Read an Excerpt
Summary and Analysis of The Things They Carried
Based on the Book by Tim O'Brien
By Worth Books OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4376-2
CHAPTER 1
Summary
The Things They Carried
The titular story introduces the members of Alpha Company. The soldiers, or legs, are identified by the things they carry with them on missions, from common items such as dog tags and C-rations to personal mementos such as Kiowa's illustrated New Testament and Rat Kiley's comic books. First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carries letters, photographs, and a good-luck charm from Martha, a college classmate. Ted Lavender carries tranquilizers and marijuana because he's scared.
In addition to tangible items, the men carry emotional baggage, including grief, terror, love, fear of cowardice, and the knowledge that they might die.
Lieutenant Cross's memories of his halting romance with Martha at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey are interspersed with the story of Ted Lavender's death during a mission to find and destroy tunnel complexes near the village of Than Khe. Because he can't stop daydreaming about Martha, Cross blames himself when Lavender is shot in the head by a sniper. Afterward, Cross leads the men into Than Khe to burn the village to the ground. He spends the night weeping in his foxhole. In the morning, he burns Martha's letters and photographs and vows to be a better, more disciplined officer.
Love
Many years after the war, Jimmy Cross visits his war buddy "Tim O'Brien." They look at photographs from their time in Vietnam, and after coming across a picture of Ted Lavender, Cross admits that he's never forgiven himself for his death.
Cross reveals that he saw Martha at a college reunion in 1979. She'd become a Lutheran missionary and a trained nurse, and had never married. When Cross confesses he wanted to pick her up and carry her to his dorm room after one of their college dates, Martha says she doesn't understand how men can do the things they do. The impossibility of a relationship with Martha becomes clear to Cross. Nevertheless, he still loves her. He gives "O'Brien" permission to write a story about his feelings, but asks to be portrayed as courageous and handsome, and a great platoon leader.
Spin
"Tim O'Brien" is a forty-three-year-old writer with a young daughter named Kathleen. He writes war stories but contends that he is not obsessed with Vietnam. A writer takes his material from his life, and "O'Brien" remembers so many stories from the war he can't help but tell them.
Many episodes briefly referred to in "Spin"— Kiowa sinking into a field of muck, Curt Lemon's body parts splayed across a tree, a young Vietnamese man dead on a trail outside of the village of My Khe — are the focus of later stories in the collection. Other fragments capture the surreal nature of the war, the strange blend of boredom, adventure, absurdity, friendship, and terror. Mitchell Sanders mails his body lice to his draft board in Ohio. Azar straps Ted Lavender's puppy to a Claymore mine and fires.
"Spin" takes its title from the things the men of Alpha Company did to alleviate their boredom and fear: "On occasions the war was like a PingPong ball. You could put fancy spin on it, you could make it dance." In many ways, Vietnam was a different world where the normal rules of society and nature did not apply.
On the Rainy River
The summer after he graduates from college, "Tim O'Brien" lives with his parents and works at a meatpacking plant in his hometown of Worthington, Minnesota. He is against the war, but purely from an intellectual standpoint, not realizing that his own life is at risk — until the day the draft notice arrives.
"O'Brien" thinks seriously about fleeing to Canada. One morning he drives a few hundred miles north to the border. On the south shore of the Rainy River he checks into Tip Top Lodge, an old fishing resort. It's the off-season and the only other person at the lodge is the owner, an old man named Elroy Berdahl, who seems to know what his guest is contemplating but never asks any questions. One day, Berdahl takes "O'Brien" fishing and deliberately stops the boat only twenty yards from the Canadian border.
Confronted with the reality of his decision, "O'Brien" is unable to choose between the two courses his life might take. He imagines crowds of people — everyone from his brother and sister to Jane Fonda to the young man he will one day kill outside the village of My Khe — urging him to swim toward one shore or another. He tries to will himself overboard, but the fear of ridicule makes it impossible. In that moment, he submits and decides to go to war — he is too embarrassed not to. Berdahl's presence makes the decision real, and the next morning, "O'Brien" starts the journey that will take him to Vietnam.
Enemies / Friends
In "Enemies," Lee Strunk and Dave Jensen get into a fistfight over a missing jackknife and Strunk is hurt so badly he has to be helicoptered back to the rear for medical treatment. He returns two days later with a splint over his nose. Fearing retribution, Jensen grows increasingly paranoid, until one day he breaks his own nose with the butt of a pistol. He shows Strunk what he's done and asks if they're square. Strunk says sure, but can't stop laughing — he really did steal Jensen's jackknife.
In "Friends," Jensen and Strunk learn to trust each other in the months following the jackknife incident. They sign a pact that if one of them gets a "wheelchair wound" the other will put him out of his misery. A couple of months later, Strunk steps on a rigged mortar round, losing his right leg below the knee. He makes Jensen promise not to kill him — the wound is not so bad, his leg can be sewn back on. Jensen agrees, but when he learns that Strunk died en route to the hospital, he is visibly relieved.
How to Tell a True War Story
"How to Tell a True War Story" can be read as both the full account of Curt Lemon's death and a statement on the purpose and methodology of the novel's blending of fact and fiction.
The story of Curt Lemon's death is told in three distinct versions. Each version reveals new and important details. In the first, Lemon "step[s] from shade into bright sunlight" and the sunlight lifts him into a tree. In the second version, we learn that after Lemon's death, his best friend, Rat Kiley, shot a baby water buffalo to pieces. In the third version, it becomes clear that Lemon stepped on a booby-trapped artillery round and was blown into a tree.
According to "O'Brien," true war stories do not leave you feeling uplifted, do not abstract or generalize, often seem untrue, and have no moral. Each of these qualities can be applied both to the story of Lemon's death and to the novel as a whole. The moment Lemon stepped on the booby trap is told three different ways because such events are never seen in their totality. Running for their lives, witnesses miss key details; the picture gets jumbled. Only by viewing it from many different angles can Lemon's death be fully seen.
The poetic description of sunlight lifting Lemon into the tree is no mere literary artifice. Because it happened in the instant he took a step from shade into sunlight, placing his foot in the one wrong spot, it must have seemed to Lemon that the sunlight was killing him. In order to know his final truth, readers must be made to believe that sunlight was the cause of his death.
In the story's final paragraphs, "O'Brien" contends that "How to Tell a True War Story" is not really a war story, it's a love story. Every detail has been invented in order to get at the real truth, which has as much to do with the sorrow Rat felt after Lemon's death as it does with the war. True war stories are never actually about war — they're about the way war is experienced by those sent to fight and die.
The Dentist
In an effort to guard against sentimentalizing the dead, "O'Brien" tells another story about Curt Lemon. During a mission to a quiet area of operations near the South China Sea, Alpha Company is visited by an Army dentist who performs checkups and minor repair work. Waiting for his personal exam, Lemon gets very tense. When it's finally his turn, he faints.
Mortified, Lemon spends the rest of the day alone, cussing himself out. Late that night, he creeps into the dentist's tent and insists that he has a monster toothache. The dentist can't find the problem, but finally yanks out a perfectly good tooth. In the morning, Lemon is happy.
Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong
This is a story "O'Brien" heard from Rat Kiley, who was once stationed with a medical unit on a hill overlooking a river called the Song Tra Bong. Their situation was so relaxed and predictable it felt like they weren't in the middle of a war, so one of the medics arranged for his seventeen-year-old girlfriend to visit.
Vietnam changes Mary Anne Belle. First she picks up a little bit of the language and helps to treat casualties. Then she cuts her hair, stops wearing makeup and jewelry, and starts coming back to her boyfriend's bunker later and later at night. One night she doesn't come back at all. When her boyfriend learns she was out on ambush with the Green Berets, he insists Mary Anne return to the States.
But instead of leaving, she goes out on patrol with the Greenies again. When she comes back three weeks later, her eyes have turned from blue to a deep jungle green. The boyfriend breaks into the Green Berets' bunker and finds Mary Anne wearing a necklace made of human tongues. She tells her boyfriend that she feels full of electricity, as if she's glowing in the dark. She wants to eat the dirt and death of Vietnam so it can be inside her. She finally knows exactly who she is.
After he's transferred to Alpha Company, Rat hears that one morning Mary Anne walked into the mountains by herself and never returned. Sometimes when the Green Berets are out on ambush, they start to feel like the rain forest is watching them and they almost catch a glimpse of her — she has crossed to the other side and become a part of the land.
Stockings / Church
This pair of story fragments focuses on Henry Dobbins and the role of faith and religion among the members of Alpha Company.
In "Stockings," Dobbins is a superb soldier but unsophisticated, and drawn toward sentimentality. His one eccentricity is to wrap a pair of his girlfriend's stockings around his neck before he goes out on ambush. The stockings serve as a talisman — they give Dobbins "access to a spiritual world" and keep him safe. Even when his girlfriend dumps him, he believes the magic of the stockings remains.
In "Church," the platoon sets up a base of operations in the yard of a pagoda tended by two monks. The monks take a special liking to Dobbins. Talking to Kiowa, Dobbins says he might join the monks after the war. In high school he thought about becoming a minister, not because he was interested in church or religion, but because he's good at being nice to people. Kiowa, who carries a Bible everywhere he goes, thinks it's wrong for the platoon to have set up near the pagoda because it's like a church. During this conversation, the monks have been helping Dobbins to clean his rifle. He gives them each a can of peaches and a chocolate bar and tells Kiowa that he's right.
The Man I Killed / Ambush
Taken together, this pair of stories offers the full account of the death of a young Vietnamese man on a trail outside the village of My Khe.
"The Man I Killed" begins with a long description of the corpse, juxtaposing the mundane — his lightly freckled forehead and clean fingernails — and the shocking: his neck split open all the way to the spinal cord, a star-shaped hole where one eye used to be. As "O'Brien" stares at the body, he imagines a life story for the young man. His family has lived in My Khe for centuries and his ancestors have always fought in the struggle for independence. He was a scholar, not a fighter, and dreaded going to war, but there was never a question he would defend the land. After graduating from university and marrying a classmate, he returned to My Khe and enlisted. He was a soldier for only one day before he was killed.
As "O'Brien" stares, Kiowa speaks. He tells "O'Brien" that there was nothing else he could do, this is war and the young man was a soldier — he was dead as soon as he stepped on the trail. But "O'Brien" is lost in his imagination. The story ends with Kiowa begging his friend to talk.
"Ambush" takes place after the war, when "O'Brien" is an author. After his nine-year-old daughter asks if he keeps writing war stories because he killed someone, "O'Brien" imagines he will tell her what happened outside the village of My Khe when she's an adult.
The patrol had set up an ambush site, and "O'Brien" was on watch when he saw the young man come out of the fog at dawn, walking up the center of the trail. "O'Brien" threw the grenade as a reflex, not because he hated the young man or wanted to kill him. Years later, "O'Brien" will look up from reading the paper and watch the young man emerge from the morning fog, pass within a few yards, and "continue up the trail to where it bends back into the fog."
Style
A young girl dances in front of the ruins of her house. Her family is dead, but the girl keeps dancing as their bodies are pulled from the rubble. Azar guesses her dancing is part of some weird ritual, but Henry Dobbins says that she just likes to dance. Later, Azar mockingly imitates the girl's dance and Dobbins picks him up, carries him to a well, and asks if he wants to be dumped in. When Azar says no, Dobbins responds, "All right, then ... dance right."
Speaking of Courage
Norman Bowker drives the seven-mile loop around the lake in his hometown over and over again. He is behind the wheel of his father's Chevy and it is the Fourth of July. The quaint town looks the same as it did before the war, but now it feels remote to Bowker. There is no one to talk to.
If someone were to listen, Bowker might tell about the time he almost won the Silver Star. It happened during monsoon season, when Alpha Company bivouacked in a swampy field along the Song Tra Bong. Old women from a nearby village warned the platoon that the field was bad news, but Lieutenant Jimmy Cross shooed them away. Later that night, the rain got worse, raising an awful stink. Eventually the men realized they were camped in the village toilet — "a goddamn shit field."
Suddenly the field explodes — mortar fire. There is nowhere to run, and after three rounds hit close by, Bowker hears Kiowa screaming. By the time Bowker reaches him, Kiowa is almost completely under the mud. Bowker grabs Kiowa by the boot and tries to pull him out, but can't. He lets go of the boot and Kiowa disappears under the waste and water.
Back home, Bowker stops at the A&W for a burger. After he's finished eating, he pushes the button on the intercom again and the voice on the other end asks what he really needs. He starts to tell about Kiowa and the shit field, but stops himself. On his twelfth trip around the lake, fireworks go off. Bowker parks the Chevy and wades into the lake. He puts his head under the water and opens his mouth to taste it.
Notes
"Tim O'Brien" reveals that "Speaking of Courage" was written at the suggestion of Norman Bowker. After reading "O'Brien's" first book, Bowker sent the author a letter describing how he felt like he had died in Vietnam, like he was still over there in the shit field with Kiowa. He suggests that "O'Brien" write a story about a veteran who spends his days driving around town with nowhere to go, who wants to talk about his experience but can't.
"O'Brien" recognizes that his writing has allowed him to work through memories that might have paralyzed him. By objectifying his experience, he's been able to separate himself from it. He decides to take Bowker's story suggestion and make it a chapter in the novel he's working on. Many of the details must be changed, however, and "O'Brien" immediately feels a sense of failure. He was afraid to tell the truth about the night of Kiowa's death.
After reading the story, Bowker sends "O'Brien" a bitter letter complaining about the missing details. Eight months later, he hangs himself. "O'Brien" revises "Speaking of Courage," restoring the central incident — the night in the shit field along the Song Tra Bong. He admits that for years he's avoided thinking about Kiowa's death and his own complicity in it, and concludes "Notes" by confessing that he was the one who let go of Kiowa's boot, not Bowker.
In the Field
On the morning after Kiowa's death, the platoon searches for his body. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross knows that he made a mistake by setting up in the shit field. In his head, he composes a letter to Kiowa's father taking the blame for his son's death. The soldiers tramping across the field look to Cross like golfers searching the rough for a lost ball.
Meanwhile, a young soldier stands apart from the rest of the platoon, searching through the muck on his own. He blames himself for Kiowa's death. They were best buddies, and last night had huddled together under a poncho, talking about their families and hometowns. The young soldier switched on his flashlight to show Kiowa a picture of his girlfriend and the field exploded. The young soldier heard Kiowa screaming. He crawled to over to Kiowa, but there were only bubbles where his head should have been. The young soldier grabbed Kiowa's boot and tried to pull him out of the muck, but had to let go.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Summary and Analysis of The Things They Carried by Worth Books. Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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