As a soldier, the equipment you carry into any conflict has two purposes. One purpose is to kill the enemy, the other purpose is to save your life. Any extra items, such as personal items or memories, are taken along or left behind to save your sanity.

I have no doubt that was the focal point of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. The story switches back and forth between the descriptions of the physical and mental equipment that the average American foot soldier carried into battle. The list becomes longer and in the end incorporates the hopes, dreams, and fears that each soldier carried. All these items are necessities to the soldiers; items that they can not live without. Like the cumbersome equipment the soldiers carried into battle, their hopes, dreams, and fears were just as heavy and weighed them down just as their equipment did.

In The Things They Carried, Mr. O'Brien describes the lethal necessities that soldiers carry into battle, such as; M-16 assault rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, flack jackets, ammunition, and steel helmets. Letters, comic books, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, hotel size bars of soap, packets of Kool-Aid

Charters, Ann, and Samuel Charters, eds. Literature and Its Writers: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Boston: Bedford, 1997.

I associated with this element of the story because I also had to sacrifice the love for my girlfriend to concentrate on my duties as a squad leader. While I was away in the Pursian Gulf, my girl friend was impregnated by another man. My heartache, anger, and longing for her interfered with my safety and the safety of my men. I let my feelings cloud my judgements, almost causing me and my men injuries. Fortunately for me though, none of the members of my squad were injured or killed during the conflicts we were in.

I also related to the way the soldiers handled their emotions as they saw their fellow soldier, and friend, die. Different people handle death in many different ways. Some "play it off" and hide their emotions until a time comes when they reach a point that they can no longer keep their feelings of grief inside and it boils out of them like a flood of rushing water. Others immediately break down and cry their grief and anger out, collect themselves, and carry on; not looking back to grieve again. Others have an immediate detachment to the whole thing and look at their fallen comrade, not as a friend, but as another fallen soldier. O'Brien supports my point of view by describing the following:

"He pictured Martha's smooth young face, thinking he loved her more than anything, more than his men, and now Ted Lavender was dead because he loved her so much and could not stop thinking about her." (521) ... "He felt shame. He hated himself. He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war." (526)

Lieutenant Cross felt personally responsible for the death of Ted Lavender. He let his feelings and fantasies of Martha get in the way of duties of watching over and protecting his men, ultimately resulting in Lavenders death. O'Brien writes of Cross:

Lieutenant Cross at length rationalized that he too had to make the same commitment to himself and his fellow soldiers. O'Brien describes this beautifully when he writes:

The idea of weight plays an enormous role in this narrative. By continuously listing all the equipment by their size and weight, I perceived the feeling of how heavy the soldiers physical burden actually was. As I read the story, I f

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1655
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)