Expert answer:The Things They Carried , working thesis
Solved by verified expert:This week, you will choose the topic you would like to explore, offer some information on what interests you about this topic, and supply a working thesis and key ideas you would like to develop.Consider the role of setting, or context, in one of the works. For example, a story that takes place in a wild and natural setting might include characters struggling against nature to survive. A story set in a city might include themes of alienation and anonymity because of the impersonal crowds and busy city life. Cultural contexts can combine with both urban and rural elements to produce further meaning, as well. Consider the following questions as you critically read one of the texts below: Does the protagonist conflict with the setting or have particular interactions with it? Does the protagonist’s relationship with the setting connect with his/her development as a character? Does the setting reveal other themes and conflicts? “The Things They Carried” (O’Brien, 1990) – 5.4 in Journey into Literature Guiding Questions:1. How does the story communicate the uncertain and frightening setting these soldier character’s experience? (Consider repeated phrases or other devices.) 2. What sorts of emotions, such as stress or fear, does the Vietnam context cause the characters to experience? Give specific examples from the story, and consider how these emotions might be “told” to us in multiple ways. 3. How do the soldiers in the story cope with their setting/context, whether through imagined escapes or other means, and are they successful? Basically all you have to do is read the attached doc “The things they carried”, answer the questions above and fill out the attached worksheet.
the_things_they_carried.pdf
proposal_for_final_paper_worksheet.docx
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5.4 A Story for Reflection on the Elements of
Setting and Character
Tim O’Brien (b. 1946)
After graduating from Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota, Tim
O’Brien was drafted into the army in 1968 and sent to fight in
Vietnam in a war he didn’t support. But he served worthily; he
© Marion
became a sergeant and was awarded the Purple Heart. Since then,
Ettlinger/Corbis
Entertainment/Corbis
he has devoted his life to writing and teaching. He won the U.S.
National Book Award for Fiction in 1979 for the novel Going After Cacciato, a book
about the Vietnam War. “The Things They Carried” is one of several stories O’Brien
published in a book by the same name in 1990; they are fiction but have
autobiographical connections to his war experiences. In one of these selections, “How
to Tell a True War Story,” O’Brien’s view of war seems to be embedded in this
statement:
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage
virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men
from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems moral, do
not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel
that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste,
then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There
is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb,
therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and
uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. (Geyh, 174)
The Things They Carried
Tim O’Brien (1990)
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 fight pretending.
He would imagine romantic camping trips into the
White Mountains in New Hampshire. He would
sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her
tongue had been there. More than anything, he
wanted Martha to love him as he loved her, but the
letters were mostly chatty, elusive on the matter of
love. She was a virgin, he was almost sure. She was
an English major at Mount Sebastian, and she wrote
beautifully about her professors and roommates
and midterm exams, about her respect for Chaucer
and her great affection for Virginia Woolf. She often
quoted lines of poetry; she never mentioned the
war, except to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. The
letters weighed ten ounces. They were signed
“Love, Martha,” but Lieutenant Cross understood
that Love was only a way of signing and did not
mean what he sometimes pretended it meant. At
dusk, he would carefully return the letters to his
rucksack. Slowly, a bit distracted, he would get up
and move among his men, checking the perimeter,
then at full dark he would return to his hole and
watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin.
The things they carried were largely determined by
necessity. Among the necessities or nearnecessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives,
heat tabs, wrist watches, dog tags, mosquito
repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt
tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches,
sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C
rations,1 (http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpoint-30#ch05_fn1)
and two or three canteens of water. Together, these
items weighed between fifteen and twenty 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-size bars
of soap he’d stolen on R&R2
(http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpoint-30#ch05_fn1)
in
Sydney, Australia. Ted Lavender, who was scared,
carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head
outside the village of Than Khe3
(http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpoint-30#ch05_fn1)
in midApril. By necessity, and because it was SOP,4
(http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpoint-30#ch05_fn1)
they all
carried steel helmets that weighed five pounds
including the liner and camouflage cover. They
carried the standard fatigue jackets and trousers.
Very few carried underwear. On their feet they
carried jungle boots—2.1 pounds—and Dave
Jensen carried three pairs of socks and a can of Dr.
Scholl’s foot powder as a precaution against trench
foot. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried six or
seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was
a necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the RTO,5
(http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpoint-30#ch05_fn1)
carried
condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat
Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist,
carried an illustrated New Testament that had been
presented to him by his father, who taught Sunday
school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. As a hedge
against bad times, however, Kiowa also carried his
grandmother’s distrust of the white man, his
grandfather’s old hunting hatchet. Necessity
dictated. Because the land was mined and boobytrapped, it was SOP for each man to carry a steel-
centered, nylon-covered flak jacket, which weighed
6.7 pounds, but which on hot days seemed much
heavier. Because you could die so quickly, each
man carried at least one large compress bandage,
usually in the helmet band for easy access. 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 took him away.
They were called legs or grunts.
To carry something was to “hump” it, as when
Lieutenant Jimmy Cross humped his love for
Martha up the hills and through the swamps. In its
intransitive form, to hump meant to walk, or to
march, but it implied burdens far beyond the
intransitive.
Almost everyone humped photographs. In his
wallet, Lieutenant Cross carried two photographs
of Martha. The first was a Kodachrome snapshot
signed “Love,” though he knew better. She stood
against a brick wall. Her eyes were gray and
neutral, her lips slightly open as she stared
straight-on at the camera. At night, sometimes,
Lieutenant Cross wondered who had taken the
picture, because he knew she had boyfriends,
because he loved her so much, and because he
could see the shadow of the picture taker spreading
out against the brick wall. The second photograph
had been clipped from the 1968 Mount Sebastian
yearbook. It was an action shot—women’s
volleyball—and Martha was bent horizontal to the
floor, reaching, the palms of her hands in sharp
focus, the tongue taut, the expression frank and
competitive. There was no visible sweat. She wore
white gym shorts. Her legs, he thought, were almost
certainly the legs of a virgin, dry and without hair,
the left knee cocked and carrying her entire weight,
which was just over 117 pounds. Lieutenant Cross
remembered touching that left knee. A dark
theater, he remembered, and the movie was Bonnie
and Clyde, and Martha wore a tweed skirt, and
during the final scene, when he touched her knee,
she turned and looked at him in a sad, sober way
that made him pull his hand back, but he would
always remember the feel of the tweed skirt and
the knee beneath it and the sound of the gunfire
that killed Bonnie and Clyde, how embarrassing it
was, how slow and oppressive. He remembered
kissing her goodnight at the dorm door. Right then,
he thought, he should’ve done something brave. He
should’ve carried her up the stairs to her room and
tied her to the bed and touched that left knee all
night long. He should’ve risked it. Whenever he
looked at the photographs, he thought of new
things he should’ve done.
What they carried was partly a function of rank,
partly of field specialty.
As a first lieutenant and platoon leader, Jimmy
Cross carried a compass, maps, code books,
binoculars, and a .45-caliber pistol that weighed 2.9
pounds fully loaded. He carried a strobe light and
the responsibility for the lives of his men.
As an RTO, Mitchell Sanders carried the PRC-25
radio, a killer, twenty-six pounds with its battery.
As a medic, Rat Kiley carried a canvas satchel filled
with morphine and plasma and malaria tablets and
surgical tape and comic books and all the things a
medic must carry, including M&M’s6
(http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpoint-30#ch05_fn1)
for
especially bad wounds, for a total weight of nearly
18 pounds.
As a big man, therefore a machine gunner, Henry
Dobbins carried the M-60,7
(http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpoint-30#ch05_fn1)
which
weighed twenty-three pounds unloaded, but which
was almost always loaded. In addition, Dobbins
carried between ten and fifteen pounds of
ammunition draped in belts across his chest and
shoulders.
As PFCs8 (http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpoint30#ch05_fn1)
or Spec 4s,9
(http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpoint-30#ch05_fn1)
most of
10
them were common grunts
(http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpoint-30#ch05_fn1)
and
carried the standard M-16 gas-operated assault
rifle. The weapon weighed 7.5 pounds unloaded,
8.2 pounds with its full twenty-round magazine.
Depending on numerous factors, such as
topography and psychology, the riflemen carried
anywhere from twelve to twenty magazines,
usually in cloth bandoliers, adding on another 8.4
pounds at minimum, fourteen pounds at maximum.
When it was available, they also carried M-16
maintenance gear—rods and steel brushes and
swabs and tubes of LSA oil—all of which weighed
about a pound. Among the grunts, some carried the
M-79 grenade launcher, 5.9 pounds unloaded, a
reasonably light weapon except for the
ammunition, which was heavy. A single round
weighed ten ounces. The typical load was twentyfive rounds. But Ted Lavender, who was scared,
carried thirty-four rounds when he was shot and
killed outside Than Khe, and he went down under
an exceptional burden, more than twenty pounds of
ammunition, plus the flak jacket and helmet and
rations and water and toilet paper and
tranquilizers and all the rest, plus the unweighed
fear. He was dead weight. There was no twitching
or flopping. Kiowa, who saw it happen, said it was
like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or
something—just boom, then down—not like the
movies where the dead guy rolls around and does
fancy spins and goes ass over teakettle—not like
that, Kiowa said, the poor bastard just flat-fuck fell.
Boom. Down. Nothing else. It was a bright morning
in mid-April. Lieutenant Cross felt the pain. He
blamed himself. They stripped off Lavender’s
canteens and ammo, all the heavy things, and Rat
Kiley said the obvious, the guy’s dead, and Mitchell
Sanders used his radio to report one U.S. KIA11
(http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpoint-30#ch05_fn1)
and to
request a chopper. Then they wrapped Lavender in
his poncho. They carried him out to a dry paddy,
established security, and sat smoking the dead
man’s dope until the chopper came. Lieutenant
Cross kept to himself. 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. When the
dust-off arrived, they carried Lavender aboard.
Afterward they burned Than Khe. They marched
until dusk, then dug their holes, and that night
Kiowa kept explaining how you had to be there,
how fast it was, how the poor guy just dropped like
so much concrete. Boom-down, he said. Like
cement.
In addition to the three standard weapons—the
M-60, M-16,12 (http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpoint30#ch05_fn1)
and M-7913
(http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpoint-30#ch05_fn1)
—they
carried whatever presented itself, or whatever
seemed appropriate as a means of killing or staying
alive. They carried catch-as-catch can. At various
times, in various situations, they carried M-14s14
(http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpoint-30#ch05_fn1)
and
15 (http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpointCAR-15s
30#ch05_fn1)
and Swedish Ks16
(http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpoint-30#ch05_fn1)
and
17 (http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpointgrease guns
30#ch05_fn1)
and captured AK-47s18
(http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpoint-30#ch05_fn1)
and
19 (http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpointChiComs
30#ch05_fn1)
and RPGs20
(http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpoint-30#ch05_fn1)
and
21
Simonov carbines and black market Uzis
(http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpoint-30#ch05_fn1)
and .38caliber Smith & Wesson handguns and 66 mm
LAWs22 (http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpoint-30#ch05_fn1)
and shotguns and silencers and blackjacks and
bayonets and C-4 plastic explosives. Lee Strunk
carried a slingshot; a weapon of last resort, he
called it. Mitchell Sanders carried brass knuckles.
Kiowa carried his grandfather’s feathered hatchet.
Every third or fourth man carried a Claymore
antipersonnel mine23
(http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpoint-30#ch05_fn1)
—3.5
pounds with its firing device. They all carried
fragmentation grenades—fourteen ounces each.
They all carried at least one M-18 colored smoke
grenade—twenty-four ounces. Some carried CS or
tear-gas24 (http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpoint30#ch05_fn1)
grenades. Sonic carried white-phosphorus
grenades. They carried all they could bear, and then
some, including a silent awe for the terrible power
of the things they carried.
In the first week of April, before Lavender died,
Lieutenant Jimmy Cross received a good-luck
charm from Martha. It was a simple pebble. An
ounce at most. Smooth to the touch, it was a milkywhite color with flecks of orange and violet, ovalshaped, like a miniature egg. In the accompanying
letter, Martha wrote that she had found the pebble
on the Jersey shoreline, precisely where the land
touched water at high tide, where things came
together but also separated. It was this separatebut-together quality, she wrote, that had inspired
her to pick up the pebble and to carry it in her
breast pocket for several days, where it seemed
weightless, and then to send it through the mail, by
air, as a token of her truest feelings for him.
Lieutenant Cross found this romantic. But he
wondered what her truest feelings were, exactly,
and what she meant by separate-but-together. He
wondered how the tides and waves had come into
play on that afternoon along the Jersey shoreline
when Martha saw the pebble and bent down to
rescue it from geology. He imagined bare feet.
Martha was a poet, with the poet’s sensibilities, and
her feet would be brown and bare, the toenails
unpainted, the eyes chilly and somber like the
ocean in March, and though it was painful, he
wondered who had been with her that afternoon.
He imagined a pair of shadows moving along the
strip of sand where things came together but also
separated. It was phantom jealousy, he knew, but
he couldn’t help himself. He loved her so much. On
the march, through the hot days of early April, he
carried the pebble in his mouth, turning it with his
tongue, tasting sea salts and moisture. His mind
wandered. He had difficulty keeping his attention
on the war. On occasion he would yell at his men to
spread out the column, to keep their eyes open, but
then he would slip away into daydreams, just
pretending, walking barefoot along the Jersey
shore, with Martha, carrying nothing. He would feel
himself rising. Sun and waves and gentle winds, all
love and lightness.
What they carried varied by mission.
When a mission took them to the mountains, they
carried mosquito netting, machetes, canvas tarps,
and extra bug juice.
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,25 (http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/AUENG125.14.1/sections/navpoint-30#ch05_fn1)
where the land was dense with Toe Poppers and
Bouncing Betties, they took turns humping a
twenty-eight-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.
On ambush, or other night missions, they carried
peculiar little odds and ends. Kiowa always took
along his New Testament and a pair of moccasins
for silence. Dave Jensen carried night-sight
vitamins high in carotene. Lee Strunk carried his
slingshot; ammo, he claimed, would never be a
problem. Rat Kiley carried brandy and M&M’s
candy. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried the
starlight scope, which weighed 63 pounds with its
aluminum carrying case. Henry Dobbins carried his
girlfriend’s pantyhose wrapped around his neck as
a comforter. They all carried ghosts. When dark
came, they would move out single file across the
meadows and paddies to their ambush coordinates,
where they would quietly set up the Claymores and
lie down and spend the night waiting.
Other missions were more complicated and
required special equipment. In mid-April, it was
their mission to search out and destroy the
elaborate tunnel complexes in the Than Khe area
south of Chu Lai. To blow the tunnels, they carried
one-pound blocks of pentrite high explosives, four
blocks to a man, sixty-eight pounds in all. They
carried wiring, detonators, and battery-powered
clackers. Dave Jensen carried earplugs. Most often,
before blowing the tunnels, they were ordered by
higher command to search them, which was
considered bad news, but by and large they just
shrugged and carried out orders. Because he was a
big man, Henry Dobbins was excused from tunnel
duty. The others would draw numbers. Before
Lavender died there were seventeen men in the
platoon, and whoever drew the number seventeen
would strip off his gear and crawl in headfirst with
a flashlight and Lieutenant Cross’s .45-caliber
pistol. The rest of them would fan out as security.
They would sit down or kneel, not facing the hole,
listening to the ground beneath them, imagining
cobwebs and ghosts, whatever was down
there—the tunnel walls squeezing in—how the
flashlight seemed impossibly heavy in the hand and
how it was tunnel vision in the very strictest sense,
compression in all ways, even time, and how you
had to wiggle in—ass and elbows—a swallowed-up
feeling—and how you found yourself worrying
about odd things—will your flashlight go dead? Do
rats carry rabies? If you screamed, how far would
the sound carry? Would your buddies hear it?
Would they have the courage to drag you out? In
some respects, though not many, the waiting was
worse than the tunnel itself. Imagination was a
killer.
On April 16, when Lee Strunk drew the number
seventeen, he laughed and muttered something and
went down quickly. The morning was hot and very
still. Not good, Kiowa said. He looked at the tunnel
opening, then out across a dry …
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