In the book “The Things They Carried”, Tim O’Brien uses figurative language and symbolism to evoke certain emotions in readers and denote to the burden of death in the Vietnam War and the effects it had on soldiers. The story, at first, appears to be about the tools and equipment soldiers physically must carry during war and combat, but it’s not that simple. In war, soldiers deal with life changing experiences that they will carry emotionally for the remaining days of their lives. O’Brien has strong way of depicting this emotional challenge of death to people through his short story. Soldiers may still be physically the same when they return home but those emotional wounds are present and they often never heal.
War is frequently believed to harden soldiers’ hearts. People believe that war makes a person stronger emotionally because soldiers are trained to deal with their pain and emotion with death internally. This training does not make it any easier on soldiers, they just keep their pain hidden. “It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do” (96), says it all. O’Brian, like all the other soldiers, was taught at a young …show more content…
Many of the Vietnam War veterans dealt with depression due to the conflicting experiences of war and the toll death had on the soldiers internally. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in Vietnam war veterans that experiences combat was also common because they were taught to internalize their emotions. “The Things They Carried” shows people the burden of loss our soldiers deal with when they come home. The American Journal of Psychiatry conducted a study on sixty-one Vietnam War veterans when they arrived home from war. The results were