The Harsh Realities Of War In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

The Harsh Realities of War War is an unchanging human interaction that has been present in history for as long as humans have. Although every war has its own mitigating factors that started them and are fought by different people, the abstract concept of war has yet to change since humans fought each other with sticks and stones. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried provides specific insight into the effects War had on the soldiers of the American Alpha Company in the Vietnam War and commentary on the actual concept of war. When people think of war they often focus on the reason for the war, the countries involved, or patriotism rather than the fear that grips the hearts of young men and women in a foreign land fighting an unknown enemy with …show more content…
O’Brien, a veteran of the Vietnam War, is well acquainted with these realities of combat and attempts to make these truths evident to the reader through his war stories and the abstract truth held within each tale. O’Brien’s writing educates readers about the reality of war while simultaneously provoking deeper questions about war: What makes the men and women who fight these wars who they are? How do the external and internal pressures of war change the soldiers who fight in them from the people they once were? What lasting impacts of war are evident in veterans? Each pair of combat boots is filled by a pair of feet that walked hundreds of miles before marching into battle, men and women who have lived unique lives and have unique ideas about war. The chapter “The Things They Carried” brings attention to this fact by listing the explicit tools, paraphernalia, and memorabilia that they carried and the unique connotations and deeper meanings that the items they carried held for each soldier (O’Brien). Lieutenant Cross carried “a compass, maps, code …show more content…
In the chapter “Notes” Norman Bowker writes to Tim O’Brien about how his life has been since the war and beseeches him to write a story about Kiowa’s death, “What you should do, Tim, is write a story about a guy who feels like he got zapped over in that shithole. A guy who can’t get his act together and just drives around town all day and can’t think of any damn place to go and doesn’t know how to get there anyway. This guy wants to talk about it, but he can’t…” (O’Brien 151). Bowker was taught a certain way to operate in order to survive in Vietnam and upon the war’s end and his return to civilian life, he finds that he is unable to readjust to the life that he left so long ago. The memories of what happened in Vietnam, particularly Kiowa’s death, keep Bowker from rejoining society and assuredly played no small part in his suicide eight months after he wrote O’Brien. O’Brien likewise bears the scars of his time in war and the role he played in it, as evidenced by the longstanding effects left on his psyche by his first kill, “Even now I haven’t finished sorting it out. Sometimes I forgive myself, other times I don’t. In the ordinary hours of life I try not to dwell on it, but now and then, when I’m reading a newspaper or just sitting alone