The Things They Carried

The platoon moves only at night in the hills near Quang Ngai City: “For almost two weeks, Sanders said, they lived the night life. That was the phrase everyone used: night life. A language trick” (209). Although moving only at night is difficult for the entire platoon, the strain is especially difficult for Rat. First, he stops talking, and then he starts talking too much. He feels that the bugs in Vietnam are “personally after his ass” (209). He can hear them saying his name and starts to lose his composure, scratching himself obsessively.

Everyone feels the effects of the long night marches. Eventually, Rat hits a breaking point. He starts to envision the men “without arms or legs—that sort of thing” (211) and sees himself dead, being eaten away at by the bugs. He shoots himself in the foot and is evacuated back to Japan.

On an afternoon in 1969, the men call in an air strike on a village along the South China Sea. Afterward, they comb through the village and find “[t]he only confirmed kill was an old man who lay face-up near a pigpen at the center of the village” (214). One by one, the men go up to the old man and greet him as though he were alive. It is only the narrator’s fourth day. He does not go up and greet the dead man; he feels sick. The men set up the body against a fence and raise a toast to him.

Kiowa approaches the narrator later that night and tells him he did a good thing by refusing to shake hands with the old man. The narrator tells Kiowa that the body of the old man reminded him of another body he once saw. Linda and the narrator were both nine, “but we were in love” (216). The narrator takes Linda on the first date of his life in the spring of 1956. They are driven to the movie theater by the narrator’s parents. She wears a red cap. They park and walk up Main Street to the theater. They see a World War II film called The Man Who Never Was. After, they go to the Dairy Queen. He walks Linda to her front door.

At school, Linda wears the red cap and kids like Nick Veenhof tease her. The narrator says, “Nick would creep up behind her and make a grab for the cap, almost yanking it off, then scampering away” (221). One afternoon in class, Nick Veenhof takes off Linda’s cap as he passes by her desk: “Even now, when I think back on it, I can still see the glossy whiteness of her scalp. She wasn’t bald. Not quite. Not completely” (222). Linda doesn’t react. After a time, she turns and stares at the narrator. Later she cries. The narrator and Nick Veenhof walk her home. Linda lives through the summer and dies in September at the age of nine.

The narrator briefly revives Linda: “In a story, miracles can happen. Linda can smile and sit up. She can reach out, touch my wrist, and say, ‘Timmy, stop crying’” (224). Nick Veenhof comes up to the narrator on the playground and tells him that Linda has died. He walks home, drinks chocolate milk, and lies down on the sofa. He daydreams about Linda and starts to cry. The day after she dies, the narrator asks his father to take him down to the funeral home to see the body. The first thing he notices is “the smell, thick and sweet, like something sprayed out of a can” (228). He feels panic as he walks up the aisle. The body doesn’t seem real to him because “[h]er arms and face were bloated. The skin at her cheeks was stretched out tight like the rubber skin on a balloon just before it pops open” (229). He closes his eyes and his father suggests they get some ice cream.

The narrator never shakes hands with the dead bodies he encounters in Vietnam, although confronts many. He continues to make up stories about Linda to bring her back to life. In one, he asks Linda what it’s like to be dead: “‘Well, right now,’ she said, ‘I’m not dead. But when I am, it’s like…I don’t know, I guess it’s like being inside a book that nobody’s reading” (232).

He relates, “[a]nd then it becomes 1990, I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now, still dreaming Linda alive in exactly the same way” (232). He can see her “as if through ice” (232) in a world where Kiowa, Ted Lavender, and Curt Lemon also live. A younger version of himself lives there as well, ice skating with Linda: “[W]hen I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story” (233).