The Things They Carried

“They carried USO stationery and pencils and pens. They carried Sterno, safety pins, trip flares, signal flares, spools of wire, razor blades, chewing tobacco, liberated joss sticks and statuettes of the smiling Buddha, candles, grease pencils, The Stars and Stripes, fingernail clippers, Psy Ops leaflets, bush hats, bolos, and much more.”

Such detailed lists are common in Story 1 and provide a vivid sense of precisely what a soldier’s life entailed. Here, common objects such as safety pins and fingernail clippers suggest small daily realities of life. These mundane items mix with those that specifically evoke the war in Vietnam—“statuettes of the smiling Buddha” and “bush hats” (13).

“It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.”

While the literal weight of ammunition, guns, and gear is a very real burden for the men, often the things they carry “inside” significantly slow or weigh them down. They all continue to carry these burdens after the war.

“I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now, and the war has been over for a long while. Much of it is hard to remember. I sit at this typewriter and stare through my words and watch Kiowa sinking into the deep muck of a shit field, or Curt Lemon hanging in pieces from a tree, and as I write about these things, the remembering is turned into a kind of rehappening.”

Most of the stories in The Things They Carry are told from the point of view of a specific storyteller such as Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, or the narrator, as a 43-year-old writer and father looking back on his war experiences. The nature of looking back on his memories changes the actuality of the events themselves.

“I remember packing a suitcase and carrying it out to the kitchen, standing very still for a few minutes, looking carefully at the familiar objects all around me. The old chrome toaster, the telephone, the pink and white Formica on the kitchen counters.”

The summer the narrator is drafted, he closely reviews his life through several new lenses. In this passage, the dramatic change in perspective forces him into a state of extreme presence—a state in which he will find himself again once at war in Vietnam.

“Even now, as I write this, I can still feel that tightness. And I want you to feel it—the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You’re at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You’re twenty-one years old, you’re scared, and there’s a hard squeezing pressure in your chest.”

The narrator emphasizes that he wants the reader to feel what he was feeling the day he chose not to dodge the draft. This quality—wanting the reader to feel something—emerges in many of the stories throughout The Things They Carried.

“Elroy Berdahl remained quiet. He kept fishing.”

In a pivotal moment of the narrator’s life—the moment he chooses to go to war—the old man with whom he stays at the lodge maintains his sense of distance and silence. This allows the narrator to come to his own conclusions and decisions without the influence of another. He is later grateful to the old man for his understanding and silent wisdom.

“You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you.”

Later in the book, when the narrator receives gunfire in the butt, he admits to feeling a keen sense of embarrassment. War, the narrator seems to suggest, does not always make a soldier seem valiant or brave. Instead, it can be humbling or even humiliating.

“And man, I’ll tell you—it’s spooky. This is mountains. You don’t know spooky till you been there.”

Mitchell Sanders’ style of storytelling varies slightly from the narrator’s style. In this passage, Sanders speaks in a casual, colloquial way that mirrors the speech of many average soldiers.

“True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis.”

This is one of many qualities the narrator claims a true war story has in “How to Tell a True War Story,” yet it is one to which the narrator does not personally adhere. Instead, the narrator often adds analysis, explanation, or generalization to his stories. This implies that one should question how “true” any of the stories in The Things They Carried are.

“And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight.”

A thread concerning presence—merely being there—runs through many of the stories in The Things They Carried. The narrator suggests that this thread of presence distinguishes “true” war stories from untrue ones.

“Once or twice, gently, Mark Fossie suggested that it might be time to think about heading home, but Mary Anne laughed and told him to forget it. ‘Everything I want,’ she said, ‘is right here.’”

The character of Mary Anne, who becomes so alive to her surroundings in Vietnam that she fails to return to her old self,

takes the theme of presence to an extreme.

“The sound. You need to get a consistent sound, like slow or fast, funny or sad. All these digressions, they just screw up your story’s sound. Stick to what happened.”

Not only does the narrator offer reflections on the nature of truth in stories, but also touches upon facets of craft. Good stories don’t get in the way of their own telling, and they have their own tone, sound, and personality.

“What happened to her, Rat said, was what happened to all of them. You come over clean and you get dirty and then afterward it’s never the same.”

Mary Anne serves as an example of what happened to many of the men who went to Vietnam. Once they set foot there, the experience of war transformed them, and they returned home as different people.

“Henry Dobbins was a good man, and a superb soldier, but sophistication was not his strong suit. The ironies went beyond him. In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot but always plodding along, always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor.”

Henry Dobbins is a comic counterpoint in many of the stories, but he is also more than that. He is a symbol of American force and sensibility and sometimes a voice of common sense and simple wisdom.

“After his years at the university, the man I killed returned with his new wife to the village of My Khe, where he reenlisted as a common rifleman with the 48th Vietcong Battalion.”

The narrator projects an imaginary life onto a man he killed. Projections and hypothetical stories play an important role here in Story 12 as well as in Story 15 when Norman Bowker imagines telling various people his own story.

“When she was nine, my daughter Kathleen asked if I had ever killed anyone.”

Kathleen makes regular appearances in the story, providing the narrator with a moral backdrop against which to compare his actions during the war. He is conflicted about what to tell her when she asks whether he has ever killed anyone and ultimately decides that the truth to the answer is relative.

“He would’ve talked about this, and how he grabbed Kiowa by the boot and tried to pull him out. He pulled hard but Kiowa was gone, and then suddenly he felt himself going, too.”

Norman replays the last moments of Kiowa’s life in his mind as he drives around the lake in his hometown. He searches for solace and someone to hear his story but finds no one to whom he can talk.

“What you should do, Tim, is write a story about a guy who feels like he got zapped over in that shithole. A guy who can’t get his act together and just drives around town all day and can’t think of any damn place to go and doesn’t know how to get there anyway.”

Norman writes a letter to the narrator expressing his sense of isolation. These lines prompt the narrator to write—and rewrite—a story, which accurately depicts Norman’s struggle to connect with the outside world after the war.

“Jimmy Cross did not want the responsibility of leading these men. He had never wanted it.”

Late in the book, Jimmy still struggles with his responsibilities as a leader of Alpha Company. Although he hardens and burns his pictures of Martha, he still struggles with self-blame and Survivor’s Guilt when Kiowa dies later.

“I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”

Throughout The Things They Carried, the narrator continually distinguishes between Factual Truth and Emotional Truth, which the narrator terms “happening-truth” (171). Here he explains why often fiction can feel more present, alive, and true than the actual truth of an event.

“When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world.”

The narrator attempts to scare his nemesis, the medic Bobby Jorgenson, but only embarrasses himself. Here he imagines that Jorgenson is as afraid as the narrator had once been, but it turns out that Jorgenson sees through the narrator’s trick.

“He was sitting there with Dave Jensen and Mitchell Sanders and a few others, and he seemed to fit in very nicely, all chumminess and group rapport.”

Seeing Jorgenson fit in with the narrator’s old company triggers feelings of jealousy that only sharpen his need for revenge. This touches on the importance of camaraderie among people who share the same terrible experiences, including the importance of Talking as a Way of Processing Trauma.

”One of these nights I’ll be lying dead out there in the dark and nobody’ll find me except the bugs—I can see it—I can see the goddamn bugs chewing tunnels through me—I can see the mongooses munching on my bones.”

Toward the end of the book, Rat Kiley loses his mind when Alpha Company is forced to only move at night. Rat is a competent and respected medic, so the fact that he loses his mind speaks more to the brutal conditions of war than it does to his temperament.