Weights and Measures: A Close Reading of Tim O’Brien’s "The Things They Carried"
The Vietnam War is commonly regarded as one of America’s most disastrous and misguided interventions. The decision to engage in what would become a twenty-year conflict led to the physical and psychological mutilation of thousands of soldiers. Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” pulls us into this world of confusion, uncertainty, and bloodshed as a group of grunts trek through the dense forests of central Vietnam, bracing themselves for the onslaught of an unseen enemy. We feel the full force of this tension as the author lists all of the things that they carried, the heaviness nearly crushing us as we read, “They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe of the terrible power of the things they carried” (7). Beyond the external enemy and the heavy weaponry, the soldiers struggle against the internal demons that weigh them down and shape their worldview. O’Brien emotionally arrests the reader by continuously repeating words, creatively using “carry”, and anchoring the narrative around a central event to reinforce that fear is the heaviest weight of all to bear.
The near-ritualistic repetition of words throughout the telling intimately connects the reader to the characters as their inner turmoil are exposed. We see the war primarily through Jimmy Cross’s eyes, but he is distracted by his feelings for Marta, his sweetheart back home. He muses, “She was a virgin, he was almost sure” (1), but then “he would get up and move among his men, checking the perimeter, then at full dark he would return...and wonder if Martha was a virgin” (2). His beloved Martha and the repetitive references to her virginity become a prevailing representation of his fear of love’s entanglements: vulnerability, jealousy, and rejection. This fear distracts him from fulfilling his main responsibility as Lieutenant: protecting his men. When Ted Lavender is shot in the head (after relieving himself in the nearby forest), Jimmy weeps not for Lavender, but for Martha, because she was “a poet and a virgin and uninvolved” (16) in the grim circumstances that surround him. In an act of guilt-filled self-loathing and anger, Jimmy burns Martha’s pictures and letters, claiming, “She wasn’t involved...Virginity was no longer an issue. He hated her” (23). By using virginity as a recurring topic, O’Brien firmly roots the reader in the protagonist’s debilitating fear of giving and receiving love.
After the reader becomes privy to the Lieutenant’s fears, the group’s shared anxieties evolve into a dual focal point. O’Brien steadily moves from listing the physical things they carried to listing the psychological things they carried. He stretches and bends the word “carry” in its multiple uses, creating a vivid picture of both the practicalities of war and the complexities of masculinity. The reader discovers that “most of them...carried the standard M-16 gas-operated assault rifle. The weapon weighed 7.5 pounds unloaded, 8.2 pounds with its full 20-round magazine...the riflemen carried anywhere from 12-20 magazines...adding another 8.4 pounds at minimum” (5). O’Brien pointedly weighs many of the physical items that he lists throughout the narrative. It is as though the rifle and magazines are on our shoulders, weighing us down as we march onward. O’Brien shows that one measure of a man appears to be the extent to which he can protect himself physically. The weaponry vividly represents the soldiers’ masculinity and their thinly veiled attempt to present themselves as fearless.
Though the figurative things the men carried cannot be measured, the reader feels the overwhelming load nonetheless as they “carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die...They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained...They carried the soldier’s greatest fear...the fear of blushing” (20). O’Brien demonstrates that another measure of a man is the extent to which he can protect himself emotionally. It is this unbearable yet “unweighed fear” (6) of facing their own emotions and of exposing their weaknesses to each other that keeps their freedom out of reach. The soldiers take great measures to prove that they are unaffected by the war: “They [kick] corpses. They cut off thumbs” (19). It is this false display of light nonchalance that ironically overburdens them. When Jimmy dreams of “walking barefoot along the Jersey shore, with Martha, carrying nothing” (8) the imagery seizes the reader because the absence of weight is a rare occurrence within the telling. This coveted weightlessness is reintroduced near the end of the narrative. The soldiers can barely conceal their jealousy of those lucky enough to leave combat due to injuries. They imagine the “unencumbered sensation, just riding the light waves...over the mountains and oceans...beyond the sun and through the vast, silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything weighed exactly nothing” (22). Again, we feel the powerful absence of weight. The earthly reality of carrying everything shifts poetically to the spiritual ecstasy of being carried away ourselves. O’Brien demonstrates that to rid ourselves of fear is to carry nothing at all.
The narrative orbits principally around Lavender’s death, a choice that structurally connects the telling around a fixed point in time and emotionally connects the reader to the soldiers’ collective plight. They all fear death, and the consistency with which his death is mentioned puts that fear in the forefront of the reader’s mind. O’Brien intentionally introduces Lavender as the man “who was scared [and] carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April” (2). This introduction, along with the scene of Lavender’s eventual demise, lend incredible symbolical significance to the telling. As the chief representation of fear, Lavender is the one who dies. Fear not only weighs you down, but it kills you; whether physically or mentally. Of the 26 times that Lavender is mentioned in the narrative, almost every association is with his death. By the time the reader finds out that “Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried the starlight scope, which weighed 6.3 pounds with its aluminum carrying case” (9) his death has been mentioned five times. There is a near hypnotic effect as the fear of death is forced onto the reader’s mind as though we too are submerged in the chaos of war.
The reader becomes even more anchored and entrenched as O’Brien consistently and repeatedly uses “until” and “when” to connect Lavender’s death to the rest of the telling. The anticipation is unbearable; the tension builds exponentially. Finally, “Ted Lavender [is] shot in the head on his way back from peeing. He [lays] with his mouth open. The teeth [are] broken. There [is] a swollen black bruise under his eye. The cheekbone [is] gone. Oh shit, Rat Riley [says], the guy’s dead. The guy’s dead, he [keeps] saying, which [seems] profound – the guy’s dead. I mean really” (12). O’Brien masterfully combines his authorial choice of repetition and various plays on the meaning of “carry” as the soldiers individually grapple with what has happened. Rat Riley repeats “dead” three times. Kiowa chillingly muses that “Boom-down, and you were dead, never partly dead” (23). He repeats “Boom. Down” six times throughout the narrative. We finally feel the rhythmic hypnosis of fear manifested in the death of Ted Lavender. Lieutenant Cross takes this tragedy personally. Fearing that more of his men will end up dead, he “[crouches] at the bottom of his foxhole and [burns] Martha’s letters. Then he [burns] the two photographs” (22). It is at this point in the telling that he decides to stop carrying Marta in his heart and start carrying a greater sense of responsibility for his men. He soon realizes that “It [is] very sad…The things men [carry] inside. The things men [do] or [feel] they [have] to do” (24). The reader senses that Lieutenant Cross is simultaneously referring to men in general, to his soldiers, and to himself. O’Brien brilliantly illustrates fear as a prison of our own making and of our own design.
“The Things They Carried” reaches deep into the soldier psyche and therein uncovers emotional complexities that all can relate to. As the telling progresses, the focus shifts slowly from the tangible burdens to the intangible burdens. The reader discovers that beneath the pocket-knives, grenades, and pistols runs a deeper well of fear: of giving and receiving love, of vulnerability with each other, and of accepting our own limitations. Cross makes the chilling assertion, “They all carried ghosts” (9). However, these ghosts are not only in the form of haunted memories, of fallen comrades, and of absent lovers, but most importantly, the soldiers are the ghosts themselves. The reader understands that to fear death is to reject life and to live in its shadow. Tim O’Brien beautifully reveals that it is not the fear of dying that weighs us down, but the debilitating fear of being truly alive.
Works Cited
O'Brien, Tim. “The Things They Carried.” The Things They Carried. Mariner Books, 2009,
https://www.boyertownasd.org/cms/lib/PA01916192/Centricity/Domain/777/TTTC Full
Text mariner.pdf.
Photo Credit: Hiep Tong @tvhiep
