Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

Civil War General Sherman once said, “War is hell.” He was right. In the short story “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien shows us the hell that our soldiers suffered. The narrator shows us a captivating, and up-close story about our soldiers in the Vietnam War. While the title relates to the story about things carried, but the soldiers carry more than just the physical burdens-in many cases, they are weighed down by emotional baggage. The emotional baggage that lies heavy in their hearts outweighs the physical weight. In addition to the items that they must carry, they also carry personal mementos.
To show how much the soldiers are carrying the narrator tells us “things carried were largely determined by necessity.” Some of the necessities included, “P-38 can opener, pocket knives…candy,
He is in love with a young girl in the United States. She is always on his mind and because he allows his thoughts to take him away and be with her. Because of this, he blames himself for the death of another platoon member even though there was nothing he could have done to protect him. “Lieutenant Cross felt the pain. He blamed himself.” “He pictured Martha’s smooth young face, thinking he loved her more than anything, more than his men, and now Ted Lavender was dead because he love her so much and could not stop thinking about her.” I think here he is being a little unreasonable. His love for her didn’t kill Lavender. He didn’t feel only the burden of being responsible for Lavender’s death, “it was the burden of being alive.” They all carried great emotional weight. “They carried all the emotional baggage of the men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing-these were the intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.” With all the physical and emotional things they carried, they also carried things that were close to their