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Analysis of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 26, 2021

In the short story cycle The Things They Carried (1990), Tim O’Brien cemented his reputation as one of the most powerful chroniclers of the Vietnam War, joining the conversation alongside Philip Caputo ( A Rumor of War ), Michael Herr ( Dispatches ), David Halberstam ( The Best and the Brightest ), and the poet Bruce Weigl ( Song of Napalm ), among others. Comprising 22 pieces—some little more than vignettes, others more “traditional” stories—the collection details the experiences of the soldier Tim O’Brien, who returns to his native Minnesota after a tour of duty in Vietnam. In his subsequent role as author, O’Brien records his recollections in a false memoir of sorts as a way of reconstructing the war’s elusive “truth.” O’Brien’s goal in The Things They Carried, he tells Michael Coffey, “was to write something utterly convincing but without any rules as to what’s real and what’s made up. I forced myself to try to invent a new form. I had never invented form before” (60).

“In the Field” follows Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and his platoon of 17 remaining men as they search a Vietnamese muck field for Kiowa, a lost comrade. Cross, who figures prominently in several of the book’s pieces—including the eponymous “The Things They Carried,” the collection’s most anthologized story—feels tremendous guilt over Kiowa’s death, not the least because the previous evening, just before an ambush, Cross refused to disobey orders and to move his men to higher, and therefore safer, ground. Kiowa, buried when a fellow soldier inadvertently gave away the platoon’s position to the enemy, was a popular soldier. Out of respect for their fallen comrade, the men dutifully wade through waist-deep sewage searching for his remains; they sustain themselves with a morbid sense of humor, making light of the situation in order to quell their fear of random, sudden death at the hands of a faceless enemy. Cross quickly realizes that he is ill suited for the military, having been shipped to Vietnam after joining the officer training corps in college only to be with friends and to collect a few college credits. “[Cross] did not care one way or the other about the war,” O’Brien intones, “and he had no desire to command, and even after all these months in the bush, all the days and nights, even then he did not know enough to keep his men out of a shit field” (168).

Tim O’Brien/The Austin Chronicle

War is a great leveler in O’Brien’s fiction. In the field where Cross and his men search for Kiowa, “The filth seemed to erase identities, transforming the men into identical copies of a single soldier, which was exactly how Jimmy Cross had been trained to treat them, as interchangeable units of command” (163). The young lieutenant, however, suspends his humanity only with great difficulty. Ruminating on Kiowa’s death, he imagines writing a letter to the soldier’s father before deciding that “no apologies were necessary, because in fact it was one of those freak things, and the war was full of freaks, and nothing could ever change it anyway” (176). Cross’s rationalization may absolve him (at least in part) of his guilt over Kiowa’s death, though it is also a tacit admission of his lack of control over the war’s daily life-and-death struggles. Cross’s desire to organize the details of Kiowa’s death in his own mind is an extension of O’Brien’s attempt in The Things They Carried to construct a coherent narrative that finds the essential truth of war (a notion that the author confirms in the ironically titled “How to Tell a True War Story” which acts as an interpretive key to his recollections).

Upon the discovery of Kiowa’s body, the men properly mourn the loss of their fellow soldier, though “they also felt a kind of giddiness, a secret joy, because they were alive, and because even the rain was preferable to being sucked under a shit field, and because it was all a matter of luck and happenstance” (175). Cross, yearning for war’s end, imagines himself on a golf course in his New Jersey hometown, free of the burden of leading men to their deaths. O’Brien examines the onus of responsibility often, and in the related story “Field Trip,” which details the author’s return to Vietnam two decades later to the field where Kiowa died, O’Brien finds a world barely recognizable as the one he left behind. “The field remains, but in a form much different from what O’Brien remembers, smaller now, and full of light,” Patrick A. Smith writes of O’Brien’s visit. “The air is soundless, the ghosts are missing, and the farmers who now tend the field go back to work after stealing a curious glance in his direction. The war is absent, except in O’Brien’s memory” (107). But it is memory, O’Brien makes clear, that supersedes experience and haunts soldiers long after the shooting has stopped.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Coffey, Michael. “Tim O’Brien: Inventing a New Form Helps the Author Talk about War, Memory, and Storytelling.” Publishers Weekly, 16 February 1990, pp. 60–61. O’Brien, Tim. “In the Field.” In The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Smith, Patrick A. Tim O’Brien: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005.

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The Things They Carried Tim O'Brien

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Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried Critical Analysis Essay

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The story starts innocently, informing the reader what the soldier got from Vietnam. Tim O’Brien’s narrative of his experience in Vietnam is a composite of many people’s stories. Death, life, joy, and harrowing situations are all part of his path. The Things They Carried is an extraordinarily comprehensive and graphic account of the Vietnam War that paints startlingly realistic imagery of the conflict. O’Brien describes each platoon member’s emblems, talismans, and totems for varied reasons. He also takes the audience through his friends’ numerous deep and diverse experiences and emotions. The Things They Carried title are literal and symbolic, implying that they carried physical goods and emotional luggage. Therefore, this paper aims to critically analyze Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried in a literary and figurative sense.

O’Brien describes some of the actual items they carried at the start of the book: This comprised anything from their girlfriend’s pantyhose to survival kit and weaponry like pistols and explosives. In their current circumstances, they utilize weapons to protect their physical bodies. Still, they also carried totems representing homes, such as comic books, the New Testament, and a rabbit’s foot, representing their past and hope for their future. Dysentery, malaria, rots, and molds were among the other factors linked to the location. Some troops packed supplies that might give them an advantage in war, while others carried comfort items such as wine and confectionery. The author mentions one soldier (Norman Bowker) who held a thumb but was “ otherwise a gentle person .” This statement stood out because the author notes that he is gentle. The thumb appears to symbolize how many of the militaries have got estranged from their humanity.

The caption The Things They Carried was both literal and symbolic. Some troops brought items into Vietnam, while others gathered them. Kiowa, an indigenous soldier, brought “his grandmother’s suspicion of the white man” into the conflict. After being enlisted, O’Brien carries extreme anxiety into the fight. He describes his experience of running away before joining Vietnam. Still, he discovers himself via interactions with other individuals and concludes that serving is the right thing to do. All of the troops had a lot of emotional baggage and had been through a lot of suffering.

Besides, the fighters all had to perform awful things during the conflict and witness terrible things. The fighters had to witness their friends, the individuals they had grown to love and care about after going through this horrific experience with them, get shot and killed right in front of their eyes. The fighters had to bear the grief of losing their friends and the anxiety that they may be next: they had to carry their rage from being recruited into a war they did not want to fight in the first place, as well as profound homesickness. They had to bear the guilt of killing other people’s lives as well as the incapacity to grieve their grief adequately.

The scenes with the infant water buffalo and the dog are examples of this incapacity to absorb grief. The author presents two stories throughout the book, one of which is far more brutal and violent than the other. In the dog’s narrative, the dog got injured in a perverted effort at entertainment. This anecdote exemplified how troops grew to lose respect for life due to the frequency they witnessed death. One of the most upsetting stories was that of the infant water buffalo. It recounted the newborn buffalo’s prolonged, violent, and brutal demise, which not only displayed great sadness but also represented how their humanity was gradually getting eroded. The author expresses his view of death as beautiful, implying that the troops begin to lose value for life due to all of the killings they have witnessed and perpetrated.

In O’Brien’s narrative, war acts as a tremendous stabilizing agent. Cross and his soldiers are looking for Kiowa in the field, “The filth seemed to erase identities, transforming the men into identical copies of a single soldier, which was exactly how Jimmy Cross had been trained to treat them, as interchangeable units of command” (163). O’Brien describes the stories they brought as other anecdotes from home to keep them going and some tales they picked up along the route. They even made up stories to help them deal with and transport the dead, sometimes wholly fictitious. It was one of the methods the guys devised to help them process their sorrow and make sense of the tragedy all around them while also celebrating their camaraderie and forming a type of family. One unhealthy coping technique the guys discovered was modifying how they referred to the remains of their fallen unit mates. Instead of bodies, they get denoted as trash . It briefly alleviated the sorrow of knowing that the deceased corpse was only a few hours earlier battling by their side and a family member.

The author posited that males also had a subjective view of truth. According to the author, the truth of a war narrative is never as easy as someone stepping in and saving all of their colleagues; actual combat stories are considerably more nuanced. The author tells battle anecdotes from his point of view of what happened during his service in Vietnam. Rather than heroics, the stories focus on the compassion and honesty of the event. His point of view resulted in a less heroic image of war and a better awareness of the complexity that our military personnel face. Patrick A. Smith describes O’Brien’s arrival, “The air is soundless, the ghosts are missing, and the farmers who now tend the field go back to work after stealing a curious glance in his direction. The war is absent, except in O’Brien’s memory” (107). But, as O’Brien points out, memory trumps experience and haunts troops long after the gunfire has ceased.

Therefore, The Things They Carried is an extraordinarily comprehensive and graphic account of the Vietnam War that paints startlingly realistic imagery of the conflict. He pondered other options but finally chose to fight in Vietnam. The story is mainly about O’Brien’s experience during the war in Vietnam as he joined the war as a young man but left as a guilty older man. The Things They Carried included both tangible goods and complicated emotions. Death, wrath, sadness, sickness, grief, remorse, humiliation, fear, agony, and a slew of other emotions must be endearing to the man. They had to see the deaths of their friends and colleagues, and they even had to retrieve their remains to be taken home afterward. The author described the story from his point of view, telling the truth. Rather than praising their experiences, his approach humanized the reality of combat via both the literal and tangible items they carried.

Works Cited

O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried . 4th Estate, 2019.

Smith, Patrick A. Tim O’Brien: A Critical Companion . Greenwood Press, 2005.

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