Betrayal In The Things They Carried

We are all killers, through our mutual silence we try to avoid the blame and ignore the destruction we cause. In Tim O’ Brien’s The Things they Carried the reader is emerged in the setting of Vietnam through the Alpha Company, a platoon of soldiers including O’Brien himself. Throughout the novel Tim O’Brien is plagued by his experiences in Vietnam yet his portrayal of others reveals a sense of betrayal towards the entire world which causes the reader to rethink their own view of war.

When we are first getting introduced to O’Brien we see this constant thought of double standards and cliches in American culture. One way he addresses his issue with American war stories is when he states “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done.” (O’Brien, pg.65) As we are introduced to each character in the novel we are forced to see their shortcomings beyond the title of bravery we grant them. This ideas leads to questioning how we choose to romanticize war stories and how this

For example, when Norman Bowker returns to his hometown he explains that “ The town could not talk, and would not listen… It had no memory, therefore no guilt. The taxes got paid and the votes got counted… It was a brisk, polite town. It did not know shit about shit, and did not care to know.”(137) Not many people are willing to listen to unscripted Vietnam stories because they are saddening and destructive to our ideals of America’s standpoint. It is simple to imagine the destruction of war but not so easy to pinpoint the cause of said destruction, when we are forced to accept the blame we run away. Scared of experiencing the ‘shit’ that we inadvertently