Blog 3 CT

In the The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, he emphasizes throughout the beginning of the book just what the title provokes, what the soldiers actually carried, mentally and physically. By starting off this way O’Brien makes us feel closer to these characters. He tries to show us the personality of each character and why they bring what they bring. The more detail he shows us about each reader the more we are focused on them throughout the book. Also what they carry is judged by what rank they are in the war. Most of the men are just common rank soldiers, but for those who are higher up they are carrying each of the men in their platoon on their shoulders, trying to protect them. Even for the common rank soldier they each have the weight of one another. A good example of this was when two of the soldiers, Strunk and Jensen, make a pack to make sure if one of them is fatally hurt they will be killed quickly thereafter. Later in the book though we see Strunk get wounded and he begs Jensen not to kill him, but later dies on the ride to medical attention. O’Brien also emphasizes the men’s greatest fear, which was blushing. He blames this as the biggest reason many men died in the war because they were embarrassed about dying. This is when O’Brien explains that men don’t go to war to become heroes they go because they don’t want to be cowards.

What shocked me the most was how all of O’Brien’s accounts are fiction. While I was reading the novel it felt like you were right with these guys and it all seems so realistic. I appreciate how O’Brien realizes the book would be much duller if he had made it nonfiction and just went through the book like a history lesson. The way he describes every characters life and character feels as close as you can get, but he offers what many authors lack on the subject, real life involvement with the Vietnam War. He was right there with these guys. I believe the difference between the true and the truth has a correlation between O’Brien making a fiction book. He talks about in the Good Form chapter about the story he is telling and how he just made it up. While he was being true it is the way he perceived things happening it was necessarily the truth, which is ultimately what actually happened. The fact that he told this story doesn’t necessarily mean it didn’t happen, but that is the way, in his mind, that it played out.

Surprisingly we find out that originally O’Brien never wanted to go to Vietnam he was trying to find ways to not be eligible to go and his final conclusion was to flee to Canada. His home town was excited for him to go but often after work at the meat packing company he would just drive around looking for a way out. Even though he ended up going to Vietnam he doesn’t feel that this makes him a hero at all. O’Brien understands that the true hero is someone who follows their own beliefs and not the beliefs of others like he did. He feels that he would’ve been a hero if he fled to Canada because he would’ve been following his own beliefs and not those of his community. Also one of the girls from his community who he was very close with as a child died of brain cancer prior to Vietnam and he feels that this helped him through the war because he was already around death and he was very close with Linda his childhood sweetheart. If it weren’t for Linda he feels he wouldn’t have been as comfortable in the war as he was.

Throughout this book I kept thinking about O’Brien’s true or truth segment and whether or not this was the way he perceived the war or whether or not it was the ultimate truth. I also wondered if that had to do with him making the story a fiction novel rather than writing a non-fiction book. I feel that he made it a fiction because it was his scope of the war and the way it happened for him which he feels is the true not necessarily the truth. Overall I really enjoyed this novel and felt that it had many good examples of how it felt to be a troop in the Vietnam War.