There was no shortage of complaining when my English teacher assigned chapters one through three of The Things They Carried for the next class during my junior year of high school.
As I was “meaningfully” making notes in the book five minutes before class began (as far as my teacher was concerned, I had read the whole damn thing the night before), I realized the book was actually interesting. Turns out I actually wanted to read it. This was no Jane Eyre or other sappy classic. This was actually a decent book.
Tim O’Brien (the author and one of the characters) takes us through stories inspired by his and the rest of his platoon’s tour, in Vietnam. It acts as an incredible narrative on the human soul and mind, as seen and felt through the eyes of this platoon brought into the war by the draft.
The book’s title refers to the things that the soldiers had to carry with them while in the war zone. It talks about the obvious, tangible objects and the intangible ones too. The book taught me that it’s these intangible things that often weigh the most. A soldier can take off his pack, but it is the intangible weight of grief, solitude or memory that can never be set down.
This book is an outlet for all of the accumulated intangible weight, and O’Brien needs us to understand in order to alleviate some of that weight.
There is a saying that, “the only way to help a bad mood is to spread it.” In this book, the only thing that helped the soldiers not feel so alone in dealing with their emotions- good or bad-was to spread them.
War isn’t even the main point.
“Nobody ever listens,” O’Brien tells us. When a soldier is telling a war story, I learned from the book, it is rarely actually about war, but is rather about the underlying truths to be learned. The problem is, as an audience, war is all we get out of it.
O’Brien teaches us how to listen to these stories. He needs us to understand the truth. He needs us to experience that reality right now, that way we can understand what soldiers during the Vietnam War must have experienced. He needs us to, “feel the truth by the raw force of feeling,” a feat which he accomplishes spectacularly.
“Absolute occurrence is irrelevant,” O’Brien says in the book. “A thing may happen and be a total lie; another might not happen and be truer than the truth.”
He tells many of these, “true stories that never happened.” But, why?
He does this because that is the only way we, who have not been to war, will be able to experience the emotion of being in a war zone.
His poetic words played tricks on my na’ve mind. Before I realized it, I was laughing when the soldiers laughed, crying when they cried and feeling emotions right along with them. I was able to dissect the real meanings. I was finally able to listen.
This book didn’t end on the last page. It won’t end until I have made sense of and found the truths in each story. Until then, I will carry them-with me.
