The Things They Carried
by Tim O’Brien
Teaching Notes prepared by
Warren Whitney
The Things They Carried
by Tim O’Brien
Teaching notes prepared for VATE members by
Warren Whitney
CONTENTS
1.
An introduction to The Things They Carried
Page
1
2.
Ways into the text
Page
3
3.
Running sheet
Page
6
4.
A perspective on the text
Page
9
5.
Character and setting
Page 11
6.
A guided approach to selected passages
Page 13
7.
Activities for exploring the text
Page 15
Page numbers in these notes refer to O’Brien, T: The Things They Carried. Harper Collins,
1991
VATE
Purchasers may copy Inside Stories for classroom use
SECTION 1.
An introduction to The Things They Carried.
Published in 1990, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien addresses a key aspect
of the on-going legacy of the Vietnam War. This may be termed the crisis of
interpretation that has confronted all those who have sought to understand the
complex origins and causes of a war that appeared to be marked by confusion and
mystification from the very outset of the conflict.
On one level the crisis has been due to the sheer difficulty of sifting through the
issues that explain how the United States came to be involved in a distant war that
was justified to its citizens in increasingly abstract terms. Cold War power politics,
the Domino Theory, the US strategic insistence on ‘stemming the flow of
communism’ all formed part of such justification. To this can be added another
specifically cultural dimension that again seemed a unique aspect of this conflict. I
am referring to the massive and unprecedented scale of the representation of the
war. What came to be described as the first television war, broadcast nightly into
American homes, was also to become the subject of an unparalleled variety and
scale of representation in academic scholarship, fiction film, documentary film,
television drama, and literature.
The ways in which the war has been represented have come to be seen as
inextricably linked to the problems in interpreting the meaning and significance of the
event. The stories in The Things They Carried collectively address this issue, in
many instances at an explicit level such as in ‘How to Tell a True War Story.’
The narrator continually reflects on the truth of what he is writing and further refines
the problem of a truthful account of his experience by distinguishing between storytruth and happening-truth (Good Form). The act of writing is also examined as an act
of remembering, and the burden of responsibility faced by the writer is to his fellow
soldiers in Alpha Company who regularly appear across all the stories in the
collection.
O’Brien acknowledges the complexity of his subject matter in the complexity of his
own narrative form. The Things They Carried is not a typically random collection of
stories brought together under the unifying principle of either the author’s name or a
loosely defined set of issues or themes. It is not even simply as a collection of
stories that treat the event of the Vietnam War that lends a formal coherence to the
writing. Rather, O’Brien has chosen to confront and to explore the complex
questions that face any writer who attempts to impose an aesthetic or narrative
coherence on a war that was so notoriously resistant to any conventional means of
analysis or understanding.
The US military involvement in Vietnam has typically and commonly come to be
described as a mess, even by apologists or supporters of the war.
To such
commentators this has been a way of presenting the US involvement as a somewhat
ill-advised, ill timed, but essentially noble cause. However, this term does nothing to
clarify either our understanding of the conflict, or the suffering of those who fought
the war or who were directly affected by it, namely the Vietnamese people
themselves. O’Brien meticulously examines the extreme and almost unimaginable
messiness of the soldier’s experience as a means of evoking the catastrophic effects
the war had on an untold number of lives.
VATE Inside Stories
The Things They Carried
1
To understand the authorial voice in this collection it is necessary for the reader to
confront the authorial or narrative dilemma that is being described here. At no point
does O’Brien ever claim to have finally settled on the actual truth of the experiences
that he is attempting to describe or represent. Despite the effort expressed in the act
of writing and the act of remembrance, his version remains incomplete. There is a
consistent admission throughout this collection that the act of writing itself is a
corruption of actual experience, a vain or egotistic effort doomed to failure. The
author places himself in the foreground of the stories, not only as a character among
the other soldiers, but as a figure continually manipulating what he knows,
remembers and imagines.
The very persona of the writer becomes a subject of these stories, prompting the
reader to question his authority, credibility and authenticity. As the writer of these
stories O’Brien assigns himself an ultimately indeterminate status. Is he the origin of
these stories? How much of them are based on his own actual experience as a
soldier in Vietnam? How much is based on the experience of those soldiers he knew
and saw die? As the reader contemplates these questions O’Brien provokes a further
series of issues that ultimately focus on the problems to do with the ways in which we
remember our past. In particular he leads us to consider those traumatic events
shaped by larger historical forces that are beyond the imaginative grasp of individuals
and their full understanding.
Vietnam has been the archetype for such problems of understanding over nearly half
a century. Despite this Vietnam has also become the name of a subject within
Western popular culture, with its own mass audience in television, film, video games
and literature.
Direct US military involvement in Vietnam ended twenty-five years ago (the US
established an economic and political embargo on Vietnam that was maintained until
the mid-nineties. Full diplomatic relations between the two countries have still not
been established). A French philosopher once wrote that while Vietnam won the war
on the ground, the US won the war in the air. By this he meant that while the US
suffered a military defeat in Vietnam, it continued to control the production of images
about the war and hence the meanings commonly associated with it. The on-going
struggle to wrest new meanings from the experience of this war provides the central
inspiration for the stories in The Things They Carried.
VATE Inside Stories
The Things They Carried
2
Section 2. Ways into the text
The historical context
In teaching O’Brien’s stories it will be necessary to provide students with materials
and activities that develop their historical understanding of the Vietnam War.
• Class discussion to establish some basic historical information about the war in
Vietnam. Small groups undertake basic research to share with the class. Groups
to take responsibility for establishing
- a timeline for events in the war
- major participants and their reasons for involvement
- the scope of US involvement
- the scope of Australian involvement
- outcomes of the war.
While it is readily admitted that students will be primarily studying a literary text with
an emphasis on their understanding of language, character, narrative form and
thematic issues, it must also be recognised that students will need to have their
knowledge of the historical and political issues deepened.
Teachers will need to approach this task with considerable care and thought. The
field of historical scholarship on the Vietnam War, whether academic or popular, is by
no means settled or undivided, and these strains go back to the earliest
investigations. In itself this is a worthy issue to discuss with students. They should
be made aware that even the scholarly or historical modes of representation are
highly tendentious and frequently overly ideological in their descriptions and
explanations. To assist in the conduct of such discussion, useful pre-reading for
teachers should include a range of contrasting interpretations of the war. A popular,
revisionist text such as Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking
Press, 1983) could be productively compared with any of the work of Noam Chomsky
or Gabriel Kolko’s Vietnam: Anatomy of a War 1940-1975 (London: Unwin Hyman,
1987).
O’Brien’s stories avoid explicitly raising the question of whether the U.S. should have
intervened in Vietnam – they begin from an entirely different starting point. The
guiding aesthetic assumption behind all the stories is the actuality of the war; its
destructive effects and the ongoing struggle of the writer to give a coherent narrative
form to this remembered chaos.
Yet these are essentially literary choices and
should not preclude teachers from providing students with a broad range of analytical
perspectives.
The Vietnam War is an event that still exists vividly in living memory. Students
therefore have a unique opportunity to discuss the issues it created with people who
were directly affected by this conflict; either as military personnel who participated in
the war, or more commonly, as people lived through the period and its intense social
divisions.
•
Invite guest speakers to address students. Veterans of the war could be invited
to share their experiences as well as those women and men who refused to fight
because they were morally and politically opposed to the war. It is important for
students to gain an understanding that these two groups are not mutually
exclusive. Some of the most passionate critics of the war ultimately came from
the ranks of the veterans themselves. By the same token students should also
VATE Inside Stories
The Things They Carried
3
•
have the chance to see that opponents of conscription were not motivated by
reasons of personal safety. Their objection was a political and moral one.
Use film to raise critical issues about representations of the war
When Hollywood filmmakers first attempted to give form to the war they were
confronted with a complexity of issues that would have appeared to defeat the
established generic conventions of the war film. Such conventions were notoriously
evident in an early film The Green Berets starring John Wayne. Utilising the familiar
conventions of the World War II combat film. The Green Berets has come to seen as
the epitome of a racist and xenophobic narrative. To overcome this initial difficulty
the earliest film treatments of the war established the most enduring contribution of
the Vietnam War film to the genre – what bordered on an almost obsessive fixation
on the psychology of the soldiers who had served in Vietnam. To be more precise,
films such as Born Losers (1967) or Rolling Thunder (1977) gave dramatic
expression to the social threat or psychoses of the returning veteran (vet). This
figure of the unstable vet who cannot adjust to civilian life and is ever-ready to turn
his lethal fighting skills on his own people reached its apogee in First Blood (1981).
A gradually more recuperative treatment of this figure occurred in the films of Oliver
Stone, notably in his Vietnam trilogy, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Heaven
and Earth. The Deer Hunter (1978) comes closest to the tone of O’Brien’s stories.
However, teachers should be aware that this film develops some highly problematic
depictions of the Vietnamese, especially in the Russian Roulette scenes conducted
at a Viet Cong base. Considerable care should be taken in showing this material to
students. Made at a time when the memory of the war was still fresh in the minds of
most Americans, The Deer Hunter, despite its considerable flaws, remains one of the
most revealing treatments of the experience of returning veterans.
• A careful examination of a selection of these films will provide a useful contrast
with O’Brien’s stories.
Establishing empathy with participants in the war
In the film Dear America actual letters from soldiers and nurses who served in
Vietnam are read over the disturbing documentary footage of the war. This film
provides an extremely useful way of examining the differences between written and
spoken language and the meanings that are created by images.
• Following a viewing and discussion of Dear America, read ‘How To Tell A True
War Story’ in class.
• Discuss the type of letters Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Curt Lemon and Norman
Bowker would have written to family and loved ones ‘back in the world.’
• Students can also be asked to write their own letters based on their
understanding of one of these members of Alpha Company.
•
Students could then read these letters in class and then reply to the letters of other
students.
Story truth versus happening truth: is it possible to write stories
after Vietnam?
A decade after the fall of Saigon, Gabriel Kolko claimed that historical narrative had
so far proved inadequate in capturing the experience of the war. He also observed:
‘But the Vietnam War has so far also evaded poets and novelists… The sheer scope
of this revolutionary struggle and war…still surpasses the literary imagination.’
Kolko’s statement preceded the publication of a number of literary works that took
VATE Inside Stories
The Things They Carried
4
advantage of the time that had passed since the end of the war, to address a range
of issues that were buried in its immediate aftermath.
O’Brien’s fiction has been at the forefront of this literary re-examination of the war
and its lingering traumas and persistent moral questions.
• The stories of Tobias Wolff exhibit a similar concern for recording the ordinary
experience of people affected by the war.
Wolff’s autobiographical novel In
Pharaoh’s Army could provide an excellent companion piece to O’Brien’s stories.
• The work of Phillip Caputo (Horn of Africa, 1980, DelCorso’s Gallery, 1983) is
also a useful contrast, but relies on the more conventional generic aspects of war
literature to examine the Vietnam War.
• Two texts that push the boundaries and style of narrative representation perhaps
further than O’Brien are Dispatches (1977) by Michael Herr and Machine Dreams
(1984) by Jayne Anne Phillips. These formally innovative works challenge the
reader to reconsider whatever preconceived ideas or images they may already
have formed about the war.
VATE Inside Stories
The Things They Carried
5
Section 3. Running sheet
What follows is a brief summary of each of the twenty-two stories.
‘The Things They Carried’
The men of Alpha Company are introduced to the reader. These are the characters
who will reappear in each of the stories.
The death of Ted Lavender occurs,
prompting Lieutenant Jimmy Cross to blame himself because of his distracted
yearning for a girl back in the States.
‘Love’
After the war ended Jimmy Cross visits the narrator. Cross describes his attempt to
establish a relationship with Martha whom he had been thinking about in Vietnam.
Her response is one of incomprehension: ‘She didn’t understand how men could do
those things.’ (p.26).
Cross departs, requesting that he appear ‘brave and
handsome’ in the narrator’s stories.
‘Spin’
The author reflects on the power and persistence of memory. He contrasts the
shifting perspective of humorous memories with the images of violent death: ‘The
bad stuff never stops happening’ (p.32). He also reflects on the nature and purpose
of stories: ‘Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late
hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to
where you are.’ (p.35)
‘On the Rainy River’
The narrator faces the moral conflict of whether to answer his draft notice. He
leaves his family home and drives to the Canadian border where he contemplates
dodging the draft and going into personal exile. While staying at a small fishing
lodge he is befriended by an old man whose silent support has the ironic effect of
shaming him into returning.
‘Enemies’
Two of the men in Alpha Company, Lee Strunk and Dave Jensen, engage in a
personal feud that causes Jensen to experience paranoid delusions.
‘Friends’
Jensen and Strunk eventually become close friends, looking out for each other while
on patrol.
Strunk is mortally wounded after stepping on a mortar round and
eventually dies.
‘How To Tell A True War Story’
O’Brien examines the nature of truth in a war-story. This is illustrated by a story told
by Mitchell Sanders of a mysterious episode in which a group of soldiers call down
an air strike without a clear or obvious cause. For Sanders this story encapsulates
the inexplicable nature of the war and the impossibility of conveying its truth.
‘The Dentist’
One of the deaths that haunt the pages of O’Brien’s stories is that of Curt Lemon.
Here the narrator remembers Lemon’s reluctance to visit the company dentist and
the amusement of the other soldiers at his fear. O’Brien notes ‘…it’s easy to get
sentimental about the dead…’ (p.83).
VATE Inside Stories
The Things They Carried
6
‘Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong’
Perhaps the strangest story in the collection, Rat Kiley relates the eerie tale of a
young woman, Mary-Anne Bell, who travels to Vietnam to secretly visit her boyfriend
while his is stationed at a remote outpost. Mary-Anne becomes fascinated with the
‘landscape’ of the war, becoming increasingly intrigued by a group of Green Beret
soldiers who go out each night on patrol.
Her gradual immersion in the war
becomes complete when she begins venturing into the jungle alone and ultimately
disappears.
‘Stockings’
A shared eccentricity among the soldiers is their belief in good-luck charms.
Dobbins carries a pair of his girlfriend’s stockings wrapped around his neck.
Henry
‘Church’
Dobbins befriends a group of monks and exchanges his thoughts on a spiritual life
with Kiowa.
‘The Man I killed’
In one of his most important examples of ‘story-truth’ O’Brien remembers the morning
he killed a young Vietnamese soldier.
‘Ambush’
Here O’Brien returns to the traumatic memory contained in the previous story: ‘Even
now I haven’t finished sorting it out. Sometimes I forgive myself, other times I don’t.’
(p.131).
‘Style’
The sole survivor of a devastated hamlet confronts the men of Alpha Company.
‘Speaking of courage’
Norman Bowker returns to the United States and attempts to reconnect with his old
life. While circling the town lake in his car Bowker is forced to confront the lack of a
single person with whom he can share his memories of the war. Bowker is haunted
by the death of Kiowa in the shit field and recalls his lack of action in saving his
friend.
‘Notes’
O’Brien explains the genesis of the previous story, referring to a letter he received
from Bowker after the war. After informing the reader that Bowker killed himself in
1978, O’Brien confesses that it was not Bowker who ‘froze’ that night in the field:
‘That part of the story is my own.’(p.159)
‘In The Field’
The morning after the attack the men search for Kowa’s body. As with the death of
Ted Lavender Lieutenant Cross must face his sense of personal responsibility and
loss as he composes a letter to Kiowa’s father.
‘Good Form’
O’Brien makes the startling admission that apart from the fact of his service in
Vietnam, ‘Almost everything else is invented.’ (p.179).
This story explains the
important distinction between ‘Happening-truth’ and ‘Story-truth’. The latter is the
imaginative recreation of remembered experience and aspires to a higher purpose
VATE Inside Stories
The Things They Carried
7
than simply documenting what actually occurred: ‘I want you to feel what I felt.
want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.’(p.179).
I
‘Field Trip’
Returning to Vietnam after the war, accompanied by his daughter, O’Brien visits the
field where Kiowa died. The story describes the relationship between father and
daughter and the importance of bearing witness. The adult writer also recognises
that the divisions created by the war are over: ‘All that’s finished.’ (p.188)
‘The Ghost Soldiers’
A sustained examination of the psychological changes wrought by the war: ‘For all
my education, all my fine liberal values, I now felt a deep coldness inside me,
something dark and beyond reason.’ (p.199). The narrator exacts revenge on a
medic he believes failed to provide adequate treatment for him in the field. The story
becomes an allegory of the U.S military presence in Vietnam and the psychological
trauma endured by the soldiers.
‘Night Life’
Rat Kiley experiences such severe delusions he shoots himself in the foot in order to
be sent home.
‘The Lives of the Dead’
After all the deaths he witnessed during the war the narrator recalls a childhood
friend, Linda, who died at the age of nine from a brain tumour. This early experience
of death traces a continuum through the writer’s life: ‘The human life is all one thing,
like a blade tracing loops on ice.’ (p.229). The fact of death defines a purpose and a
vocation for the writer: ‘And as a writer now, I want to save Linda’s life. Not her body
– her life.’ (p.229). The same principle underlies the stories told by the men in
Vietnam: ‘We kept the dead alive with stories.’ (p.231).
The final story in the
collection reasserts the primacy and significance of the narrative function. The writer
is less concerned with explaining his formal techniques than with illustrating their
origin in his own experience.
VATE Inside Stories
The Things They Carried
8
Section 4.
A perspective on the text
It is generally recognised that teaching a collection of stories poses a number of
difficulties that are not encountered when teaching a novel. These difficulties or
challenges if you prefer, are usually seen to stem from the fragmentary form of a
story collection – each story being complete unto itself without necessarily adding to
the overall thematic or formal design of the whole. While this perception may apply
to the anthology form we should be able to distinguish these general problems from
the specific demands of O’Brien’s collection.
It is indeed tempting to attempt to sidestep this issue altogether by viewing O’Brien’s
text as perhaps closer to the novel. Many of its formal aspects are reassuringly
novelistic. These include a single, consistently identifiable narrative voice; a uniform
cast of characters that appear in all the stories; a unifying set of themes; a
consistency of tone; a formal design that continually draws attention to itself and
reminds readers of its motivating purpose. However, I would caution against this
type of easy assimilation of the story form to the novel. What is distinctive and
formally interesting about the text is its refusal of an organic narrative unity or an
ultimate position of truth. While Tim O’Brien is the text’s author, a central character
and the self-conscious narrator of these stories, he actively chooses to dispel any
illusion of omniscience; of controlling knowledge or final authority in matters of
interpretation and meaning. These are the more conventional formal attributes that
we usually associate with the novel. O’Brien elevates the fragmentary nature of the
story form to the level of thematic significance in its own right, dramatically illustrated
in ‘How to tell a true war story.’
O’Brien makes the nature of story telling of importance for his character, and by
extension, for himself, the actual subject of this story. It begins simply, ‘This is true’
p. 67). The remainder of the story is an exercise in uncovering the complexity and
contradictions of such an apparently straightforward statement. The story describes
the death of Curt Lemon and the effect it has on his best friend Rat Kiley, who writes
to the dead man’s sister attempting to explain his feelings for her brother: ‘He says
the guy was his best friend in the world. They were like soul mates, he says, like
twins or something…He tells the guy’s sister he’ll look her up when the war’s
over.’(p.68). The sister never replies.
The rejection of this letter is instructive for the narrator. He is prompted to reflect on
the peculiar nature of story-telling that the war has created. ‘If at the end of a war
story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some bit of rectitude has been salvaged from
the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible
lie.’(p.68). The failure of the sister to reply indicates a larger failure on the part of
American society to understand the experience of war, particularly an unpopular and
unjustifiable war.
For the narrator, this inability of a soldier’s family to understand the ‘truth’ of that
soldier’s experience only heightens the importance of the story-telling function
amongst the soldiers themselves. He then recounts another story told to him by
Mitchell Sanders. This is best described as a parable of belief and its opposite,
incomprehension. After listening to Sander’s story the narrator concludes: ‘In a way,
I suppose, you had to be there, you had to hear it but I could tell how desperately
Sanders wanted me to believe him, his frustration at not quite getting the details right,
not pinning down the final and definitive truth.’ (p.73).
VATE Inside Stories
The Things They Carried
9
Sanders’ frustration is shared by O’Brien. The author repeatedly attempts to evoke
the moment of Lemon’s death, as if by fixing this moment in time he will have
resolved its truth. But in struggling to fix a meaning to Lemon’s death he discovers
that ‘The truths are contradictory.’ (p.77)
Within this story O’Brien explains the over-arching purpose of the entire collection.
‘Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn’t hit you
until twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start
telling the story to her, except when you get to the end you’ve forgotten the point
again!’ (p.78) The lack of a point to be made, a moral to be drawn or a lesson to be
learnt is confronted again and again in these stories. But this is not to suggest that
O’Brien’s writing begins to promote an idea of truth as simply elusive, or worse, a
certain type of postmodern relativism, all truths are equal and there is not one
position from which to judge their competing claims.
It would be far more productive to ask students to consider the following proposition:
‘In a true war story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth.
You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unravelling the deeper
meaning. And in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story,
except maybe.. “Oh.”.. ‘ (p.75).
Students might then consider the following
questions:
• Is O’Brien suggesting to the reader that his stories cannot be discussed or
analysed?
• That it is pointless to try to find meaning in them?
• Yet why does O’Brien himself, as a writer, continually return to these stories, after
fifteen years, in an effort to understand his distant experience?
The Things They Carried is not solely a collection of stories about war. It is also a
collection that examines the deep structures of memory, the loss of one’s youth and
the indifferent passage of time.
The formal significance of the story as a fragment, as a minor piece of the truth, is
revealed to the reader when we consider O’Brien’s previous remark that you cannot
extract meaning without unravelling deeper meaning. The effectiveness of the storyfragment resides precisely in its partial form and the need to establish a relationship
or a connection between fragments. The intention is not to achieve a ‘bigger picture’
(the mistaken belief of U.S.military planners in Vietnam) or to arrive at a resolution.
The story-fragment conveys that truths are situated in and that they emerge from
physical details and actual situations that cannot be abstracted and therefore lent a
higher meaning. The light that surrounded Curt Lemon at he moment of his death,
‘the fatal whiteness of that light, the quick glare, the obvious cause and effect’(p.79),
is the only truth that the narrator can summon. Ironically and subversively, it is not a
light that illuminates anything other than the fact of Lemon’s sudden and random
death.
VATE Inside Stories
The Things They Carried
10
Section 5. Character and setting
O’Brien does not attempt to depict each character with the full psychological depth of
conventional realist fiction. He typically expresses character through a description of
behaviour and physical detail, as exemplified in the title story. What is important
about these soldiers is not their psychological selves, their individualism, but the
writer’s memory of the small facts that define them, that allow him to summon them
again.
The author avoids creating a false solidarity or camaraderie amongst the soldiers.
There are many instances of hostility, violence, humiliation and revenge enacted by
the squad upon each other (see ‘Enemies’, ‘Friends’ and ‘The ghost soldiers’).
The death of Kiowa becomes the emotional centre of the collection. Of all the men
he is rendered with the greatest strength of character and individual dignity. He is
also the narrator’s closest friend. Yet all these attributes do not prevent Kiowa
suffering the most ignominious death of all, hit by shrapnel and sinking beneath the
shit field while the terrified narrator looks on.
O’Brien combats the stereotypical depiction of soldiers in Hollywood films. (Even a
more sensitive portrayal such as Oliver Stone’s Platoon frequently lapses into a type
of period romanticism or nostalgia for the sixties. Compare the scenes in that film
where the soldiers are getting high on dope while listening to Jefferson Airplane’s
‘White Rabbit’.
The platoon here seems to have been magically relocated to
Woodstock.) O’Brien resists depicting character through such stereotypical period
details. The most common form of recreation O’Brien’s soldiers enjoy is story-telling
in which they follow strict rules of oral narration (see especially ‘Sweet heart of the
Song Tra Bong’).
• Ask students to consider the importance of story-telling among the characters
and then to compare these findings with the direct observations O’Brien himself
makes about the purpose of his own writing.
• How does the readers’ knowledge of each character develop over the course of
the collection?
• Form the class into small groups, assigning each group a separate character.
After following this character through each story, gathering individual details and
information, the groups re-form and discuss the information they have collected.
It should then possible to reach a clearer understanding of how O’Brien presents
character, in particular the formal techniques he employs.
It would be a mistake to view The Things They Carried as a conventional group
portrait. The narrator’s feelings for each of the men are indeed mixed.
• Ask students to compile a collection of quotes in which the narrator reveals his
feelings for his characters.
It has been argued here that O’Brien offers the reader an alternative to the Hollywood
depiction of American soldiers in Vietnam.
• Present students with a range of scenes from different films and ask them to
compare the filmic representations with O’Brien’s stories. (A useful selection of
films might include Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill, and
Platoon).
• What appear to be the major differences?
• Can these be organised into differences of emphasis? For instance, how is death
depicted in the films and O’Brien’s stories respectively?
• In what ways do the films resolve the viewers’ emotions and understanding?
VATE Inside Stories
The Things They Carried
11
•
•
•
Do the films rely on established generic conventions to present the war and the
soldiers?
Is there an ideological position on the war established within these films?
Are the positions in any way similar? Do they differ fundamentally?
VATE Inside Stories
The Things They Carried
12
Section 6.
A guided approach to selected passages
The title story ‘The Things They Carried’ provides a systematic introduction to the
characters and themes that are developed further in the collection. This story in
particular introduces the reader to an innovative technique employed throughout the
text.
I have previously discussed the importance of the ‘fragment’ in O’Brien’s
writing.
This alludes to both the fragmentary nature of experience and
understanding, and the most suitable formal device for evoking the narrator’s
memories of the war. This technique is employed to startling effect in the opening
story.
Students may find it more helpful to think of O’Brien’s prose style as the literary
equivalent of a series of photographic snap-shots. The reader is allowed to glimpse
extreme ‘close-ups’ of the men in the field. O’Brien again avoids piecing together a
group psychology of the soldiers and opts instead for the presentation for what might
be termed a series of ‘actualities’. To describe his writing style as photographic is
not to suggest the more customary definition of fictional realism, or what was the
contemporary style of new journalism employed by many writers who reported on the
war.
O’Brien’s writing approximates the style of a snapshot in its extremely personal tone,
producing the effect of an apparently random detail that sharpens the memory.
What the narrator remembers are the hard facts of the war, and these are initially
presented as the actual things the soldiers were forced to carry. The act of carrying
is the very definition of the soldiers’ purpose: ‘To carry something was to hump it…In
its intransitive form, to hump meant to walk, or to march, but it implied burdens far
beyond the intransitive.’ (p.5).
The actions performed by the men are completely at odds with the higher
justifications of the war made by politicians: ‘Their principles were in their feet. Their
calculations were biological.
They had no sense of strategy or mission…They
carried their own lives.’(p.13)
Each of the soldiers is introduced to the reader through a description of what they
carried.
• Ask students to select an individual soldier and assemble all the personal details
that are mentioned about him in this story.
• What type of portrait do these details create for the reader?
• How does this approach differ from a more conventional description of what the
characters might be feeling?
• Does it make the writing seem impersonal?
Military hardware and more personal possessions become intermingled. Members
of the platoon carry an object that functions as a signifier of ‘home’ or insulates them
against the dangers of the war. In all his stories, O’Brien emphasises the sense of
strangeness and foreignness experienced by the men while they are ‘in-country’.
This sense of strangeness is frequently the cue for a character to recount a story,
one he has either experienced or heard. This sense of something eerie, uncanny or
inexplicable is described by Sanders in ‘How to tell a true war story’, but receives its
most exemplary treatment in ‘Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong’, one of the most
daring stories in the collection.
VATE Inside Stories
The Things They Carried
13
While O’Brien describes the men’s attempts to insulate themselves against ‘Vietnam’
and the landscape of the war he is also concerned to explore the nature of the
experience shared by the men.
Questions for discussion
•
•
•
•
What type of experience do the members of the platoon share?
What bonds are established?
Is there a genuine sense of connection forged between any of them?
How do the men share the experience of death?
Ask students to look closely at each of the deaths described in this collection: Ted
Lavender, Curt Lemon, the young Vietnamese soldiers and Kiowa.
• How does O’Brien evoke the tragic loss of each of these lives?
The death of Ted Lavender in ‘The Things They Carried’ is juxtaposed throughout the
story with the intimate description of the yearning felt by Lieutenant Jimmy Cross for
a young woman in college back in the United States. Cross blames himself for
Lavender’s death: ‘he pictured Martha’s smooth young face, thinking he loved her
more than anything, more than his men, and now Ted Lavender was dead because
he loved her so much and could not stop thinking about her.’ (p.7)
• Consider the way in which O’Brien changes the tone in this story from a
description of the actual physical objects carried by the men to a description of
the metaphysical or spiritual burden they each carry.
The story ultimately
becomes an inventory of complex and conflicting emotional states such as
shame, guilt, fear, cowardice, grief, love and longing.
• Think about the ways in which these emotions are explored in the later stories.
• Ask students to consider how the remainder of the collection is an attempt by the
writer to work through each of these difficult states through the use of story and
memory.
VATE Inside Stories
The Things They Carried
14
Section 7. Activities for exploring the text.
Group and Individual Activities
O’Brien avoids presenting an outright moral condemnation of the war. This can be
partly explained as the reticence of a writer who wishes to explore personal
experience not political arguments. Yet the moral dimension of this particular war is
strongly evoked in ‘On the Rainy River.’ The extreme ambivalence of the narrator’s
response to his draft notice causes him to consider fleeing the country. When he is
confronted with the finality of this decision, while living in an isolated cabin on the
Canadian border, the only human contact he has is with an old man who refuses to
press him for an explanation of his problems. Both men studiously avoid a direct
discussion of the narrator’s dilemma and this becomes emblematic of the difficulties
many Americans had in confronting the moral implications of the war.
• Imagine that these two men, one old and perhaps the veteran of other wars, the
other young and about to submit to his country’s latest military demands, discuss
the validity of this highly divisive conflict. Write their conversation, paying close
attention to the variety of arguments that each might use to justify their position.
- What type of language or emotional appeals would they use?
- Would it be possible to develop this dramatic encounter in such
way that the narrator ultimately makes a different decision?
- You might like to include a postscript set many years later in which
the narrator explains to his daughter why he decided not to fight in
the war.
- Perform these scripts to the rest of the class.
The surviving members of Alpha Company assemble for the 25th anniversary of the
end of the war.
• Write a story that describes their interaction on that day. Look carefully at each of
the stories so that you have a clear sense of the individual characters and how
they might have changed in the intervening years.
•
Develop a dramatic performance, in groups of four or five, based on an issue in
one or more of the stories. This could be developed later as an appropriate piece
for either the Craft of Writing study area as a reflective piece on an issue or as a
dramatic enactment from one of the texts as an option in Effective Oral
Communication. Such issues might include:
- how the soldiers cope with the death of their friends;
- attempting to shield yourself from the horror of the war by the use
of black humour;
- exploring the moral confusion of soldiers as they are called on to
perform duties that have no clearly defined military objectives;
- facing the prospect of returning to civilian life knowing that Vietnam
veterans are considered as psychologically unstable killers;
- years later men and women reflecting on the effects of the war.
•
Keep a journal that records the thoughts and reflections of one of the men in
Alpha Company i.e. Jimmy Cross, Kiowa or Norman Bowker.
VATE Inside Stories
The Things They Carried
15
Questions for discussion.
•
•
•
•
•
•
Why was the Vietnam War such a divisive and controversial event?
What were the specific issues that caused such fundamental opposition to the
war?
Do these stories give a sense of why this war was such a defining experience for
all those who lived through it?
The experience of the soldiers is depicted as being consistently traumatic - no
one appeared to escape either the physical or psychological terror of this war. In
what ways does O’Brien present the experience of Vietnam as somehow different
to other wars, as essentially unique in its effects?
The soldiers in Alpha Company are placed in situations they cannot fully
comprehend. They experience witnessing the sudden and violent deaths of their
friends, undergoing extreme mental states, literally traversing geography they
cannot understand or locate themselves within.
What survival strategies do they develop in order to cope with the
war?
- In what ways are these survival strategies useful during wartime,
but wholly unsuitable once they have returned from the war?
In ‘Speaking of Courage’ the extreme difficulty of returning to civilian life is
examined in the experience of Norman Bowker.
- What problems would the men of Alpha Company have faced
when they returned to the United States and attempted to take up
their lives again?
- Consider also the ways in which Hollywood films attempted to
represent these problems in such films as Coming Home and The
Deer Hunter.
VATE Inside Stories
The Things They Carried
16
Essay Topics
•
O’Brien’s stories provide the reader with a deeper understanding of the Vietnam
War. Do you agree?
•
‘The soldiers in Alpha Company carry out their daily tasks with little or no
awareness of the devastating impact they are having on the people or
countryside of Vietnam.’ Is this a fair comment on O’Brien’s characters?
•
In ‘How to Tell A True War Story’ O’Brien argues: ‘You can tell a true war story by
the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let’s say, and afterward you ask,
“Is it true?” and if the answer matters, you’ve got your answer.’ Does it matter that
we ultimately know these stories are fiction? Does it diminish their truth?
•
The Vietnam War ended twenty-five years ago. What do you think is the value of
continuing to examine its legacy through stories such as O’Brien’s?
•
‘One of the problems with O’Brien’s stories is that he is not able to make a place
for the Vietnamese.
Their experience goes unexamined.’ Is this a fair
assessment of O’Brien’s writing?
•
The main reason O’Brien gives for going to war is that he would have been
embarrassed not to. What light does this shed on the attitudes and behavior of
the soldiers in these stories?
VATE Inside Stories
The Things They Carried
17