The Things They Carried is a collection of interconnected short stories about the experiences of a company of young American men serving in the Vietnam War. The book blurs the line between fiction and autobiography. It is told mainly from the first-person perspective of a middle-aged writer named Tim O’Brien, who is looking back on his time during the war. Tim O’Brien, however, is also the name of the actual author of The Things They Carried—it is unclear if the main character (and narrator) of the book is meant to be the same person as the author (who is also a Vietnam veteran).
The blending of fact and fiction is further developed as O’Brien tells us throughout the book that many of the tales we have read are not literally true. Rather, they are stories whose embellishments and fantastical qualities convey to the reader the full scale of the horror and emotional trauma of war. Because they produce what he deems to be the appropriate emotional reaction in the reader—one of shock, revulsion, and even disbelief—O’Brien deems this collection of stories to be truer than actual truth. They bring the experience of Vietnam to life in a way that a straight retelling of the facts never could.
The stories do not form a coherent, linear narrative—we jump back and forth through time and space and between the perspectives of different characters. Sometimes, O’Brien takes us inside the minds of characters other than himself, revealing their deepest thoughts and fears—details that would be impossible to recount, of course, if the book were a simple war autobiography. We see O’Brien’s early experiences with grief and loss as he recounts the death of his childhood girlfriend in the 1950s, his reluctance to go to war when he is drafted, the trauma and chaos he experiences when he is in Vietnam, and his attempts to make peace with his past and achieve closure with the war when he revisits the combat scenes of his youth with his daughter.
But we also see how the other men he serves with process the harrowing experience of war. We see these men engage in shocking acts of cruelty toward Vietnamese soldiers, civilians, each other, and even themselves. We see how the high chance of sudden death makes life a cheap commodity for the soldiers. And we see how the men use the power of storytelling to make sense of the ordeal and burden of war. Telling stories enables them to objectify their experiences, to make them seem more distant, third-party, and remote—and thus, more bearable. But creating a narrative around their experiences also brings the war and the people whom they lost to it back to life. Telling their stories makes them immortal.
The Things They Carried explores some key themes:
The men endure harrowing life-and-death experiences fighting in the jungles of Vietnam. There are, of course, the physical threats to one’s safety, as men become sick, lose limbs in combat, and are even killed. Men die suddenly, randomly, and gruesomely, whether from unexpected bursts of sniper fire, stepping on landmines, or even drowning in sewage fields. But there are also the psychological threats to one’s sanity and basic humanity, as the men of Alpha Company succumb to the emotional traumas inflicted by fear, isolation, and grief.
As the men spend more time in Vietnam and become more exposed to life in a war zone, they become hardened and emotionally callous. O’Brien comes to believe that he has lost some essential part of his former self because of the things he has seen and done. The men of Alpha Company burn down villages, terrorize the local Vietnamese population, slaughter animals, and mock the grief of the people they see lamenting the loss of their homes and families. At other times, they desecrate corpses of dead soldiers and civilians—kicking them, cutting off their limbs as trophies, and mockingly “shaking hands” with them.
But they also brutalize and dehumanize with language. The men joke and put on a mask of weary indifference to cope with the threat of death that hangs over their entire existence. When someone dies, they are, “offed,” “lit up,” or “zapped.” Even when some of their own are killed, the reaction is the same—jokes, callous remarks, and outward displays of cold indifference.
O’Brien shares an early, pre-Vietnam experience from his childhood, in which he fails to defend a friend who was suffering from a brain tumor from having her cap yanked off in class by a bully, revealing her bald head. He says that he failed to show moral courage and act on his principles because he didn’t want to look weak or effeminate in defending a vulnerable friend. He felt compelled to socially sanction an act of cruelty.
He faces similar dilemmas as a soldier. When first drafted into the war, O’Brien contemplates fleeing to Canada, but also feels immense pressure from his conservative Minnesota hometown to fight, and fears being seen as a coward. While he believes that the war is morally wrong and politically unjustified, he ultimately succumbs to his fear of how he would be perceived by his peers and goes to Vietnam—a decision which he, ironically, looks back on as having been the cowardly one.
Later, in Vietnam, he sees that the men of Alpha Company disdain outward displays of compassion and celebrate those fellow soldiers who seem to relish the violence of combat. Those who deliberately injure themselves to escape active duty are castigated as dishonorable and shameful “pussies” and “candy-asses.”
A frequent theme throughout the book is how telling fictionalized narrative stories brings true experiences alive. O’Brien discusses the difference between happening-truth and story-truth. Happening-truth is just the literal recounting of events that happened, while story-truth is imbued with fictional or exaggerated elements. Story-truth, however, is more real, because its sensationalized features more fully convey to the reader the emotional power of what happened. Stories can be truer than truth.
O’Brien experiments with this theme throughout the book, by relating emotionally traumatic episodes to us (like his killing of a young Vietnamese soldier), only to reveal to us later in the narrative that they did not actually happen the way he told us. Nevertheless, the stories are “true” because they convey to us what it felt like for O’Brien to be in these situations in a way that the literal truth (or happening-truth) never could.
He notes that true war stories aren’t parables—they’re not meant to instruct, impart morals, serve as examples of good conduct, generalize, or engage in abstraction. What makes the story true is the reaction it produces, not the content itself. Thus, something may happen and still be a complete lie, while another thing may be pure fiction and yet truer than the actual truth.
For O’Brien, a writer, storytelling is an act of both catharsis and resurrection. He can process his own war experiences and make sense of them by reshaping them into a narrative. But he can also see the dead again, make them smile and speak. He likens his characters to books on a library shelf that haven’t been checked out for a long time. They are lying dormant, waiting for him to check them out and bring them to life once more—to make them immortal through storytelling.
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, commanding officer in charge of Alpha Company, a unit of the U.S. Army in the Vietnam War, is reminiscing about a girl named Martha whom he knew back home. He is in love with her, but fears that his love is unrequited—although she signs off her letters to him with the customary “Love,” Cross knows that it is perfunctory and without meaning.
Cross is a reluctant commander, who never wanted the responsibility of leading men in combat. He had joined the officer training program in his sophomore year of college because it seemed preferable to the draft. He has no deep commitment to the war, and, at 24 years of age, feels himself to be entirely unsuited to be making life-or-death decisions for others. The responsibility is too much for him to bear.
To cope with his war burden, he clings to the memory and to the idea of Martha in any way he can, including tasting the envelope flaps of her letters (knowing that her tongue has been there) and keeping a small pebble in his mouth that she sent to him from a beach back home. He also endlessly ponders whether or not she is a virgin. His feelings about Martha are his tether, his connection to a world apart from the horror and mayhem of Vietnam.
Cross recalls going to see Bonnie and Clyde with her and touching Martha’s knee during the final scene of the film. He regrets not going further—carrying her up to her dormitory, tying her to the bed, and touching her knee all night. For him, this act is a symbol of a lost time, of a path in his life not taken.
In military parlance, to “hump” means to walk or march. In the psychologically harrowing context of Vietnam, however, to hump something carried far deeper meaning. All the men must carry the necessary weaponry, rations, and survival gear for operating in the dense jungle warfare of Vietnam. All of them are grimly aware of the terrifying destructive power of the weapons they wield. The brutality of war has transformed all of them, hardened them into new and unrecognizable versions of their former selves.
What each man chooses to carry is a window into who they are and what is most important to them. Some carry extra rations, condoms, comic books, marijuana, or copies of the New Testament. Beyond the physical, the men of Alpha company also carry a great many burdens—including diseases both biological and psychological.
Cross carries two photographs of Martha. Another man, Dave Jensen, carries a rabbit’s foot as a good-luck charm. Henry Dobbins carries his girlfriend’s pantyhose, tied around his neck. Disturbingly, Norman Bowker carries a rotting thumb taken from the corpse of a slain Vietcong (VC) soldier, a boy of perhaps 15 or 16.
Much of the war is spent in passive waiting and long spells of boredom. It often seems to be a continual march, without end and without purpose, humping their burdens from one poor village to the next. Of course, it is war—and war still brings the fearsome anticipation and knowledge that, at any moment, death and destruction may descend upon the company.
In moments of combat when the unit is under fire, the boredom drains away and the tough exterior the men put on drops immediately. They fall to the ground in terror and pray to be spared from death. But when the firing stops, the men cover up their fear, almost as if it’s a stain. The shame of being seen to be afraid is a powerful force, more powerful than death itself. Many of them are only in Vietnam because they want to avoid the shame of not going off to fight. They are there out of fear of embarrassment, not out of any patriotic zeal. They castigate soldiers they know who have shot themselves on purpose to get put on medical leave as “pussies” and “candy-asses,” but always with a measure of envy for those who have found a way out of the jungle.
There are jobs that every man dreads. One of the most fearsome tasks is to search out enemy tunnels. The men reveal their cold fatalism when the unlucky soldier is selected to perform this dangerous and possibly deadly service—you win some, you lose some. Lee Strunk draws the short straw and is forced to descend into the subterranean world of rats, spiders, and possible hidden VC. When Strunk emerges back out of the tunnel, Rat Kiley, the company’s medic, remarks that Strunk looks like he is “right out of the grave, fuckin’ zombie.”
One of the men under Cross’s command, Ted Lavender, is shot in the head and killed while the company is stationed outside a small village. His death comes entirely out of the blue, without warning. By this point, the burden of war has hardened the men—death is no longer (at least outwardly) a cause for shock or displays of grief. They coldly and unemotionally observe how Lavender’s body hit the ground. They note that his death was un-dramatic and oddly mundane—in their words, “the poor bastard just flat-fuck fell. Boom. Down. Nothing else.” Of the 17 men—now 16—only Rat Kiley shows any shock as he repeatedly remarks, as if in shock, “The guy’s dead.”
In lieu of expressing their grief, the men find their emotional outlet by subjecting a local Vietnamese village to an orgy of mayhem and destruction. They burn homes, destroy food stocks, slaughter domestic animals, and then call in artillery to raze the place to the ground while they watch. Azar, a soldier particularly given to performative displays of cruelty and callousness, sees a boy with one leg. His sympathies, however, are not with the boy, but with the soldier who failed to kill him and instead only succeeded in maiming him. He remarks, “War’s a bitch. Some poor fucker ran out of ammo.”
The company desecrates the corpses of soldiers and civilians, kicking them and cutting off their limbs to take as trophies. They also brutalize and dehumanize with language. The men joke and put on a mask of weary indifference to cope with the threat of death that hangs over their existence. When someone dies, they are, “offed,” “lit up,” or “zapped.” Even the death of one of their own, Lavender, brings the same chorus of jokes. They sneer about how Lavender (who constantly took tranquilizers to cope with the fear of war) is serene and tranquil now.
Cross is consumed with guilt over Lavender’s death, as he has been—and will be—about all the men who die under his command. He believes that he was daydreaming and distracted while thinking about Martha, and that this led to Lavender’s demise. Wracked with guilt and shame, he is afraid to cry in front of the men. He retreats to his foxhole to weep, for Lavender, for his unrequited love for Martha, and for the world he has lost to war. The morning after Lavender’s death, Cross burns Martha’s letters and photos. He would sever the connection to his old life, commit now to his duties as a soldier—and nothing more. “Love” would no longer be a factor.
Among the men of Alpha Company, only one soldier, Kiowa, a Native American who carries his New Testament on his person at all times, shows any introspection. When death strikes the company, he is always the one who encourages his comrades to talk about their experiences rather than submerge them in acts of violence or displays of emotional cruelty. Seeing Cross’s despair, Kiowa wishes to himself that he could feel for Lavender as Cross does. But instead, all he can think about is the sound of Lavender’s body hitting the ground.
(Shortform note: Some of the men’s stories are told from the third-person, while others are told from the first-person perspective of the narrator and main character of the book, Tim O’Brien. Often, O’Brien is sharing stories that he heard from others, but claims not to have experienced or witnessed himself. The character O’Brien shares many autobiographical similarities with the actual author of The Things They Carried, including sharing the same name. Because the book blends autobiograpy and fiction, we as readers are never certain whether the “Tim O’Brien” in the story is the same person as the author.)
Years later, after the war, Cross reunites with the narrator, O’Brien, at the latter’s home in Massachusetts. O’Brien asks Cross what became of Martha. He tells O’Brien that he ran into her again at a college reunion in 1979 and told her that he still loved her. He’d even confessed to her his fantasy about tying her to her bed and touching her knee (which Martha had said she was glad he never acted upon).
O’Brien, now an author, says that he’d like to develop Cross and Martha’s story into a written piece. Cross only asks that O’Brien make him out to be “brave and handsome, all that stuff. Best platoon leader ever.”
Even years after they’ve returned home, the men can’t stop telling themselves war stories. The stories, whether they are literally true or not, provide a powerful catharsis. Through the power of narrative, they can make sense of their experiences and convey to others what it felt like to be in Vietnam. It is the stories that connect the past to the present, that tie together the loose narrative threads of their lives. Whether they literally happened or not is irrelevant. They provide meaning and coherence to memory, they fill in the gaps between who the men were in Vietnam and who they are now.
There were some happy stories. Indeed, for all the horrors of war, there were still moments where people could display decency, even compassion for others. Like the time a local village elder guided Alpha Company safely through a minefield and Cross tearfully hugged the man while others provided him with rations as an expression of gratitude.
Many of the stories are barely stories at all, lacking a narratively clear beginning, middle, and end. Rather, they are memory fragments. Like the time Kiowa (a Native American) taught a rain dance to Rat Kiley and Dave Jensen. Or when Ted Lavender adopted a stray puppy.
But of course, there are also stories of bloodshed and near-sadistic cruelty. Like when Azar strapped Lavender’s puppy to a landmine and then detonated it. Or when the same Azar mocked the frenzied dancing of a girl whose family had just been killed in a napalm attack on her village (the girl was clearly suffering from some sort of psychotic break). Or when Rat Kiley tortured a baby water buffalo with a submachine gun, methodically blowing away its limbs and body with surgical precision (he was a medic, after all) while the company watched the animal bleed to death, fascinated by how long it took to die. Or when the company shook hands with and ironically “introduced” themselves to the corpse of an old man who’d been killed in an air strike on a local village.
For some of the men, these were rituals that objectified the horror of war and made it seem less personal—it was easier to cope if it was all just a joke. Others, like Azar, seemed to genuinely relish the most ghoulish aspects of Vietnam and took pleasure in watching the pain and suffering of others.
Think about the tools and methods you use to handle stress in your life.
Have you ever been in a situation that caused high levels of emotional or physical distress? Describe it in a few sentences.
Did this stress or burden ever cause you to lash out at others or behave in other ways that you normally wouldn’t? Describe this experience.
In the future, how can you develop better coping mechanisms to avoid behaving this way?
O’Brien looks back at how he came to be in Vietnam, and how he nearly made the choice not to be there. He grew up in a small, conservative town in Minnesota whose citizens were fiercely pro-war. There was immense social pressure to support the war effort and great disdain for the war protestors and pacifists who decried US involvement in Vietnam. It was a mark of cowardice and shame for a young man to avoid the military if he was called upon to serve.
When O’Brien received his draft notice in June 1968, he was a 21-year-old, self-described liberal who was opposed to the war. He believed that there was no justification of self-defense for the United States, no deeper humanitarian principles at stake, and no clear rationale offered by the government for why American boys were being asked to die in the jungles of southeast Asia in the first place. He’d believed that you couldn’t send boys off to war without being able to explain why.
And, besides, he’d never seen himself as a soldier. He had thought he was too smart, too worldly, too questioning of authority to fall in line with the flag-waving, jingoistic masses. He remembered thinking that there was no shortage of hyper-patriotic young men in his town eager to enlist and fight the Communists (which is what they believed the war was about), so why did O’Brien need to potentially sacrifice his life?
None of this mattered, of course, to the people of his hometown. To them, anyone who shirked his military obligations was a traitor and a coward. There were no moral ambiguities, no gray areas. The war was about fighting and killing Communist aggressors in Vietnam and nothing more. It was a noble cause to fight for, and, if need be, to die for.
O’Brien recalls that he began thinking of fleeing to Canada to escape the draft. He was morally conflicted. He feared the war, but he also feared the ostracism from his community and the shame he knew he would bring on his family if he became a draft-dodger. He knew that he would become an ignominious example in his town, the boy who ran away because he was too afraid to fight. He seethed with resentment at the ignorant masses who were pushing him to sacrifice his life for a cause he didn’t believe in.
Rather impulsively, he one day decided to make a break for the Canadian border, quitting his job at a meatpacking plant, and not even saying goodbye to his parents. Something inside him had snapped under the pressure. He drove his car north, stopping at an old fishing lodge a half-mile from the Canadian border.
It was there that O’Brien met the man who, with hindsight, he says saved his life. Elroy Berdahl, the proprietor of the lodge, was 81 years old and immediately saw that O’Brien was in trouble. As tourist season was over, the two of them were the only people in the lodge. They spent six days together, fishing, eating, listening to records, and hiking through the woods. But never once did Berdahl ask O’Brien why he was there or what was troubling him.
During those six days, O’Brien recalls that he was tempted to steal a boat and row to the other side of the river to freedom in Canada. But, despite being so close, he could never bring himself to leave his life behind. It was not out of a sense of duty—indeed, his conscience is what told him to make a break for Canada. He still believed that avoiding fighting in Vietnam was the morally correct decision. What kept him from acting on his convictions was a fear of shame. He was ashamed, ironically, of his conscience.
He helped Berdahl get the lodge ready for winter, performing chores that kept his mind off the dilemma he faced. Berdahl refused to charge O’Brien for his stay, reasoning that O’Brien had performed chores that more than earned his keep—in fact, he offered the young man wages. One day, the old man took O’Brien fishing out on the Rainy River, which separates the U.S. from Canada. Berdahl navigated the vessel far enough upstream to where they passed into Canadian waters. Without ever saying it, the old man was presenting O’Brien with a choice. He could escape now, swim the twenty yards or so to the Canadian shore, and be free. O’Brien remembers Berdahl not speaking to him in this moment or acknowledging the option he was presenting him with.
O’Brien imagined duelling forces cheering him on and willing him toward one shore or the other—faces from the past and the future. He saw Lyndon Johnson, Abraham Lincoln, his future commanding officer Jimmy Cross, Jane Fonda, Abbie Hoffman, his unborn daughter, and the young Vietnamese man he would eventually kill.
But, in the end, he realized how unrealistic his plans to build a life in Canada were. It was a romantic fantasy—he was not a brave conscientious objector. His service in Vietnam would be an act of capitulation and submission, not self-sacrifice. He was too cowardly not to fight. Seeing the choice O’Brien made, Berdahl turned the boat back toward Minnesota, toward the U.S., and toward Vietnam.
Back in Vietnam—or rather, ahead in Vietnam—Lee Strunk and Dave Jensen get into a fight over a jackknife that one supposedly stole from the other. Jensen, being stronger, overpowers Strunk and breaks the latter’s nose.
This leads to a tense situation between the two men, as Jensen grows increasingly paranoid that Strunk is plotting his revenge. He scrupulously avoids Strunk at all turns. The anxiety causes Jensen to snap—one day, he starts firing his rifle indiscriminately into the air, yelling Strunk’s name.
Later that evening, Jensen takes a pistol and uses the barrel to break his own nose, to preempt Strunk’s feared retaliation. This act of penance brings about a reconciliation between the two men. They begin sharing foxholes and going on patrol and guard duty together.
They also make a solemn pact. If either of them should become seriously maimed in the course of combat, the other man agrees to mercy-kill him. They put this agreement in writing and even have some of their fellow Alpha Company men stand as witnesses.
This grim covenant is shortly put to the test when Strunk loses his right leg after stepping on a mortar round. When Jensen comes to see his friend’s wound, however, Strunk pleads with him not to kill him. Jensen assures Strunk that he will not kill him, and the company has Strunk airlifted into the chopper to be taken to a field hospital. The men later learn that Strunk dies from his wounds while he’s en route. Jensen is relieved to be spared from performing his harsh duty.
Looking back after Vietnam, O’Brien ponders what makes a “true” war story. He notes that true war stories aren’t parables—they’re not meant to instruct, impart morals, or serve as examples of good conduct. True war stories also don’t generalize or engage in abstraction. Even adages like “war is hell” are unbelievable to O’Brien because they lack the gut-punch sensation and raw disgust that such a story is meant to provoke. What makes the story true is the reaction it produces, not the content itself. Thus, something may happen and still be a complete lie, while another thing may be pure fiction and yet truer than the actual truth.
True war stories instead convey the emotional weight of the war experience. As such, obscenity and cruelty are central elements of this kind of storytelling because war is an obscene, vile, and dehumanizing experience.
He recalls a story Rat Kiley told him. Rat had served with a man named Curt Lemon who was known for volunteering for the most dangerous combat assignments, like late-night reconnaissance missions and patrols. Lemon was also celebrated for being a daredevil with what his fellow soldiers saw as a terrific sense of humor. According to Rat, Lemon once went out to a Vietnamese village, nude except for a mask and full body paint, to go “trick-or-treating,” bewildering the villagers in the process.
Unfortunately, Lemon was killed in action when he accidentally stepped on a landmine while he and Rat were goofing off by tossing smoke grenades back and forth. The men even had to retrieve Lemon’s mangled remains out of a tree, during which Dave Jensen sang the song “Lemon Tree,” laughing in the face of death once again. Rat tells O’Brien that he wrote a letter to Lemon’s sister, telling her how much he loved her brother. When he didn’t hear back from the sister, Rat was dismayed, then angered. In the coarse and brutalized language which the men have adopted, he tells O’Brien that “the dumb cooze” never wrote back.
O’Brien notes that the coarseness of Rat’s language is what makes the story true, because it reflects the harshness of Vietnam. It is important that Rat says the vulgar “cooze,” and not “woman,” “girl,” or even “bitch.” He also observes that it is nearly impossible to arrive at literal truth in the fog of war. Memory is unreliable (especially after time) and every witness remembers things differently. Often, the wildest elements of the story are true and the most banal aspects are false.
O’Brien, in fact, has his own Curt Lemon story. He recalls an Army dentist who visited the company one day to check in on the men’s teeth. Lemon, for all his bravado, fearlessness, and exploits in combat, was, for some reason, deathly afraid of going to the dentist. When it came time for Lemon to have his teeth examined, he fainted.
For a man like Lemon in a place like Vietnam, this was a deeply embarrassing episode. He couldn’t face the other men after this “lapse” in his masculinity, unless he made things right. So that evening, he went into the dental tent complaining of a toothache and insisted that the dentist extract what was, in fact, a healthy tooth.
Although in great physical pain, Lemon was in bright spirits the next morning. He had performed his penance and avenged the dishonor he’d done to himself by fainting.
O’Brien remembers another story he heard, this one from Mitchell Sanders, about a six-man patrol that was sent up into the mountains to listen for enemy movement.
(Shortform note: It’s significant that O’Brien hears these stories secondhand, rather than experiencing them himself. It speaks to the unreliability of narrative and the blending of fact and fiction that defines so much of The Things They Carried. These stories may not be true in an empirical sense—they’re often fantastical and surreal—but they accurately illustrate the emotional turbulence and mind-bending experience of actually being in Vietnam, so in that sense they are true and worthy of retelling.)
Sanders describes the fear and isolation the men experienced at this remote listening post in the mountains, surrounded by dark. The experience blurred the line between reality and fantasy for the patrol, as the men began to see and hear things in the darkness that they logically knew couldn’t and shouldn’t be out there. At first, they heard strange and ethereal Vietnamese music playing, seeming to emanate from the jungle itself. Some of them were driven to near-madness by the music they heard, but were unable to do anything to shut it out.
Eventually, they began hearing what sounded like a cocktail party out in the jungle, complete with glasses clinking, conversation, and orchestral music. They called in an air strike to drown out the haunting and nonstop noise. The Air Force napalmed the mountain—it was only then that the music finally stopped. The men were reprimanded for calling in an air strike against what appeared to have been an uninhabited mountain, but to them, the noise was all too real.
O’Brien rates this story as true, even if it can’t be believed and may never have “happened.” It is true because it reveals to the listener the fear, isolation, and paranoia that defined the Vietnam War experience for so many young men. O’Brien can relate to the story of a collective psychotic break on the part of this patrol unit, because he knows all too well what being alone in the jungle dark does to the human mind.
Think about how your ideals and beliefs have been put to the test.
Have you ever felt pressured to do something against your beliefs because you feared you would lose your reputation if you acted on your convictions? Describe what happened.
In the future, how can you better stick to your principles?
Do you think there are times when it is appropriate to sacrifice your personal ideals for some larger cause? Identify an example and explain your reasoning.
Madness was baked into the Vietnam experience. Rat Kiley, a keeper of these tales (and also a known braggart and exaggerator), shares another one with O’Brien about an American girl who became consumed by the war.
Kiley tells O’Brien that before he joined Alpha Company, he had been assigned to a separate medical unit embedded with a detachment of Green Berets. Kiley says that the Green Berets, or “Greenies,” were a secretive unit that operated largely outside of the normal command-and-control structure of other military personnel in Vietnam, often going out on clandestine, weeks-long excursions into the jungle.
(Shortform note: The Green Berets are the colloquial name for the U.S. Army Special Forces, a special operations force that focuses on specific missions and tactical responses outside the scope of what the broader Army does. They are subjected to more rigorous training and are considered an elite fighting force even within the Army.)
One of the men in Rat’s unit, Mark Fossie, decided to bring his American girlfriend out to Vietnam. He reasoned that the presence of the Greenies made the outpost safe, a sort of oasis within the war. To the astonishment of the men, he actually managed to pull the logistics of this off, bringing in his girlfriend Mary Anne on one of the daily resupply choppers from Hanoi.
After some time with the unit, Mary Anne became accustomed to life in Vietnam, learning about weaponry and military hardware, coming to understand the intricacies of Army tactics and maneuvers, learning some Vietnamese, and growing more and more curious about what was in the mountains beyond the unit’s base camp.
Mary Anne developed a fascination with the war, especially its most grisly realities. She got an adrenaline rush from treating injured soldiers and seemed to be at her most comfortable and serene when she was surrounded by the chaos and violence of warfare. She had become more of a natural soldier than any of the men in Kiley’s unit, remarking, “Everything I want is right here,” and telling Fossie that she’d never been happier in her whole life.
One night, Mary Anne didn’t come back to the base. At first thinking she was sleeping with one of the other soldiers, Fossie and Kiley searched the entire camp, but found no trace of her. It dawned on them that Mary Anne wasn’t missing or captured—she had gone out on ambush with the Green Berets. Vietnam had consumed her. She had gone native.
She would go off on ambush often after this, sometimes for as long as three weeks, with fewer and fewer return trips to the camp. One night, Kiley claimed to have seen her returning from a mission with the Greenies, like a silhouette, ethereal and mysterious. She had become one with the strangely compelling chaos of Vietnam.
One night, Kiley and Fossie went out to the Special Forces area. From inside the Greenies’ compound, they could hear ghostly, otherworldly, chanting, not unlike what the men on the listening patrol had heard up in the mountains. Inside, they found Mary Anne singing, chanting, and swaying to some sort of tribal music, wearing a necklace made of human tongues. She was flat and indifferent, betraying no emotion and displaying no sign of the person she had once been. She told Fossie that she wanted to consume Vietnam (and, by implication, the war), to imbibe and swallow the filth and death and have it live inside her forever. For her, Vietnam was a powerful drug, a potent mix of terror and pleasure. From there, Kiley says, she slipped forever into the shadows of Vietnam, still out there like a predator, waiting for the kill.
O’Brien recalls another man in Alpha Company, Henry Dobbins, as being highly drawn to sentimentality. Dobbins carried his girlfriend’s pantyhose around his neck, but not out of a sexual predilection. For Dobbins, the pantyhose were a talisman, a good-luck charm, something that made him feel protected. Like Cross’s pebble from Martha, they were a link to a world away from the war.
O’Brien observes how powerful a hold superstition exerted on all the men in circumstances where life and death seemed to hang so precariously and randomly in the balance. Thus, even the other men came to accept the pantyhose’s mysterious protective power, seeing how Dobbins seemed to glide through the mayhem of war without so much as a scratch. Once, he stepped on a landmine that, miraculously, failed to explode. Another time, he was trapped in a gunfire battle with no cover, but simply slipped the pantyhose over his nose and somehow came out unscathed. Even after his girlfriend broke up with him, Dobbins believed that the pantyhose retained their power. “No sweat,” O’Brien recalls him saying, “The magic doesn’t go away.”
One day, the company discovered a pagoda where they met two monks. The deeply religious and (atypically for Alpha Company) scrupulous Kiowa was uneasy about going in, believing that it was sacrilegious for the men to enter such a holy place. Still, the men camped out there for a week, as the monks waited on the soldiers. They took a special liking to Dobbins, dubbing him “Soldier Jesus.” The serenity of the place and the kindness of the monks even inspired Dobbins to consider leading a spiritual life after the war.
O’Brien recalls Dobbins as being more drawn to the idea of being nice to people as a minister rather than grappling with any weighty theological considerations, remembering Dobbins saying, “All you can do is be nice. Treat them decent, you know?”
O’Brien vividly recalls the VC soldier he killed. He describes him as a “dainty young man” who was left with a star-shaped hole in his eye after O’Brien’s grenade tore through him. O’Brien stresses that he did not kill him out of any personal malice, nor out of any moral or political conviction, or even out of a sense of military duty. Seeing the young enemy soldier pass by a few meters away, O’Brien simply pulled the pin on his grenade and lobbed it at him as a purely automatic function. It was not even an act of self-defense—O’Brien knows that this soldier would have almost certainly passed him by harmlessly had he simply done nothing. He remains deeply traumatized by the experience, haunted by it even decades later.
Azar, in his typically callous manner, described the body as being like “Shredded fuckin’ Wheat.” Kiowa, however, tried to comfort O’Brien about what he’d done, telling O’Brien that he had had no choice in the matter. It was war and it could have just as easily been O’Brien lying dead. Kiowa reminded O’Brien of the fatalistic circumstances of war—the man would likely have been killed anyway, if not by O’Brien, then by someone else. Critically, O’Brien remembers Kiowa urging him to talk about his feelings instead of suppressing them. Kiowa was encouraging O’Brien to fulfill his role as a storyteller.
O’Brien then takes us through an imagined biography of the young man he killed.
(Shortform note: It is another example of the blurred line between fact and fiction and the subjective nature of even “true” war storytelling. O’Brien, of course, couldn’t have known in any absolute sense the details of this soldier’s life, but he shares it with us anyway. The story is true, because it represents the kind of thing that did happen in Vietnam, and serves as a stand-in for the untold stories of the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who died in the war. Perhaps most importantly, it evokes the proper sense of shame and sadness in the reader.)
The young man was born in the village of My Khe around 1946, into a family that had resisted French colonialism (though the young man himself was not a Communist). Like O’Brien, the young soldier was subjected to peer pressure from his community about the necessity of military service. He was bombarded with stories about the famed military exploits of his family and how it was his duty to follow in their footsteps. He, too, was afraid of disgracing himself.
But he’d had no stomach for soldiering. He had a passion for mathematics and had wanted to pursue a scholarly life. He’d fallen in love with a classmate at the university in Saigon (whose photo O’Brien and Kiowa found on the young man’s corpse) whom he married, later returning with her to his village. Giving in to the same fear of shame as O’Brien, the young man enlisted with a VC battalion, where he was killed on his first day in combat.
After the war, a soldier from Alpha Company named Norman Bowker returns to his hometown in Iowa. He is unable to find a meaningful use for his life after the war, and spends his days and nights wistfully driving his car along the lake in his town, remembering friends lost and a life gone by. He thinks about his best friend from high school who drowned in the same lake and about his teenage sweetheart, Sally Kramer, who is now married.
He imagines conversations that he’d like to have with all the people in his life, but never actually does. He fantasizes about visiting Sally and impressing her with his war-taught skill of being able to tell time without looking at a clock. He is haunted by the Silver Star medal for uncommon valor that he almost won in Vietnam, but never did. His life has become a series of regrets, unfulfilled promises, and dreams unrealized.
He yearns to talk with people about his experiences, to tell his stories. He longs to have a conversation with his father, in which he shares the fact that he almost won the Silver Star. In Norman’s imagination, his father comforts him and tells him that he is proud of him anyway and that many soldiers who are brave nevertheless return home without medals. In Norman’s mind, he failed to win the Silver Star because he didn’t display bravery in the right moment. But Norman never actually shares any of this with his father.
Later, he imagines telling Sally about that terrible night where he didn’t win the Silver Star. The unit had been camped out, he tells her, in a field on a stormy night, which turned the dirt to mud. They had been warned away from camping in this particular field by the locals, but their warnings went unheeded, with First Lieutenant Cross even chasing the villagers away with rifle fire. Norman remembers the awful, all-consuming smell of this field, and how the rain covered the men in the filth. They realized that they had settled down into a sewage field and were mired in human waste. He even imagines Sally being offended when he describes the place as a “shit field.”
He pictures telling her about coming under heavy mortar fire in this awful place, how the mud and human waste oozed and boiled up into his face and even into his mouth. And he remembers seeing Kiowa sinking into the vile ooze, and being unable to save him. He remembers watching Kiowa drowning (it’s unclear if he was also hit by gunfire) and trying desperately to save him by grabbing his boot and attempting to pull him out. But he was unable to rescue his comrade.
This is why he failed to win the Silver Star. This is what he is haunted by. Throughout the war, he had been braver than he ever thought he could be, but not as brave as he wanted to be—and needed to be in that moment.
O’Brien tells us that Norman Bowker shared this story with him in 1975, three years before Bowker hanged himself in the locker room of a YMCA. He had sent O’Brien a long, rambling, and disjointed letter in which he shared his thoughts on life after Vietnam; his resentment toward “patriotic idiots” who knew nothing about what the war was actually like; and his feeling that he had actually died back in the shit field all those years ago, rendering his life after that moment a mere addendum or epilogue to his story.
O’Brien thinks about how he has made the transition from Vietnam to the world after. He has done this by telling stories, which he likens to clearing the throat. Storytelling enables him to clarify and make sense of his experiences, objectifying them and separating them from himself. He has told his stories, engaged in catharsis, in a way that Bowker never could.
O’Brien then reveals that he adapted the emotional crux of Bowker’s tale into a published short story, with some adaptations. For example, he condensed most of the action to a single time and place, of Bowker circling his car around a lake as he imagines unspoken conversations (apparently, the car circling is a literary device and Bowker didn’t literally do this). He also changed Bowker’s name and used his own hometown to color the scenery of the journey around the lake. Most notably, however, he omitted the part about Kiowa and the field, which he now feels substantially weakened the piece and robbed it of much of its emotional impact. O’Brien tells us that Bowker was disappointed to see these details missing. His story had not been told after all. He killed himself a mere eight months later.
O’Brien reveals why he was unable to write about Kiowa’s death. It is because he feels that he was responsible, not Bowker. Right before the attack, O’Brien and Kiowa had been talking together in the field, sharing stories from back home. O’Brien had shown Kiowa a picture of his girlfriend Billie and used a flashlight to illuminate the photograph. The light from the flashlight gave away the company’s position to the enemy, causing the firefight which led to Kiowa’s death. Naturally, O’Brien is haunted because he believes he is responsible for the gruesome death of his friend.
The next day, the men begin the mournful search for Kiowa’s body in the sewage field. Their boots sink into the filth as they wade through, trying to cover as much ground as they can. Eventually, they find Kiowa’s pack, containing a pair of moccasins and an illustrated New Testament.
Later, they find Kiowa’s submerged body, which requires several men to dig out from the muck. Finding the body causes the men to reflect on the random nature of life and death in Vietnam. What happened to Kiowa could just as easily have happened to any of them. Even Azar is driven to a moment of introspection after the incident. While earlier in the day he had been cracking jokes about Kiowa being “buried in shit,” he later tells his comrades, “Those dumb jokes—I didn’t mean anything.” After finding the pack, Mitchell Sanders becomes enraged at what he perceives as Lieutenant Cross’ incompetent decision to encamp the company in a sewage field, arguing that he ought to have exercised better field discretion and found a safer place for his men to spend the night.
Cross, meanwhile, is stricken with guilt at losing another man under his command. He knows that he ignored the warnings from the villagers (and from Sanders) to avoid that field. It is his mistake, he believes, that killed Kiowa. He silently laments the loss of Kiowa, remembering him as an upstanding young man who deserved far better than the fate he met. In writing to Kiowa’s father, Cross is unable to tell him the true awful and disgusting circumstances of his son’s death.
Cross observes to himself that a death always leads to an assessment of responsibility, a search for who or what is to blame. It could get very abstract and disconnected from the proximate events in the field—you could blame the politicians and generals who started the war, the American voting public, God, the military-industrial complex, or any number of other “responsible” parties. But in the field, the larger sociopolitical or theological context doesn’t matter: a single stupid decision (like Cross camping in the sewage field or O’Brien switching on his flashlight) could lead to a man getting killed. Kiowa’s death is simultaneously no one’s fault and everyone’s.
O’Brien now reveals to us that much of the narrative we have been following is invented. He did not, for example, actually kill the young North Vietnamese soldier with the grenade. But he did witness the young man’s death, and for O’Brien, his presence, his witnessing, has been enough to trigger a lifetime of guilt and trauma.
He reminds us that the narrative that makes up a story is often more true than a literal recounting of the events that actually transpired. He defines this as story-truth vs. happening-truth. He notes that the story-truth (like the biography of the young Vietnamese soldier and how O’Brien lobbed the grenade at him as he passed by) brings the emotions of the war into the present in a way that happening-truth never could. He might as well have killed the young man, because that is how he’s experienced the event for all these years—this is why he chooses to tell the story this way.
At the age of 43, O’Brien returns to Vietnam with his ten-year-old daughter, Kathleen. He wishes to bring his war experience alive for his daughter by bringing her to the country that has defined so much of his life. While in Vietnam, Kathleen struggles to understand why the war happened and how her father came to be a part of it. He is unable to coherently explain to her either the political and ideological conflicts that created the conflict or the sequence of events that led to his personal decision to fight in it.
Eventually, O’Brien takes her to the setting of his most harrowing war experience—the field where Kiowa died. Both his daughter and the Vietnamese government interpreter who accompanies them are perplexed as to why he would choose to visit such a place. Kathleen almost immediately notices the stench of the field.
O’Brien notes how ordinary and mundane the field looks today, nothing like the filthy hellscape it was the night Kiowa died. It is hard to imagine that this place has loomed so large in his mind for all these years—this field, after all, had killed his close friend, while transforming O’Brien himself into a different person than who he’d been before. This field was the cornerstone of his Vietnam trauma, the place that embodied all the filth and terror of the war. Now, however, he sees it for what it really is: just a drab and unremarkable patch of dirt in a far-flung corner of rural Vietnam, obscure and unremarkable.
In what he hopes is a final act of closure, O’Brien returns Kiowa’s moccasins to the field, letting them sink into the mud. Although a gifted writer, words fail him in this instant. He is unable to come up with anything poignant or meaningful to say during this moment of remembrance. He simply says, “Well, there it is,” as he looks back at the field one last time. He feels that he has been buried in that field ever since that terrible night, but that now, perhaps, he has finally found his way out.
O’Brien reflects on two separate occasions in which he was hit by gunfire in Vietnam. The first time was when Rat Kiley was still with the company. As a skilled medic, Kiley had been able to successfully apply a compress, stop the bleeding, and get O’Brien to an emergency evacuation helicopter. O’Brien even recalls Rat Kiley almost hugging him as he was being helped into the chopper. After a short hospital stay, O’Brien returned to the company in the field.
When he returned, however, he discovered that Kiley was no longer with the unit, having suffered his own gunshot wound and transferred to a hospital in Japan. What really happened, however, was much more disturbing. Kiley had, in fact, suffered a mental breakdown, believing that the insects in the jungle were personally out to get him. He had begun compulsively scratching himself, eventually covering himself in scabs and open sores. The strain of his job as a medic, having to constantly attend to the dead and dying, had finally pushed him past his limits. In desperation, Kiley shot himself in the foot to get out of active combat duty, although Cross told Kiley that he would present it as an accident to the military authorities.
He was replaced by a new medic named Bobby Jorgenson, who was young, inexperienced, and badly unprepared for when O’Brien was shot on a second occasion, this time in the buttocks. Jorgenson failed to treat for shock and did a shoddy job stitching the wound. As a result, O’Brien became infected and nearly succumbed to gangrene.
O’Brien recovered following a painful hospital stay, after which he was transferred out of active combat into a Headquarters Company battalion supply base. While still in a war zone, he was relatively safe from the day-to-day perils of warfare (although the compound still came under the occasional mortar fire). He recalls his old Alpha Company comrades coming in one week when they were on stand-down (a period of time when they were temporarily out of the field). O’Brien remembers how different he had already become from the rest of them. They were still combat soldiers, while he now felt like a civilian. He was no longer part of the blood fraternity.
In his new assignment, O’Brien had time to reflect on his experience of getting shot and came to hate Bobby Jorgenson for the incompetence which nearly led to his death. He brooded over this and yearned to exact revenge on Jorgenson. While Alpha Company was at the base, Jorgenson and O’Brien accidentally ran into one another. Jorgenson was embarrassed and tried to apologize to O’Brien, explaining that he had been paralyzed by fear when he saw that his fellow soldier had been shot and that it was up to him to save his life. Jorgenson told O’Brien that he had been suffering from recurring nightmares and trauma thinking about what happened to O’Brien. But O’Brien was unable to move on—his experience in the war and the things he’d seen had turned him into a crueler, meaner version of his former self. He was now capable of evil.
O’Brien decided to psychologically torment Jorgenson and turned to the darkly cruel Azar for help. They chose a night when they knew Jorgenson had been selected to pull night guard duty as their moment to strike, knowing how ghostly and terrifying nights in Vietnam could be, when one’s mind tended to run wild with the worst fears imaginable. All of the potential horrors of war could be projected onto the blackness of the night. O’Brien and Azar knew that Jorgenson would be at his most psychologically vulnerable when he was alone in the dark.
They hid in the bushes outside the perimeter around the base and set up a series of homemade booby traps and noisemakers designed to make Jorgenson think that the Vietcong was attacking. They filled cans with ammunition and attached them to pulley ropes. When Azar and O’Brien tugged on the ropes, the cans would rattle in a way that completely unnerved Jorgenson. They did this on-and-off at irregular intervals, ratcheting up the psychological tension. Next, they set off trip flares to mimic the visual of an impending enemy attack.
While he was doing this, O’Brien imagined himself floating above Jorgenson, seeing the young man’s abject terror. In this moment, O’Brien saw himself as the horror of the war embodied. But at this point during the elaborate revenge scheme, O’Brien tells us that he began to feel some kinship with his victim. Jorgenson finally understood what it meant to be scared in war, how the fear robbed you of your humanity and sanity.
O’Brien asked Azar to stop, feeling that his need to psychologically balance the equation with Jorgenson had been met. But Azar was unable to stop, instead carrying the “prank” to more and more extreme lengths, firing off more flares and even tear gas grenades at Jorgenson. O’Brien himself was cowering in fear and shock and pleading with the sadistic Azar to stop. Jorgenson eventually fired back at the “enemy,” impressing O’Brien with how cool and collected he was. It is only at this moment that Jorgenson realized the whole ordeal was a prank. Azar left, disgusted with O’Brien, labelling him the “sorriest fuckin’ specimen I ever seen.”
The last story O’Brien shares with us is one that predates his Vietnam experience. But he sees it as of a piece with what happened to him later in life, because like the stories of Ted Lavender, Curt Lemon, Kiowa, and the young Vietnamese soldier, it is a tale of loss. It is the story of his childhood girlfriend Linda, who died of a brain tumor when they were both nine years old.
O’Brien describes his love for Linda as being as deep and rich as any love he later experienced as an adult. He even took her out on a “double date” in 1956 with his parents. He remembers that evening, because she wore a bright red cap, which he’d never seen her wear before.
In the weeks after, he noticed that Linda was wearing the cap to school every day. She was bullied over it by some of her classmates, who thought it was funny to try and snatch it off her head while she wasn’t looking. O’Brien was dismayed to see this happening, but felt himself unable to act on his convictions because of his pride and his wish to maintain his reputation (just as he would years later when he ultimately decided to fight in Vietnam). He didn’t want to be seen as less tough or masculine because he was defending a girl. Looking back, O’Brien laments not having stepped in to do the right thing, and rejects his youth as an excuse. He notes that displaying moral courage in the fourth grade would have made him better prepared to face the far harder moral choices in Vietnam.
One day, a bully managed to knock Linda’s cap off during class, revealing her bald scalp beneath. Linda was sick with a brain tumor and had lost all her hair—she had been wearing the cap to cover it up. Later, O’Brien’s mother explained to him that Linda was terminally ill and would soon pass away from the tumor. Linda survived the school year and summer, but died during the September when O’Brien was entering the fifth grade. Foreshadowing the callous and cold way death would be treated on the fields of Vietnam, the same bully who humiliated Linda in class told O’Brien of her death by coming up to him during recess and telling him that Linda had “kicked the bucket.”
His experience with Linda was O’Brien’s first glimpse into the power of storytelling. After her death, he began to invent elaborate stories in which Linda was still alive. His dreams and his stories became his secret meeting place with his lost friend. He could bring Linda to life again by telling her story. He could make her real, make her smile and speak. In one of his dreams, the dead Linda likened herself to an old book on a library shelf that hadn’t been checked out for a long time. All she could do was wait for someone to check her out—for someone to tell her story and bring her to life again.
Even amid the brutality of the war, the men were always telling stories about the dead to make them seem more vivid and present. This was how the line between story-truth and happening-truth became blurred. The more vivid the stories were, the more alive and of this world the dead seemed to be. If they could tell stories about Curt Lemon trick-or-treating through a rural Vietnamese village or Ted Lavender being sedated on tranquilizers, it was almost as if they weren’t gone. Like with Linda, storytelling brought the body and soul together.
Think about the power of storytelling and remembrance.
Is there someone who was important in your life that you lost? Describe this person and what they meant to you.
Do you share stories about this person? If so, why do you do this?
Would you want your memory to live on through stories after you die, even if the stories aren’t 100 percent accurate? Explain why or why not.
Think about why storytelling is so powerful.
O’Brien talks about the difference between story-truth and happening-truth. In a few sentences, explain what this means to you.
Why do you think that, for the war stories O’Brien and the others share, literal truth is less important than the emotional reaction it provokes in the listener?
The men in The Things They Carried often behave and speak in shockingly brutal ways. Why do you think they do this and what does this say about the effects of combat on human beings?