The Vietnam War in The Things They Carried by Tim O´brien

The Vietnam War. A war that many Americans believed unfair and unnecessary. “Why am I being sent off to fight in a war I don’t know anything about? Will I ever return again?” Many draftees asked themselves these questions hoping to find comfort in the answers. But there was little to no hope, and they knew it. They were being drafted and they could do absolutely nothing about it, only hope that at the end they would be returning to the enlightened faces of their loved ones, something that not many Vietnam soldiers expected to ever see again. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, portrays his experience in the war along with his fellow squad members, in their fight for survival against the Vietcong. In The Things They Carried, each character carries a physical or emotional weight, whether it be a memory, story, or object, to comfort them and guide them in their struggle to find hope during the war.
Tim O’Brien, the author, carries undoubtedly the most important weight of any of the squad members. He carries first hand experience of the times leading up to the war, as well as the brutalities of war, and the challenging life for soldiers after it ended. He shares his experience, allowing us to see a different side to war that we are not usually exposed to through textbooks and the media. Through him, we learn about the weights carried by the other soldiers and their importance. Early on in the story, O’Brien shares with us a time when he almost fled to Canada to prevent himself from being drafted. He carries the memories of a man who was once unsure of war, but came to become not only a soldier, but a friend to the other soldiers who fought alongside him. He is able to keep them alive through his stories and memories, which is an...

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...t them while they fight the brutal war that was Vietnam. Tim O’Brien, the narrator, carries the most important of all the objects, his ability to tell stories and recall on his memories from the war, which he uses not only to teach us about the war from a first person view, but also to help keep the dead alive. While other characters weights such as Jimmy Cross’s and Mitchell Sanders’s might not be as crucial to the story, they are important in their own way. Cross carries memories of his love Martha, which works with and against him during war, while Sanders carries the entire weight of the squad through his loyalty and entertainment. The Things They Carried doesn’t just teach us a story of war, but it teaches us a story of the men at war. We learn that all soldiers at war carry something crucial to either their survival or the survival of the people around them.