Exploring the Truth through The Things They Carried - Essay Example

Exploring the Truth through The Things They Carried In his short story “Good Form”, Tim O’Brienindicates that there is a significant difference between the truth as historical fact and the truth as it is experienced and known by those who have lived it – subjective truth. In writing about the Vietnam War, the author does little to convey historical accuracy to the events his characters are participating in as he works instead to provide his readers with a sense of what his characters are feeling as they participate, the subjective truth. “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story truth is truer sometimes than happening truth,” he writes in “Good Form” (203). For O’Brien, the only way to tell a true war story is not through the facts of the movements, the ‘happening truth’, which remain clouded and unclear to the soldiers themselves, but to portray the emotions and experiences of the soldiers themselves, the ‘story truth’ that can only be discovered through the emotions they experience and the subjective impressions they reveal through their relationship with these emotions that represent the truth of the war to all soldiers who fought regardless of their movements. “For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel – the spiritual texture – of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true … You can’t tell where you are, or why you’re there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity” (O’Brien cited in Riley, 2006: 124). This sense of a detached emotional search for meaning in a world where meaning has ceased to exist can be discovered through the pages of O’Brien’s short story “The Things They Carried.” Through the text of this story, the reader is able to gain a deeper understanding of the truths of war through the characters in a way that has nothing to do with the facts of the war as they might be reported. O’Brien contrasts the facts of war with the truths of war within the story as he consistently jumps back and forth between listing the standard equipment each soldier is required to carry as a part of his ‘pack’ and those things the soldiers carry by virtue of their human reality. The facts of official gear required to be on hand for each man and each unit is listed with precise detail, often down to the approximate weight one might expect to ‘hump’ with such equipment: “What they carried was partly a function of rank, partly of field specialty … As an RTO, Mitchell Sanders carried the PRC-25 radio, a killer, 26 pounds with its battery. As a medic, Rat Kiley carried a canvas satchel filled with morphine and plasma and malaria tablets and surgical tape and comic books and all the things a medic must carry, including M&Ms for especially bad wounds, for a total weight of nearly 20 pounds” (4-5). These are the reported facts, the ‘happening truth’ of the story; however, there are ‘story truths’ that provide O’Brien with the means of relaying the real truths of war to his readers by allowing him to include heavier weights that these men carry as they undertake their various missions. This is the subjective truth of the war as it is experienced. Jimmy Cross, the lieutenant, has his own personalized list of required equipment he must carry, including “the responsibility for the lives of his men” (5), while Kiowa “carried his grandmother’s distrust of the white man” (4). Each man is presented as having his own particular emotional burden to carry, which is highlighted specifically when O’Brien again combines fact and the storyteller’s fiction in the case of Ted Lavender, who “went down under an exceptional burden, more than 20 pounds of ammunition, plus the flak-jacket and helmet and toilet paper and tranquilizers and all the rest, plus the unweighed fear” (6). Although O’Brien employs fiction as the only way in which he can demonstrate the weight of fear felt by Ted Lavender in this scene, the concept that he is ‘making this up’ as a part of his art does not diminish the truth of the emotion within the thousands of soldiers who felt this same sensation as they traversed the war. O’Brien illustrates through these types of comparisons that it is only through fiction that the truth can be discovered. Far from the romance of war that might be conveyed through a glorious recital of battles won, even when delivered as part of a factual, unemotional list, O’Brien is able to convey how each character carries evidence of his own loss of meaning as a part of his kit. In doing so, O’Brien is forcing the realization upon the reader that there is no romance or glory involved as even the sense of purpose that provide a driving force for most people is removed from consideration in these men’s lives. The men are presented as little more than beasts of burden through the long lists of things they carry and the approximate weight of the pack, which slowly increases in weight as the story moves forward. “Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together, these items weighted between 15 and 20 pounds,” (2-3). The realities of this list illustrate the individuality of the men only because of differences in relative weight carried. That the men themselves are having difficulty maintaining their own sense of reality or identity is illustrated through the more personal items they carry. Martha’s letters to Lieutenant Jimmy Cross provide an example of how one might try to cling to a memory of himself, a means of reminding him of who he ‘really’ is. While everyone knows that these letters are not in any way considered to be love letters, the soldier has nevertheless attached romantic ideals to the image of this girl he knew back home as his only means of remembering himself as an individual human being. “He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire” (2) and “thought of new things he should have done” (5) as if any chance at that kind of life were now over forever. This loss of idealism and heroic romanticism regarding war is further brought out on an emotional level through the death of Lavender. “It was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or something – just boom, then down – not like the movies where the dead guy rolls around and does fancy spins and goes ass over teakettle – not like that, Kiowa said, the poor bastard just flat-fuck fell. Boom. Down. Nothing else” (6-7). There is no purpose, there is no heroism, there is almost no humanity – Lavender was on his way back from the bathroom and falls as if he were little more than a bag of dirt or a loose rock. The narrator tells us that the pain was felt by Cross, further removing Lavender’s humanity from him as if he were incapable of feeling either before or after the shot. Yet the narrator can’t help but continue to refer back to Lavender’s death throughout the story, recognizing there should be importance in the individual but not recognizing why this is important. Again, it is a concept that can best be demonstrated not through the facts of the case, but through the fictionalized presentation of the true emotions discovered in the characters. Only by approaching his story from a fictionalized account is O’Brien able to present with any degree of validity, the emotions and impressions received by the soldiers who fought in the Vietnam War. Factual cases were not capable of delivering this emotional content to the reader sufficiently enough to give them the deeper understandings of the truth of the war as the soldiers experienced it. Through fiction, he is able to draw on the entire group of soldiers, illustrating various ways that the individuals attempted to re-orient themselves to the being they were forced to become in a world that no longer made any sense. By the relentless realities of factual necessity, represented by the factual weight of the equipment each man was required to carry for his own survival and the accomplishment of his duties, O’Brien is able to demonstrate how the individual was squeezed out of his own skull. War changed him into something that would do whatever it took to survive another day and accomplish the task that he’d been ordered to finish regardless of how he, as a human being, might have felt about the action. However, the anonymous ‘he’ that represents all soldiers in war, cannot escape his own humanity. He still clings to those things that represent what was good or clear about him in the past, when he had a sense of who and what he was, also represented by the things they carried in the form of memorabilia or survival tools. The agent of change emerges as the intangible elements of the things they carried, in the form of guilt, shame, repression, fear or responsibility as they are manifested by the individual personality. Through fiction, O’Brien is able to present the truth of war from a uniquely human perspective. Works Cited O’Brien, Tim. “The Things They Carried.” Riley, Brett Alan. “The Separatism of Vietnam Veterans: Reality vs. Representation, Narrative vs. Memory, History vs. Myth, and the Return to ‘The World’.” Separation Anxieties: Representations of Separatist Communities in Late Twentieth Century Fiction and Film. Louisiana: Louisiana State University, 2006: 124-178. Read More

As a medic, Rat Kiley carried a canvas satchel filled with morphine and plasma and malaria tablets and surgical tape and comic books and all the things a medic must carry, including M&Ms for especially bad wounds, for a total weight of nearly 20 pounds” (4-5). These are the reported facts, the ‘happening truth’ of the story; however, there are ‘story truths’ that provide O’Brien with the means of relaying the real truths of war to his readers by allowing him to include heavier weights that these men carry as they undertake their various missions.

This is the subjective truth of the war as it is experienced. Jimmy Cross, the lieutenant, has his own personalized list of required equipment he must carry, including “the responsibility for the lives of his men” (5), while Kiowa “carried his grandmother’s distrust of the white man” (4). Each man is presented as having his own particular emotional burden to carry, which is highlighted specifically when O’Brien again combines fact and the storyteller’s fiction in the case of Ted Lavender, who “went down under an exceptional burden, more than 20 pounds of ammunition, plus the flak-jacket and helmet and toilet paper and tranquilizers and all the rest, plus the unweighed fear” (6).

Although O’Brien employs fiction as the only way in which he can demonstrate the weight of fear felt by Ted Lavender in this scene, the concept that he is ‘making this up’ as a part of his art does not diminish the truth of the emotion within the thousands of soldiers who felt this same sensation as they traversed the war. O’Brien illustrates through these types of comparisons that it is only through fiction that the truth can be discovered. Far from the romance of war that might be conveyed through a glorious recital of battles won, even when delivered as part of a factual, unemotional list, O’Brien is able to convey how each character carries evidence of his own loss of meaning as a part of his kit.

In doing so, O’Brien is forcing the realization upon the reader that there is no romance or glory involved as even the sense of purpose that provide a driving force for most people is removed from consideration in these men’s lives. The men are presented as little more than beasts of burden through the long lists of things they carry and the approximate weight of the pack, which slowly increases in weight as the story moves forward. “Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water.

Together, these items weighted between 15 and 20 pounds,” (2-3). The realities of this list illustrate the individuality of the men only because of differences in relative weight carried. That the men themselves are having difficulty maintaining their own sense of reality or identity is illustrated through the more personal items they carry. Martha’s letters to Lieutenant Jimmy Cross provide an example of how one might try to cling to a memory of himself, a means of reminding him of who he ‘really’ is.

While everyone knows that these letters are not in any way considered to be love letters, the soldier has nevertheless attached romantic ideals to the image of this girl he knew back home as his only means of remembering himself as an individual human being. “He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire” (2) and “thought of new things he should have done” (5) as if any chance at that kind of life were now over forever. This loss of idealism and heroic romanticism regarding war is further brought out on an emotional level through the death of Lavender.

“It was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or something – just boom, then down – not like the movies where the dead guy rolls around and does fancy spins and goes ass over teakettle – not like that, Kiowa said, the poor bastard just flat-fuck fell. Boom. Down.

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