Lieutenant Jimmy Cross Analysis

Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, a soldier in The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, had extremely strong feelings for a girl back home, Martha. He carried her letters and her pictures with him in his rucksack because they gave him an escape from the terrors of the war and they helped him to remember he has a life after the war.

Cross’ feelings for Martha were made evident by the way he thought of her. The letters he received from her, “Were signed Love, Martha, but Lieutenant Cross understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant.” (O’Brien, 2) He was constantly reading these letters and imagining what Martha had been doing when she wrote them.

Although he knew Martha had boyfriends, Cross was always jealous of who she was with. “At night, sometimes, Lieutenant Cross wondered who had taken the picture, because he knew she had boyfriends, because he loved her so much, and because he could see the shadow of the picture taker spreading out against the brick wall.” (O’Brien, 4) He almost seems to become just as obsessed with the people she might be with, as he is with her. When she sent him the pebble she described it as representing the separate-but-together aspect of their relationship and then sent it to him as a token of her truest feelings for him. This made him doubt their

This meant he had dispose of Martha. So he burned her pictures and her letters. He kept her good luck pebble for a while, but eventually decided he had to dispose of it too. He considered shooting it in the slingshot carried by one of his men, dropping on the path and even swallowing the pebble. He wanted to keep his unit as safe as possible so he instilled a stricter discipline and confiscated the marijuana that had been carried by Lavender before his death. He even eventually accepted the blame for Lavender’s death, which helped him to lead his unit safely home after the