The Things They Carried

Melinda Rubenau
2/26/08
Eng.387
Paper #1

Fact and Fiction of “The Things They Carried”

There is much conflict in America about the Vietnam War and if it was a necessary evil or a war against a people who were looking for a better way of life. Feelings of exile sprouted within the troops fighting in Vietnam because the enemy had the advantage of knowing the terrain and the Americans were not used to the environment or the warfare used by the Viet Cong. The constant reminder that they were not wanted in Vietnam form the Vietnamese and their fellow Americans back home, gave way to more awkward feelings of fighting a war with an unclear purpose. The American troops ended up fighting for their sanity and their lives as they tried to compete against the Viet Cong’s use of guerilla warfare and ambush tactics. When the troops returned to America, adjusting to civilian life after years of constant violence and having to stay alert gave way to new feelings of exile. They couldn’t fit in with their old way of life after the experiences they had endured. Tim O’Brien depicts the use of warfare and the feelings involved with mentally dealing with the war experience in his novel The Things They Carried, as he attempts to recreate how these young men fought to survive in the jungles and mine fields of Vietnam, in a way that one who hasn’t experienced war might understand.
Even though the stories are either fictional or exaggerated, O’Brien explains that “In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. It’s a question of credibility. Often the crazy stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness.” (71 O’Brien) O’Brien uses these stories in order to convey; not the exact accounts of what happened historically, but the true emotions that he, and soldiers like him felt in the jungles of Vietnam.
It is impossible to remember every fact of a past memory, especially when multiple years have passed and the unused memory has faded into a person’s subconscious. By utilizing the stories however, O’Brien is able to recreate his own Vietnam so his readers can grasp the true emotional impact of loss, confusion and paranoia felt by the soldiers fighting. His story on the death of Curt Lemon while he plays chicken with his friend and comrade Rat Kiley brings the reality of sudden and unexpected death of these young, inexperienced soldiers to a light that a person who has never experienced war would have known:
The angles of vision are skewed. When
A booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and
Float outside yourself. When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon,
You look away and then you look back for a moment and then
Look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend
To miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about
It, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes
the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the
hard and exact truth as it seemed. (71 O’Brien)

The story of Curt Lemon quickly turns form two young men goofing around to the death of a young man that was entirely unexpected, given the atmosphere conveyed. O’Brien attempts to recreate how suddenly an ambush could occur in the jungles, and how every step could be a soldier’s last if they fell victim, as Curt Lemon did, to one of the multitudes of buried mines: “’Mines and booby traps have been employed so often and effectively by the Viet Cong that the war has often been referred to as the ‘War of Mines and Booby Traps’ Mines had a major influence in the way the ground war was fought,” (www.hrw.org) Mines were not only deadly but maiming as well, which added to the apprehensions of the soldiers.
Along with mines, which were buried in Vietnam by both sides; guerilla warfare was utilized to its full extent by the Viet Cong. Due to their small numbers, compared to the U.S. troops, the Vietnamese took to ambush tactics as well as blending in with the local villagers. O’Brien’s exaggerated stories of the platoon reflect larger, historical problems of the Vietnam War and its troops. Lee Strunk and Dave Jensen, both men in the same platoon, have an altercation over a stolen “jackknife”. During the fistfight that ensues, Jensen breaks Strunk’s nose. When Strunk returns form medical, Jensen is so paranoid that he wants revenge that he ends up breaking his own nose to make things even “No safe ground: enemies everywhere. No front or rear. At night he had trouble sleeping-a skittish feeling-always on guard, hearing strange noises in the dark, imagining a grenade rolling into his foxhole or the tickle of a knife against his ear. The distinction between good guys and bad guys disappeared for him.” (63 O’Brien) Jensen’s complex of a lack of enemy distinction is a common, historical issue of the war as well.
The N. Vietnamese used ambush attacks in the majority of the battles with U.S. soldiers, because of this there was no sure way for the military to know when or where the enemy would attack “The highly unusual nature of the communist force structure with its regulars, guerillas, part time village defense forces, and subversive apparatus, made it difficult to agree on a valid picture of the whole communist lineup.” (4 Thayer) With O’Brien’s depiction of two comrades, on the same side, distrusting each other is his way of showing how an ambush could be waiting around any path taken, a quiet village could have Viet Cong forces lurking and the troops wouldn’t know until it was too late.
Returning soldiers faced adjustment problems due to the environment differences that surrounded them, however they also felt displaced due to the changes in their personal lives as well. Veterans of Vietnam were forced to cope with losses of loved ones, girlfriends who married other men while they were overseas and jobs that could no longer hold their attention: “More often we think we know our motives without being aware of the real motives. That is, quite frequently we are attempting to gratify motives of which we are not even aware of.” (Rogers 10) Norman Bowker commits suicide, after recieveing a copy of Tim O’Brien’s “Speaking of Courage.” It seems as if Bowker’s suicide is directly related to the story O’Brien wrote due to his “somewhat bitter” letter he wrote about it: ““It’s not terrible,” he wrote me “but you left out Vietnam. Where’s Kiowa? Where’s the shit? “Eight months later he hanged himself.” (O’Brien) The story is not the reason for Bowker’s suicide though, it is the underlying problems, the social changes that have passed the men who served in Vietnam by.
The lack of understanding form the Americans who did not witness Vietnam firsthand leaves the soldiers without anyone to relate to except other exiled veterans like themselves. “A good war story, he thought, but it was not a war for war stories, nor for talk of valor, and nobody in town wanted to know about the terrible stink. They wanted good intentions and good deeds. But the town was not to blame, really. It was a nice little town, very prosperous, with neat houses and all the sanitary conveniences.” (O’Brien 150) Civilians don’t want to hear gory details, they’d rather hear about acts of courage however, the problem faced by many soldiers is that their so called courageous acts were inspired by fear and the intense want to stay alive.
Exile felt by the troops after the war was a huge factor in many soldiers returning from Vietnam. Since they were use to the constant violence surrounding them, returning to civilian life was difficult “”The thing is,” he wrote, “There’s no place to go. Not just in this lousy little town. In general. My life, I mean, It’s almost like I got killed over in Nam.” (O’Brien 156). For years the soldiers have been fighting in a foreign jungle with the only purpose being to survive. Returning to civilian life is a sharp curve from struggling to live everyday in distant jungles: “That he has shown unquestioned courage under fire does not alter the fact that facing civilian life is a frightening experience and involves many decisions that he hardly feels ready to make.” (2 Ragers). For men like Norman Bowker, and others in O’Brien’s platoon, civilian life was a huge contast to life in Vietnam. The men have fought in unfamiliar territory only to return to an old life they can no longer relate to.
O’Brien explains throughout his stories that truth is not as important as the reality that the story depicts “A thing may happen and be a total lie, another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.”(83 O’Brien) Although his stories may not be entirely true, what matters is what he tries to convey while telling the story. O’Brien’s fictional stories recreate events that happened and the impact it had on those who were involved:
“You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If
You don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; If
You don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send
Guys to war, they come home talking dirty.
Listen to Rat: “Jesus Christ, man, I write this beautiful fuckin’ letter, I slave over it, and what happens? The dumb
Cooze never writes back. (O’Brien 69)

What is being conveyed is the psychological change that occurred among the soldiers of Vietnam. The war forces boys to become men and to survive on their own. To cope they harden themselves and hide their pain with words that make them feel brave, however they are just masking pain and hurt with apathy and jokes.
The fact that there is no moral to any of the stories shows the frustration of a war with no point. Numerous times in the text the soldiers will ask their listeners if they want to know the moral, and when told yes the answer they give is either too obscure to make sense or that there was no moral to begin with “For some Americans who served in Vietnam, however, events were distinguished by their senselessness. The phrase ‘It don’t mean nothin’ was commonly used by American soldiers to express their alienation from their surroundings and from the acts they performed and witnessed.” (1 Taylor) The young men of O’Brien’s platoon used apathy and jokes to get through a war that had no moral. The truth, therefore, lies with the feeling received from the story and not the story itself.
Although O’Brien’s stories are fabricated, the reality emitting from them is the true emotional impact of the war that he aims to reveal to the reader. The stories get the reader to understand how Vietnam truly affected soldiers and what they had to go through as the country fought over whether the war should even continue. O’Brien uses these fictional stories to get to the reality of the alienation, hopelessness and fear felt by these young men who have been forced to leave their innocence behind because of the violence of reality they have witnessed.