The Things They Carried by Tim O' Brien

" This com handstary does an excellent bloodline of showing the symbolism and meaning behind the things the soldiers " ingest" in trash. For they carry necessities like food, water and ammunition but they as well carry the horrific memories of combat and the pain of loss and closing off from home. At times, they in addition carry their dead brethren.

We see in O'Brien's story that some of the men can only nurse and cope if they rely on memories of home or carry with them reminders of home. One such individual is First Lieutenant lever Cross. Cross is a exhaustively soldier but he is very much in love with a girl back home named Martha. Martha sustains him through the worst ordeals but she also causes him to endure some of his worst moments as far as suffering from longing, loss and the need for love and normalcy in combat. In his commentary on "The Things They Carried," Steven Kaplan (p. 44) maintains that many of the things the soldiers carried, even the good things, were like a double-edged sword in their stirred up impact: "At the end of the chapter, after one of Cross's men has died because Cross was too busy thinking of Martha, Cross sits at the bottom of his foxhole crying, not so much for the instalment of his platoon who has been killed ?but mostly it was for Martha, and for himself, because she belonged to another world, and because she was?a poet and a everlasting(a) and uninvolved."

We see in O'Brien's commentary on "Alpha Company," that combat often turns normal

determine into abnormal ones and normal ones into abnormal ones. We see this in the office of Mad Mark, a platoon leader who no one is veritable got his nickname first or after exhibiting mad way. However, in combat, it is not some hysterical or aggressive qualities that understand Mark his nickname. Rather, O'Brien (p.

1552) tells us his unusual nickname stems from what we might typically find a normal value, tranquility: "The madness in Mad Mark, at any rate, was not a hysterical, crazy, into-the-brink, to-the-fore madness. Rather, he was insanely calm. He never showed fear." In combat, it is this kind of behavior that appears mad compared to other soldiers engaged in war and invariably at risk for their lives.

O'Brien, Tim. "Alpha Company," 1973, pp. 1553.

Kaplan, Steven. "The Undying Uncertainty of the cashier in Tim O'Brien's ?The Things They Carried.'" Critique, 35(1), pp. 43-52.

In conclusion, while we learn that many of the value typically associated with war and perpetuated through propaganda and the media are actually false. Honor, courage, fearlessness and heroism may exist but on the area they are small comfort to the troops who risk their lives and sanity in defense of their country. This is particular true in a war where justification for intervention is weak or does not enjoy the full support of the citizenry. Vietnam was such a war. As such, the only way O'Brien is able to bring greater intellect and healing to this unfortunate incident in American archives is by telling his story and the stories of those who fought alongside him in
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