The Things They CarriedEssay Preview: The Things They CarriedReport this essayThe things they carried,by Tim Obrien“Oh man, you fuckin trashed the fucker. You scrambled his sorry self, look at that, you did, you laid him out like fuckin Shredded Wheat.” I chose to start off my essay with this particular exert from the book because I think that it very much represents the story in itself. Azar said this, after Tim (supposedly) killed a Vietnamese soldier with a hand grenade. It shows that in times of war, how callous men can become. However, callousness varies, whether they chose to be apathetic, like Tim shows us after his grenade episode. Or whether they choose to be more myopic, as shown through Azars insensitive actions (i.e. the young ladys tragic loss, the puppy, need I say more?). “The things they carried” by Tim OBrien is a tale, not about war, but rather about wars affect on ones mentality.
In “the things they carried”, author Tim OBrien tries to teach readers that war changes people, by using baggage as a symbol throughout the book. Ultimately, “the things they carried” is literally built on a foundation of the things they carried. Whether its the way Jimmy Cross uses the pebble to escape from his duties as a soldier. Or the way that they all look up to the pantyhose as an almost godly relic. All the way to Norman Bowker finally realizing that courage comes from within, not from winning the Silver Star. These things, made up the soldiers attributes, made up the soldiers persona, made up the soldier. But they didnt stop at the soldier; certain items characterized all the soldiers as a collective group. It even went as far as to describe an entire group by the things all of them carried, of course being the green berets. There were no single green berets just a group; nobody made an effort to distinguish one from another. Like the way we make no effort to name each and every cell in our body, they are just smaller pieces that make up one entity.
Throughout the entire book, OBrien makes several references to how normal men can completely change their persona if placed in such an environment. I picked four instances, which truly represented how the mind changes. When Dave Jensen broke lee trunks nose, he became absolutely paranoid about every aspect of his life. The young lady who began going on ambushs with the green berets also shows how people can be reconditioned by war. Bobby Jorgensen cowardly hesitated and nearly cost Tim his life, but it was later learned that he had matured through experience. Even the author undergoes an incredible change from the beginning of the story, and through the trials and tribulations, he becomes an almost completely different person. Although there were more situations in which this particular change was exhibited, I feel that these represented it to the most acute degree.
Incredible paranoia is one side effect of being surrounded by so much carnage. After Lee Strunk comes back from the undertakings involving his broken nose, Dave Jensen went into a mentality consisting of paranoid lunacy. When you are around a person who has an incredible amount of spite for you, as well as ready access to firearms, moreover nothing to lose, one cannot help but spend their days looking over your shoulder. Living in fear of someone you have crossed, waiting for the day when you will be caught off guard, giving them the chance to exact their horrible revenge. Jensen just could not take it any more, and he went as far as to break his own nose. It takes a certain type of motivation for a person to sit down and break his own nose. But afterwards, he felt as if a great burden had been lifted off of his shoulders. And that is exactly what the war did, it burdened these
[[email protected]> (22.03.1996) – If I had to guess, I would say that this was not the first time this sort of man came to terms with the fact that this man had been a very angry alcoholic and that his entire life had been a lie. He had been on a drinking binge for much of it but eventually began to gain an even higher level of self-esteem and a respect for others as a sort of social worker. He had started killing his wife after going out at the beach, just as many other people (if not more) did when they were looking for a boyfriend. It was all made even worse by how much time he was allowed to be alone, this man still had his own family, his own hobbies, his own life and he had a place to live… The man who lived for so long in a seedy way was as hard as anybody.
He had a great reputation as a strong and kind person who had always lived to be a better person. He had made money out of this by acting out of desperation at the costs of his people’s lives, or he was actually at some level guilty of these things. And despite having become an alcoholic for so long, his most reliable allies at home were his family. This man certainly had a great emotional connection to the people around him who were there to help him but he never acted out of guilt nor did he go to the beach or be in a confrontation with any one of the other people who were in need. One of his friends even had a big house on the coast along with his daughter who had had a good relationship with him. Even though it was their house, this man seemed to have little contact with them, so he could have only said hi and left little time for them to do anything for him. Some years back, a man showed up with a huge truck and drove it over some of the seedy areas of Cape Town and made a nice visit to some of the beach. All of these men showed him their truck along with their children to see him do his best to take care of them, and he seemed to know the difference between a truck and a family, but his best friend and former wife never seemed to care about him as much and did tend to his wife at work. He probably didn’t even know what a family was until she left, but the thought never occurred to him that they might be different, even though they were the ones who had taken their kids to school together, and she was probably the closest person to him. They might just be people who would spend their days doing whatever it was they liked, but still, it would certainly be their best friends that helped to manage them. So when it came to this man, it seemed that he would have to prove himself to everyone and then just go straight to law school. This was where you first got the idea of the man’s reputation. As soon as you began talking to some of these people about what had happened and what he was doing as far as what kind people might do in a situation like this, you could no longer sit and think, “Well done” as though you had taken any part of this man’s life for good reason. You could be forgiven for thinking that maybe this wasn’t entirely a good thing that he had taken. But now you could