Step 50: The Things They Carried

Woe...my 50th Blog!!

The Things They Carried: Tim O'Brien

I first encountered this book as a freshman in college in my English 101 class. I remember the teacher, Mr. Kula, he had a lovely red tint to his hair. He was young. He loved creative writing. He assigned some really great stuff for an intro to English class, most of which was made up by students only taking the class for the required credit, not because they had any interest in the subject. He assigned one of the chapters from this book called, ‘How to Tell a True War Story.’


I still have saved the short essay that I wrote on the piece and recall how wonderful I felt about the idea that “story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” It’s the feeling, the way you have stored it in your mind that really matters, not the exact what happened truth of a story.


My sister and I have often discussed this subject of ‘truth’ as we both have a similar collection of stories from our past and yet details of the exact truth of it differ extremely. Whose version it right? I guess both of them, because underplayed or over exaggerated they are the way we experienced them through who we are, our own psychology, our own sense of the world.

Anyways, this book in its entirety or read in small excerpts is excellent. Of course those of us who haven’t lived through war can never truly know anything about it, but this book conveys some powerful emotions of that time (the Vietnam War) and I think anyone who reads this can gain valuable lessons from it, as well as laughter, tears, joy, and every other fearful emotion.


The Things They Carried:
Tim O’Brian

*First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there.

*To carry something was to hump it, as when Lieutenant Jimmy Cross humped his love for Martha up the hills and through the swamps. In its intransitive form, to hump meant to walk, or to march, but it implied burdens far beyond the intransitive.

*Almost everyone humped photographs. In his walled Lieutenant Cross carried two photographs of Martha. Whenever he looked at the photographs, he thought of the things he should’ve done.

*They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.

*She had found the pebble on the Jersey shoreline, precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated. It was this separate-but-together quality that had inspired her to pick up the pebble and carry it.

*She was a poet, with the poet’s sensibilities, and her feet would be brown and bare, the toenails unpainted, the eyes chilly and somber like the ocean in March.

*Whatever was down there—the tunnel walls squeezing in—a swallowed-up feeling—and how you found yourself worrying about odd things: Do rats carry rabies? Would your buddies hear you if you screamed? Imagination was a killer.

*He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely, just alone—riding her bike or sitting off by herself—even dancing, she danced alone—and it was the aloneness that filled him with love.

*They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworms and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself—Vietnam, the place, the soil—a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.

*They carried it all on their backs and shoulders—and 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.

*They were actors. When someone died, it wasn’t quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had their lines mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and because they called it by other names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of death itself. They kicked corpses. They cut off thumbs, they talked grunt lingo.

*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, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor.

*He hated her. Love, too, but it was a hard, hating kind of love.

*It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.

*There was something restful about checkers, something orderly and reassuring. There were red checkers and black checkers. They playing field was laid out in a strict grid, no tunnels or mountains or jungles. You knew where you stood. You knew the score. The pieces were out on the board, the enemy was visible, you could watch the tactics unfolding into larger strategies. There was a winner and a loser. There were rules.

*Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

*I was twenty-one years old when I was drafted to fight a war I hated. Young, yes, and politically naïve, but even so the American war in Vietnam seemed to me wrong. Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.

*The only certainty that summer was moral confusion. It was my view then, and still is, that you don’t make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.

*The afternoon was sunny and cold. A stiff breeze came in from the north, and I remember how the little fourteen-foot boat made sharp rocking motions as we pushed of from the dock. The current was fast. All around us, there was a vastness to the world, an unpeopled rawness, just the trees and the sky and the water reaching out toward nowhere. The air had the brittle scent of October.

*I sat in the bow of the boat and cried. It was loud now. Loud, hard crying. Elroy Berdahl remained quiet. He kept fishing. He worked his line with the tips of his fingers, patiently, squinting out at his red and white bobber on the Rainy River. His eyes were flat and impassive. He didn’t speak. He was simply there, like the river and the late-summer sun. And yet by his presence, his mute watchfulness, he made it real. He was the true audience. He was a witness, like God, or like the gods, who look on in absolute silence as we live our lives, as we make our choices or fail to make them.

*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 men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

*He couldn’t stop bragging. He had an opinion of himself, I think, that was too high for his own good. Or maybe it was the reverse. Maybe it was a low opinion that he kept trying to erase.

*Rat had a reputation for exaggeration and overstatement, a compulsion to rev up the facts, and for most of us it was normal procedure to discount sixty or seventy percent of anything he had to say. If Rat told you, for example, that he’d slept with four girls one night, you could figure it was about a girl and a half. For Rat, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you’d find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.

*Whenever he told a story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion. It was a bad habit, Mitchell Sanders said, because all that matters is the raw material, the stuff itself, and you can’t clutter it up with your own half-baked commentary. That just breaks the spell. It destroys the magic. What you have to do, Sanders said, is trust your own story. Get the hell out of the way and let it tell itself.

*Sometimes I want to eat this place. The whole country—the dirt, the death—I just want to swallow it and have it there inside me. That’s how I feel. It’s like this appetite. I get scared sometimes—lots of times—but it’s not bad. You know? I feel close to myself. When I’m out there at night, I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and my fingernails, everything, it’s like I’m full of electricity and I’m glowing in the dark—I’m on fire almost—I’m burning away into nothing—but it doesn’t matter because I know exactly who I am.

*He was a good man. In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of food but always plodding along, always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor. Like his country, too, he was drawn toward sentimentality.

*The town could not talk and would not listen. “How’d you like to hear about the war?” he might have asked, but the place could only blink and shrug. It had no memory, therefore no guilt. The taxes got paid and the votes got counted and the agencies of government did their work briskly and politely. It was a brisk, polite town. It did no know shit about shit, and did not care to know.

*I did not look on my work as therapy, and still don’t. Yet it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others.

*But listen. Even that story was made up. I just want you to feel what I felt. I want you know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

*There were birds and butterflies, the soft rustlings of rural-anywhere. Below, in the earth, the relics of our presence were no doubt still there, the canteens and bandoliers and mess kits. This little field, I thought, had swallowed so much. My best friend. My pride. My belief in myself as a man of some small dignity and courage. Still, it was hard to find any real emotion after all those years. It simply wasn’t there. After that long night in the rain, I’d seemed to grow cold inside, all the illusions gone, all the old ambitions and hopes for myself sucked away into the mud. Over the years, that coldness had never entirely disappeared. There were times in my life when I couldn’t feel much, not sadness or pity or passion, and somehow I blamed this place for what I had become, and I blamed it for taking away the person I had once been.

*When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends.

*I hated him for making me stop hating him.

*The darkness squeezes you inside yourself, you get cut off from the outside world, the imagination takes over. That’s basic psychology. The fear factor gets multiplied as you sit there hour after hour, nobody to talk to, nothing to do but stare into the big black hole at the center of your own sorry soul. The hours go by and you lose your gyroscope; your mind starts to roam. You think about dark closets, madmen, murderers under the bed, all those childhood fears. You blink and shake your head. Bullshit, you tell yourself. But then you remember all the guys who died.

*We were both nine then, but we were in love. And it was real. I know for a fact that what we felt for each other was as deep and rich as love can ever get. It had all the shading and complexities of mature adult love, and maybe more, because there were not yet words for it, and because it was not yet fixed to comparisons or chronologies or the ways by which adults measure such things.

*The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then be dreaming along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.