Weighed Down: "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien

Weighed Down

"First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey" (667). So begins Tim O'Brien's short story "The Things They Carried." The author will go on to list all the items carried by these soldiers, including helmets, canteens and ammunition, but it is no mistake that he starts the list with the relatively light burden of love letters from home. The letters are symbolic of another burden, which is a heavy one indeed. Every member of the company carries physical baggage which they can drop along the roadside, but the equally heavy emotional baggage, abstract, can never be taken off.

One thing immediately noticeable about this story is that it does not follow a traditional narrative form; there is, in fact, very little action in the story. Ted Lavender is dead before the story begins, and readers, though told what Jimmy Cross plans to do, never see him do it. The readers is given an occasional glimpse into the action, or allowed to listen in on a conversation, but would likely have difficulty in saying at what point he or she began listening to the story. This is because O'Brien's emphasis is not on the tale itself, but on the setting; not on what happens, but on what is. Through flashbacks and commentary, readers are given the true meaning of the story: longing, heartache, exile. O'Brien has said that his so-called war stories are, really, "never about war" (qtd. in Chen 79). The narrative is called "The Things They Carried" because that is what it's about: it's about the heat of Vietnam, the devastation of losing a friend, the pain of unrequited love.

The story is divided into several sections, and nearly every one of them starts by describing something carried by the platoon. "The things they carried were largely determined by necessity -- What they carried was partly a function of rank -- What they carried varied by mission -- " and so on (O'Brien 669-671). The action of the story, Lavender's death and what followed it, is given in fragments, mixed in with lists of all the external and internal burdens of the men. "Directing readers beyond the stories to the narrative gaps within and between them, O'Brien renders the indescribable experiences of '˜Vietnam' as moment one may gesture to but never fully represent" (Chen 79). The story is less important than the experience. If readers can experience Vietnam, can feel the fear and the pain, can put themselves in the shoes of Jimmy Cross, then the actual events of the story are of secondary importance; almost irrelevant.

Much of the gear carried by the soldiers is standard equipment: guns, flak jackets, canned food, ponchos, helmets. These items cannot be dispensed of, because they are necessities to stay alive. Every pound, every ounce of weight serves as a reminder that the soldier can be killed at any time.

They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing '" these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained -- (O'Brien 677).

Every one of the men is afraid of death. They are supplied with objects that will supposedly keep them safe. In America they would never have to carry all these objects, but in Vietnam, each object is a safeguard against death. And as seen in the story of Ted Lavender, these painstaking precautions are sometimes no help at all.

The soldiers carry many things in order to stay alive, but where their loads differ is in smaller items: personal belongings, individual to each man and representative of some larger intangible. "Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers" (O'Brien 668). Certainly his tranquilizers have practical uses, but to anyone else they would mean nothing. To Ted Lavender alone they hold the promise of serenity: the absence of fear. Kiowa, a Native American, carried "an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father" as well as "his grandfather's old hunting hatchet" (668). Neither of these items is essential to jungle survival, yet he carries them as remembrances of faith and tradition; they have additional meaning in that they belonged to family members, now lost. Robin Silbergleid wrote last year that O'Brien

uses lists of the objects [carried] by the soldiers and their exact weight in order to define the '˜real' parameters of Vietnam -- the literal heaviness of these objects stands in metaphorically for the weight of the war, an enormous emotional burden O'Brien's narrator shares with the reader (134).

It is not only the weight of war, though, that the soldiers are forced to carry. There is weight from home, weight from the past, weight from knowing what can never be. Jimmy Cross is a man who cannot be viewed primarily as a soldier. He is a lonely kid, fearful of the war but also of life itself. Even without the draft, even without Vietnam, he never could have had what he wanted.

It is no coincidence that the protagonist of "The Things They Carried" shares his initials with Jesus Christ, or that his last name, Cross, brings to mind an item carried by Jesus 2000 years ago. Christ, too, carried heavy physical and emotional baggage. He had the responsibility of all humanity on Him, but Jimmy Cross, whose focus should also be on those he's responsible for, is at first distracted from the mission by his love for Martha. Tina Chen writes that "Cross's imaginative returns home, to Martha and the Jersey shoreline, to America -- are pitifully inadequate in the face of the ambiguous and dangerous realities of combat duty in Vietnam" (85). His daydreams take him away from the task at hand. Ted Lavender dies because Jimmy Cross is not paying attention; he is thinking about Martha.

He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war -- Later, when it was full dark, he sat at the bottom of his foxhole and wept (675).

John 11:35, the shortest verse in the Bible says that "Jesus wept" (King James). Jesus wept for his dead friend, Lazarus; now Cross weeps for the fallen Lavender. It is one more thing the Lieutenant will have to carry "like a stone in his stomach" (675).

The object in this story which is given the most attention is perhaps the smallest, lightest object of them all; but its significance is great and its burden a heavy one. It is a pebble, sent to Jimmy Cross from the states, from Martha (O'Brien 671). To the lieutenant, the pebble symbolizes Martha, who in turn symbolizes something more. His love for Martha is highly idealized and perhaps not entirely realistic. In looking over photographs of her, he "thought of new things he should have done" (669). Sometimes he would sit up "and watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin" (668). He wonders about her college major, he remembers their only kiss, but there is never any returned love; his obsession is completely one-sided. It has been suggested that Cross' feelings for Martha are truly a desire to return home, to return to a simple time, to peace: "Martha becomes, for Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, the embodiment of America as home and haven" (Chen 89). This reading is not much of a stretch when one considers the boyish way in which he fantasizes about her. After all, as Cross confesses to himself, "he was just a kid at war, in love. He was twenty-four years old. He couldn't help it" (673). Martha seems to be uninterested in a romantic relationship with Jimmy Cross, but Cross keeps hoping and wishing. As far as he is concerned, America and Martha are one and the same: to return home is to return to his love, and, essentially, to live happily ever after. Writes Chen,

Mesmerized by fantasies of Martha while partially cognizant of his self-willed delusions about her requiting his love, Lieutenant Cross cultivates within himself an exilic consciousness that continually returns to the idea and image of home as it is embodied in Martha (85).

Martha, then, has become the very embodiment of "home" for Jimmy Cross. The story mentions nothing else from Cross' past, nothing else for him to go back to, but Martha alone. And as he stands daydreaming about his love, his friend Ted Lavender is shot in the head (O'Brien 673).

It is Lavender's death that brings Jimmy Cross to reality, permanently. He is sobered in knowing that he could have prevented it. He rebukes himself for his fantasies, realizing that Martha "did not love him and never would" (675). His pebble, which has represented everything he longs for, he vows to throw away (679-680); it is no use to him here in Vietnam. Martha is no use to him. "He hated her," reads one of the most painful lines in the story. "Yes, he did. Love, too, but it was a hard, hating kind of love" (O'Brien 679). The burden of Lavender's death is one that Cross will not be able to forget, will not allow himself to forget. The weight of guilt is something he must carry along with everything else. The intangible heaviness of Lavender's death is illustrated by his physical weight as the soldiers carry him to a helicopter. Consider the lines from O'Brien:

Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried 34 rounds when he was shot and killed outside Than Khe, and he went down under an exceptional burden, more than 20 pounds of ammunition, plus the flak jacket and helmet and rations and water and toilet paper and tranquilizers and all the rest, plus the unweighed fear. He was dead weight -- Then they wrapped Lavender in his poncho. They carried him out to a dry paddy -- When the dustoff arrived, they carried Lavender aboard (670).

Carrying the body, though, will only be the beginning for Jimmy Cross and his men. They will continue to carry Lavender in their hearts and minds, and the memory of his death will continue to weigh them down.

Through the episode of Lavender's death, Cross has traded one burden for another. He has given up Martha, only to take up the yoke of command. "He would accept the blame for what had happened to Ted Lavender," O'Brien says (680). At the end of the story, Jimmy Cross takes up the same burden as Jesus Christ: the burden of responsibility. Unlike his biblical counterpart, Cross will not be kind or forgiving, but he remembers "that his obligation was not to be loved but to lead" (O'Brien 680). Although he has sworn to give up his love for Martha, Jimmy Cross will never be free of emotional weight. Tim O'Brien was not speaking merely in a literal sense when he said that "for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry" (675).

Perhaps the most difficult part of the war was the feeling of isolation. When Jimmy Cross is weeping for his fallen comrade, he weeps also for Martha, "because she belonged to a different world" (O'Brien 675). She belongs to the world of college and volleyball and midterm exams; to the idealized world that Cross used to dream about, but now holds in contempt. He remembers that in all of her letters to him Martha had never talked about the war: "She wasn't involved" (O'Brien 679). To Lieutenant Cross, Vietnam is the only realty. Martha's detachment from the war is seen as a detachment from Cross. They do not belong together. Even upon returning home to the states, some veterans cannot fit back in with their old friends. In a 1991 interview, Tim O'Brien told about a man he had known in Vietnam, who had recently returned to America. "He was talking to me in his letters about how he just couldn't adjust to coming home. It wasn't bad memories; it was that he couldn't talk to anybody about it" (qtd. in Naparsteck 7). The greatest trauma is not what has been seen or done, but the soldier's fear that no one will ever relate, no one will ever understand.

Jimmy Cross is an ordinary man placed in an extraordinary position and, like anyone else, he falls short. He is torn between his love for Martha and his duty to his men, he is haunted by the potential and the realized deaths of his friends. Even if he lives to get home to America, it may never be the same as what he once knew. The difficulty is not only in staying alive, but in staying sane. As Tina Chen said, "The Things They Carried" is a story with characters that must not only live through Vietnam, but with it (80).

Works Cited

Chen, Tina. "Unraveling the Deeper Meaning: Exile and the Embodied Poetics of displacement

in Tim O'Brien's '˜The Things They Carried'" in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 39, No. 1.

Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.

King James Bible. Web. Accessed 1 May 2010. Biblegateway.com.

Naparsteck, Martin and Tim O'Brien. "An Interview with Tim O'Brien" in Contemporary

Literature , Vol. 32, No. 1. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

O'Brien, Tim. "The Things They Carried" in X. J. Kennedy, Dana Gioia. Literature: An

Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ninth ed. New York: Pearson Longman,

2005.

Silbergleid, Robin. "Making Things Present: Tim O'Brien's Autobiographical Metafiction" in

Contemporary Literature , Vol. 50, No. 1. Michigan: Michigan State University, 2009.