The Things They Carried

West of the Batangan Peninsula, the men come across a pagoda where a pair of monks live. They speak little English. The older monk leads the men into the pagoda, where they spend the night, and then stay for the next week or so. The narrator relates that “[i]t was mostly a very peaceful time” (113). The monks bring water every morning, and they provide a chair for Lieutenant Jimmy Cross to sit in in the altar area. They especially take a liking to Henry Dobbins and help him clean his machine gun.

Dobbins reflects that he used to want to be a minister: “The thing is, I believed in God and all that, but it wasn’t the religious part that interested me. Just being nice to people, that’s all. Being decent” (115). Meanwhile, the monks continue cleaning Dobbins’s machine gun; Kiowa states that he likes how it feels inside churches and claims that it’s wrong of them to have set up inside a pagoda. The monks finish cleaning Dobbins’s gun and Dobbins gives them each a can of peaches and chocolate. Dobbins performs a mysterious hand gesture that one of the monks often does. He tells Kiowa that he’s right that it is wrong to set up in a pagoda and then adds, “All you can do is be nice. Treat them decent, you know?” (117).

The narrator describes a dead man: “His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole” (118). The dead man lies in a trail, wearing a shirt and pajama pants. The narrator speculates that the man would’ve heard stories about war heroes from his family, but that the man himself wasn’t a fighter. Instead, the man had liked books and had wanted to become a math teacher. A soldier named Azar says some crude words about the appearance of the dead man and Kiowa tells Azar to go away. Kiowa encourages the narrator to stop staring at the dead man, but the narrator continues to look, studying the young man’s appearance and thinking about his history. He explains:

The nose was undamaged. The skin on the right cheek was smooth and fine-grained and hairless. Frail-looking, delicately boned, the young man would not have wanted to be a soldier and in his heart would have feared performing badly in battle (121).

Blue flowers line the trail; Kiowa continues to try to get the narrator to stop staring at the man. The narrator imagines that the man spent his nights alone, writing poems and enjoying doing math. Kiowa attempts to convince the narrator that even if the narrator hadn’t killed him, someone else would have. Kiowa gives the narrator five more minutes to stare, then covers up the body and encourages the narrator to “talk about it” (124): “One eye was shut. The other was a star-shaped hole. ‘Talk,’ Kiowa said” (124).

The narrator’s daughter asks if the narrator has ever killed anyone. The narrator replies, “Of course not” (125). Then he expresses a desire to “tell her exactly what happened” (125) once she’s grown.

Late in the night, the men move to an ambush site near My Khe. They work in two-man teams keeping watch. When it is the narrator’s turn, he keeps three grenades in front of him, ready to be thrown. Dawn begins to break and the narrator sees a man wearing black clothes and sandals and carrying an ammunition belt emerging from the fog. The narrator pulls the pin on a grenade: “It was entirely automatic. I did not hate the young man; I did not see him as the enemy” (126). The narrator throws the grenade before telling himself to throw it. The grenade lands and the man on the trail begins to run before hesitating, turning, and glancing down at the grenade. There is a popping sound and the man is pulled upward into the air. He falls on his back and lies at the center of the trail. The narrator laments, “[e]ven now I haven’t finished sorting it out. Sometimes I forgive myself, other times I don’t” (128).