The Things They Carried Discurse Essay Example for Free

The Things They Carried Discurse Essay â€Å"The Things They Carried† displays men in the heart of war trying maintain some sort of semblance of their normal lives.   The main character of the story, First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, spends a good deal of his time thinking about his love interest back at home.   In fact, the story opens by saying that he â€Å"carried letters from a girl named Martha†¦They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack† (PAGE #). Immediately the reader is thrust into this world of war, and what is important to the men who live it.   There are countless different clichà ©s/sayings regarding how one can tell a lot about a man by X or Y (by the way he dresses, by the way he treats his mother, etc.); in this story, we can tell everything at the heart of a man by what he carries with him trekking through the jungles of Vietnam. Jimmy Cross is a dreamer; he spends his time fantasizing about building a life with a woman who hasn’t really expressed the same kind of interest in him, and who maintains a great deal of emotional distance from him.   But it is this idea of a â€Å"normal† life, a life in which he can focus on marriage and children and just life, a life he hopes to return to after the war.   The thought of Martha, as well as her letters, acts as a beacon of normalcy for him, and it is what he feels he must cling to for his own survival. Jimmy ultimately ends up shunning his own need of maintaining some sort of focus on life outside of the war because he feels his own incessant daydreaming was the cause of another soldier’s death; in a great symbolic gesture, he burns her letters and her pictures, turning his back on any hope he clung to of a normal life and vowing to be the solider he failed to be: â€Å"Henceforth, when he thought about Martha, it would only be to think that she belonged elsewhere.   He would shut down the daydreams.    This was not Mount Sebastian, it was another world†¦a place where men died because of carelessness and gross stupidity†¦He was not determined to perform his duties firmly and without negligence† (PAGE #).   Jimmy is so shaken by the experience of witnessing one of his men’s death that it forces him to become a different person—in a sense, to adapt, and to become hard and cold.   As much as his daydreaming was for his own survival before, his hardened personality after the death of Ted Lavender is as well. The use of Ted Lavender’s name and story is the dominant theme throughout the story.   O’Brien uses Lavender’s tragic demise as a constant reminder of the horrors of war.   Throughout the whole story, in the middle of what might seem to be a casual description of various items being â€Å"humped† by the men, O’Brien drops Lavender’s name attached to a reminder of how he was shot.   This occurs towards the beginning, when the narrator is describing the different things the men carried: â€Å"Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April† (PAGE #). His name is brought up repeatedly throughout with this same kind of cryptic reminder of his death.   When referring to how everyone had to carry a poncho, it is noted that it â€Å"weighed almost two pounds, but it was worth every ounce.   In April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (PAGE #). This name-dropping of Ted Lavender throughout the story is an effective tool that O’Brien utilizes the emphasize the point that this man died.   The deeper-lying message behind the use of Lavender’s demise as a running metaphor is that people die in war; it is terrifying; these men are children (with the Lieutenant being a mere 22 years old) and they’re scared and they want to go home, and these things they carry they keep because it makes them feel safe and reminds them a little of home. There is emphasis in the story about how their constant marching and their humping of endless items from village to village seemed pointless to them—as pointless as Ted Lavender’s life ending.   â€Å"By daylight they took sniper fire, at night they were mortared, but it was not battle, it was just the endless march, village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost†¦They had no sense of strategy or mission.   They searched villages without knowing what to look for†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (PAGE #). These men, who have to hump a great many number of items (of both the personal and the protective nature) from one place to the next to the next, are being shipped off to war without a clear sense of what it is they’re doing there and are sacrificing their lives without really understanding what their lives are being sacrificed for.    They do what they are told because they are told to do it, and because they are too afraid not to: â€Å"Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.   It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor.   They died so as not to die of embarrassment† (PAGE #).   These young men were dying for little other reason that they knew of besides that they felt that they had to. O’Brien’s message throughout this story is clear: war is terrifying.   O’Brien uses the lists of what they had to carry with them to illustrate the heavy burden each of them had to hump around everywhere they went, with the underlying theme that the things they carried physically were nothing in comparison to the things they each carried around with them emotionally.    All of them were scared for their lives; all of them wanted to go home.   Much of their personal belongings were things that would remind them of home, that would possibly allow them to escape for brief moments (like Jimmy Cross did with Martha’s letters) and fantasize about the lives they could and did have outside of this war, reminding them that there is still another world outside of Vietnam.   Many of the men carried with them the hope of a safe return; many more carried with them the fear that there wouldn’t be one for them. O’Brien is very careful to allow these characters’ lives (and one death) speak for themselves.   He uses their example of their experience in war to speak for a greater number of young men across the country who had been shipped off to Vietnam to die without understanding why.   Part of O’Brien’s message is that these experiences—the hopes, the fears, the daily terror and the struggle to combat it—are universal, and can universally be applied to anyone who has been through war.   The bottom line is that war is hell, it is terrifying, and no amount of pride or glory can change that, and whether or not the war was being fought for the â€Å"right† reasons (a big debate during the Vietnam conflict) couldn’t change that either. O’Brien is largely concerned with the pointlessness of all of it, and he succeeds in making his point effectively by using these very poignant lists of things the men carried and for what reasons to hammer his point home.   He is able to do so without being preachy or pedantic; the story is so simple that the message becomes just as simple.   Whether or not you support war, you cannot deny that the men fighting it are forced to live through things that the rest of us would rather not know about.   We would rather remain in our self-deluded bubble in which we understand war only as far as its being for freedom, for honor, for the greater good†¦we would rather be spared the knowledge of the blood loss and the body counts.   Not to mention the terror.   We would rather not hear the story of the Ted Lavenders, but O’Brien insists that we have to. Works Cited O’Brien, Tim.   â€Å"The Things They Carried.†Ã‚   (1986) [NAME OF ANTHOLOGY.] Ed. [NAME OF EDITOR(S) OF ANTHOLOGY.]   (DATE OF ANTHOLOGY’S PUBLICATION.)