throughout his time attending. This is reflected in The Things They Carried where the protagonist and narrator, also named Tim O’Brien and with the same upbringing as O’Brien, does not kill anyone during the war. O’Brien uses his stand-in character to reflect his anti-war feelings he had at the time, and that were vital in the creation of his work.

Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist specializing in war, says that the men going into Vietnam were filled with unrealistic expectations about the war. The baby-boomer generation of soldiers fighting were born to WWII veterans, and often time grew up over-glorifying war and its association with masculinity. In The Things They Carried, Mitchell Sanders carries condoms and brass knuckles, clearly coming to war with expectations of masculine activities. When arriving in Vietnam, the soldiers were quickly met with the reality of the new world around them. “They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity” (O`Brien). The men, outside of war, had to live through horrendous conditions that would test some of the best during even peacetime. O’Brien understood firsthand the conditional hardships faced during the war, and conveys them in a way that transcends the media seen during the Vietnam War on TV and in papers. 

Many soldiers in Vietnam went through a “change of self” according to Lifton. A couple of weeks, to a couple months into the war, soldiers would begin to question so many aspects of themselves and their beliefs, that they could become irreparably changed (Lifton). The “change of self” is often triggered by the death of fellow soldiers and, O’Brien shows the change in Lieutenant Cross, the leader of their platoon. When Ted Lavender, a dope loving soldier is killed, through no fault of Cross’s, Cross completely blames himself. Cross, who before Lavender’s death, is obsessively in love with a non-reciprocating English major named Martha, tears up and burns her letters and vows not to let another soldier die because of his misplaced attention. Sanders, unlike Cross, does not become weighted by guilt after observing death. Sanders is obsessed with the morals and truth of the events unfolding around him. The morals do not have to make sense, so long as there is one. “Hear that quiet, man?" he said. "That quiet – just listen. There's your moral” (O`Brien).

The soldiers try to cling on to who they are with comic books, bibles, M&Ms, and Lockets, and who they have to be, with guns, ammunition, water, ponchos, and more wartime belongings. O’Brien breaks the rhythm of listing objects to tell the items everyone has to carry, and will be carrying after the war. “They all carried ghosts.” The men, carried the death of their fellow soldier, but also of the faceless enemies they killed. “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.” The emotional weight crippled the men in the few ways they were not already physically (O`Brien).

What all of this in turn translates into is quite profound. O’Brian goes to great lengths to humanize his characters to the highest extent possible, showing their lives through the things they carried. The bibles, letters, condoms, dope, etc. all reveal who they were before the war, their lives that were unique to them. Through them, we see their personalities and histories. He then conversely lists the military gear they all must carry, the M-16s, radios, claymores, and bandages, the burdens that shape their current reality, a reality they want no part of. As they mindlessly hump through the jungle, they are literally and figuratively weighed down by these two burdens. All they can do march for the sake of marching. This is further demonstrated by Lavender’s death, as he (as Kiowa puts it) hit the ground “boom-down, cement.” The weight of his burdens translates into a physical and emotional impact that is felt throughout the rest of the platoon. 

What this polarity creates is a set of characters who effectively demonstrate their humanity. They are regular people have been thrust into hell and are selectively holding onto or scrapping parts of their prior identities for survival (as is demonstrated in the burning of Martha’s letters). They want no part of where they are and constantly dream of flying away home, dreams that (Author) O’Brian would have experienced firsthand. The ironic thing is that these soldiers would find little solace back home, in a country that had strong anti-war sentiments that were often directed towards the returning soldiers (Barringer, Mark, and Tom Wells). This is not even to mention that the return home would only relieve them of half of their burdens, those which they carried physically. They still had their emotional burdens.

This is certainly not to say that O’Brian is against the anti-war movement, quite the opposite in fact. What this semi-autobiographical text tells us is that he was very much against Vietnam, both the conflict fought for political expediency and the terrain itself. While at Macalester College, he was an avid anti-war protestor, standing against the symbolic implications of the war, looking at it from afar. However, once conscripted after his graduation, he experienced the war first hand, developing the perspective the audience sees in The Things They Carried. His opinion and opposition of the war went from a purely theoretical place to a firsthand experience. It certainly caused him to have sympathy for those serving rather than directing animosity towards them as was commonplace among the academic anti-war organizations. 

In The Things They Carried, author Tim O’Brian reveals events of a similar nature to those he experienced during his stint in Vietnam. Through doing little more than revealing the possessions of the soldiers, we are able to construct a vivid image of their situation. The impact of these belongings is what shapes each of the personas as well as what life was like for them on the march. We see the men in two different lights, who they are outside of Vietnam, and who they are during it. Furthermore, when we cross this narrative with the anti-war movements of the time, the influences are prevalent. Even though he avoids openly displaying his political contempt for the conflict, we still see a narrative influenced by his prior academic protest. In any case, The Things They Carried is an account of Vietnam born from the anti-war sentiments of the time and O’Brian’s own harrowing experience.
