There is a local angle for Minnesotans as the author, Tim O'Brien, was born in Austin, Minnesota, in 1946—lots of Americans born in 1946—before the family moved, when he was 10, to Worthington, in the southwest corner of the state, where he graduated from high school in 1964. He then attended Macalester College in St. Paul: honor student, an editor of the college newspaper, president of his class. He graduated from Macalester in the spring of 1968 and planned on continuing his education at Harvard, but the Vietnam War was escalating—it was the year of the Tet Offensive—and that summer his draft notice appeared in the mailbox in Worthington. Though he was opposed to the war, as evidenced by signed editorials in the Macalester student newspaper, he reported as directed in the notice and served two years as a US Army grunt in Vietnam. This was plainly the defining experience of his life. His war memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone (Box Me Up and Ship Me Home), was published in 1973 and was followed, in 1978, by the Vietnam War novel Going After Cacciato, which won the National Book Award. His third book, The Things They Carried, published in 1990, is a collection of linked stories, some of which seem more like memoir: all are narrated by a Vietnam veteran who is now a writer. The story called "The Things They Carried" opens the book and gives the collection its title.
There is a technique of literature called the catalogue, in which names or objects are compiled in a long list. To my knowledge, the great original is from the Iliad, the section in Book II where Homer gives the names of all the ships, together with the names of the leaders and their soldiers and the districts from whence they came, that sailed against Troy. "The Things They Carried," a war story some three millenia hence, employs the same technique, but the catalogue is made of—"the things they carried," that is, the items that the grunts "humped" across Vietnam on their expeditionary missions. It begins:
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.
And we learn, as the paragraph proceeds, that Martha is an English major, that she loved the poetic works of Geoffrey Chaucer, that her letters were "chatty" but "elusive on the subject of love," and that they weighed ten ounces. One expects events in a war story but this one is made mostly of this elaborate catalogue of the things the men carried. The narrator moves on from Lieutenant Cross to other members of the platoon and we are filled in, one by one, on the things that this man and that one carried. Of course, many items were carried by all, or most, of the soldiers:
P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together, these items weighed between 15 and 20 pounds, depending upon a man's habits or rate of metabolism. Henry Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations; he was especially fond of canned peaches in heavy syrup over pound cake. Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-sized bars of soap he'd stolen on R&R in Sydney, Australia.
And on and on it goes. What can be said about it? The lieutenant's name, Jimmy Cross, calls attention to itself: Christ figure? suffering servant? One may take him to be the leader of a band of pilgrims on a journey, like in The Canterbury Tales, whose author is name-called in the first paragraph. Cross's girlfriend Martha, the English major, might point out that in the General Prologue Chaucer methodically moves through the various pilgrims, describing each one briefly, thereby achieving a kind of miniature portrait that is then deepened in the tales that are told along the way to Canterbury. "The Things They Carried," the first story in The Things They Carried, may function in a similar way.
Considered apart from the other stories, however, the accumulation of items carried has an incantatory force. One receives an overwhelming sense of burdens. The men are burdened, materially but also immaterially. The flat naming of items permits the narrator to bury his strong emotion about his experience beneath the mass of all the carefully observed and collated stuff. He pretends to be completely objective. He's just giving a list. But it's possible to detect a certain attitude toward the stuff and, by association, toward the war. Never a mention of anything a dignitary might say on Memorial Day. Not a laminated copy of the Gettysburg Address. Instead, can openers, cigarettes, Kool-Aid &c. Once, the narrator allows something like an editorial opinion to intrude on the catalogue:
If a mission seemed especially hazardous, or if it involved a place they knew to be bad, they carried everything they could. In certain heavily mined AOs [areas of operation], where the land was dense with Toe Toppers and Bouncing Betties, they took turns humping a 28-pound mine detector. With its headphones and big sensing plate, the equipment was a stress on the lower back and shoulders, awkward to handle, often useless because of the shrapnel in the earth, but they carried it anyway, partly for safety, partly for the illusion of safety.
By describing this technique of the catalogue, I think I've accounted for most of the words in the story. But there is one incident, one event. All this business with the catalogue is like the backdrop for the thing that happens. One of the soldiers in the platoon, Ted Lavender, is killed. We've seen that the story doesn't begin with him—it begins with Lieutenant Cross. Lavender isn't the last soldier mentioned, either. He's just in the mix, as it were. He receives his first mention in the sentence following the one about Jensen's R&R in Sydney, Australia:
Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April.
This is hardly what literature teachers call "foreshadowing," right? Just told, flat out, that he got shot in the head. Wasn't for nothing that he was scared. The next sentence concerns how they all carried 5-pound steel helmets. So moving on. Next mention of Lavender:
Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity.
One more item in the catalogue: premium dope. Lavender next comes up in connection with yet another item:
Because the nights were cold, and because the monsoons were wet, each carried a green plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat or groundsheet or makeshift tent. With its quilted liner, the poncho weighed almost two pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that carried him away.
This is just a couple of pages into the story, which continues in the same manner, but with details of Lavender's death occasionally distilled in the catalogue. The killing occurs when the platoon is on a mission to blow up enemy tunnels, an operation that affords the narrator the opportunity to describe the explosives and detonators—more things that have to be carried. For some reason, the tunnels can't just be blown: someone has to descend into them and investigate. Lots are drawn for this task. A soldier named Strunk loses. He disappears into the tunnel and is gone for what seems too long. Lavender moves away from the group to pee. Strunk emerges, and the relieved joking is interrupted by the sound of the sniper shot that kills Lavender as he heads back to the group. His wound is described with the same clinical detachment that the narrator devotes to the specs of the carried things. Waiting for the helicopter that will take Lavender's body away, the soldiers smoke the dead man's dope. One jokes that the moral of the event relates to the dangers of drug use (as they smoke up Lavender's unused stock). Kiowa, the devout Baptist who carried an illustrated New Testament, is obsessed with the way Lavender crumbled unceremoniously, no somersaults or picturesque effects like in the movies. Something about the everyday haphazardness of it strikes him as "unchristian." Lieutenant Cross blames himself for allowing reveries about Martha to interfere with the strict imposition of safety protocols and so burns her pictures and letters. The platoon burns to the ground the nearest Vietnamese village and an animal is cruelly tortured. I'm relating all this together but in the story it's conveyed in separate snapshots, the killing of Lavender and its effect on the rest of the platoon acting as a leitmotiv that at intervals interrupts the unfurling of the list of things that had to be carried. The list is unending, the weight of obscene experience infinite:
They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds.
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