Physical vs. Emotional

Although I had already read The Things They Carried, the first chapter blew me away yet again. Reading the list of what the men carry gave me a new perspective on how to view what everyone carries with each step they take. It is not only the clothes on our body and the books in our backpack, but the gravity on our shoulders and the entirety of our life as well-literally and figuratively. We carry our body, our internal knowledge and our past. In my opinion, most of what people carry is internal rather than external. This is portrayed by how the men walk. O’Brien writes, “In its intransitive form, to hump meant to walk, or to march, but it implied burdens far beyond the intransitive,” (3). What is truly weighing the men down is their fear of war, fear of being a coward, responsibility of the lives of men in their platoon and the fear of dying. The emotional baggage is weighing them down more than the physical.

What struck me most in the portion where O’Brien discusses the weapons that the men carry was the last sentence: “They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried,” (7). What is frightening about a weapon is not its name, or size, or color or weight, but rather the damage that it can cause. Similarly, it is not the pictures of Martha that present an issue, but Cross’ love for her that he expresses by carrying the photos and distracts him at a pivotal moment. The implications of the facts, I think, is what O’Brien tries to highlight in these passages and in the book overall. What the men carry is important because of what those objects represent to their owner and to each other. Likewise, the stories that O’Brien tells are important for what they show about humanity and war, not the actuality of the events. In class we discussed “emotional truth” and “actual truth.” The beauty of the novel is that O’Brien captivates the reader and makes him believe the actual truth, but the point in doing so is to capture the emotional truth. Regardless of what truly happened to O’Brien, the emotions that he displays through his work are real.