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

War is not about the victories and the heroes, but about surviving and carrying the burden of death as a soldier fights for their country and life. In “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, the author, describes the human side of war and what a soldier really endures when they trudge through the country side of Vietnam or during the horrors of the night while on guard duty; not only are there physical burdens during war, but also mental burdens. Mental burdens are emotions like fear, desire and responsibility that are shown through the characters, like Lieutenant Cross, Henry Dobbins and O’Brien. Many of these characters, especially the narrator, are affected by all the burdens that war causes in different ways. But O’Brien argues throughout the book that the mental burdens of the war that the …show more content…
The most conveyed mental burden throughout “The Things They Carried” was fear, which haunted every soldier in Vietnam. The soldiers feared the land due to its “uncivilized” manner and the many voices that come alive in the mountains at night (71). Vietnam was a scary, foreign place for the American soldiers, and it filled them with fear, but they hid their fear by cracking jokes and talking to the dead; for example, Dave Jensen jokingly sang “Lemon Tree” as they gather up the remains of a soldier named Curt Lemon or shaking a dead man’s hand (79, 214). This type of joking-around is shown as a type of manliness through the story, but soon they realize manliness is not worth dying for. On another hand, not everyone took part in making these jokes, others dealt with their fear in a different ways. For Ted Lavender, he was so scared of dying in pain that he was addicted to tranquilizers. But the greatest fear that the men obtained was not dying, but it was being a coward. O’Brien explains this by how, “ They carried the soldier’s greatest