"The Things They Carried" By: Tim O'Brien

I found this short story heart-warming. I thought it was well written and interesting. How true to life this story is! "The things they carried were largely determined by necessity... necessity dictated." (425) Among the various weaponry, first-aid, and personal items were items not able to be weighed. "As a first lieutenant and platoon leader, Jimmy Cross carried a compass... and the responsibility for the lives of his men... plus the unweighed fear...including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried... They all carried ghosts... They shared the weight of memory... Often they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections... malaria and dysentery... They carried the land itself -- Vietnam, the place, the soil... They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere... they carried gravity... They carried their own lives... They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die... the intangible had their own mass and specific gravity... THey carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained... in many ways this was the heaviest burden of all... They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier's greatest fear... the fear of blushing... It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside." Of all the physical things they carried, Tim O'Brien had a way of making you fell the weight of the intangible.
To carry something was to "hump" it. The hump was described as, "everyhting, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility." (431)
Jimmy Cross carried around his hope for love, his want for Martha, his need for female companionship and home, his desire for affection. This hump he carried around distracted him to the point where he was an irresponsible leader and lost a man. He realized that his hump was too much of a burden. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross reminded himself that his obligation was not to be loved but to lead." (437)

Posted by: Krista Behrends