Printer On Fire

<p style=”text-align: right”>The Things They Carried final essay</p>

In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien tells the stories of a group of soldiers in the Vietnam War. Though they’re fiction, the stories are gripping and inform the reader what the war in Vietnam was like for those fighting in it. The soldiers are constantly fighting Viet Cong snipers and avoiding (or not avoiding, in several cases) booby traps. Through it all, it’s made clear that the ultimate enemy is not the Viet Cong, but the combined entities of death and Vietnam itself.

In the story The Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong, one of the medics brings his girlfriend, Mary Anne, to Vietnam, even though it “just isn’t done”. Unlike the soldiers, she gets used to Vietnam, and eventually goes and stays with the Green Berets. She learns to accept death and becomes like the Green Berets, her personality a twisted amalgamation of a Special Forces soldier and her own. Before she disappears, she’s seen wearing a necklace of tongues from dead Vietnamese. When one of the soldiers visits the Green Berets’ hut to try to talk her out of it, she tells him, “You’re in a place you don’t belong” (111), referring to both the hut (filled with gruesome war trophies) and Vietnam, to which she has adapted. She’s become like the Viet Cong, a person who’s adapted to the forest instead of burning their way through it with napalm and artillery, and she eventually disappears. She has become a part of Vietnam, like the mountains and trees, and entirely unlike the medics, who stick out like sore thumbs.

When the soldiers have to deal with dead bodies, whether of their own or the enemy, they do things to soften the impact of death: they tell stories about the corpses of friendly soldiers, and they shake hands with enemy corpses, somehow making them live again.
<blockquote>Mitchell Sanders smiled. “There it is, my man, this chopper gonna take you up high and cool. Gonna relax you. Gonna alter your whole perspective on this sorry, sorry shit.
We could almost see Ted Lavender’s dreamy blue eyes. We could almost hear him.
“Roger that,” somebody said. “I’m ready to fly.”
There was the sound of the wind, the sound of birds and the quiet afternoon, which was the world we were in.
That’s what a story does. The bodies are animated. You make the dead talk.</blockquote>
(231)
By doing this, the soldiers stave off death by remembering the dead as they were, alive. By saying “somebody said” instead of someone’s name, O’Brien almost gives life to Ted Lavender again.

The soldiers, though death is their enemy, have come to understand it. After a time, they’re able to sense when it’s about to happen:
<blockquote>At one point, I remember, Mitchell Sanders turned and looked at me, not quite nodding, as if to warn me about something, as if he already knew, then after a while he rolled up his yo-yo and moved away.</blockquote>
(70)
A moment later, Curt Lemon steps into the sunlight and onto a rigged artillery round, and is blown into a tree. One of the soldiers, while gathering up pieces of his remains, starts singing a song: “Lemon Tree”. It’s gruesome, but by almost pretending death doesn’t exist, or is something happy, or a way to avoid war, the soldiers successfully fight it and win.

War is a terrible thing, and no matter who the political enemy is, the real enemy is always death. Often, soldiers have nothing personal against other soldiers (as in the Christmas Truce in World War I, where English and German soldiers came out of their trenches, exchanged gifts, and played soccer), and the common enemy for both sides is always death.