A brief synopsis of The Things They carried: First lieutenant Jimmy Cross leads a platoon of soldier over in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Several of his men are named Henry Dobbins, Dave Jensen, Ted Lavender, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, and Kiowa. This segment of reading starts off with exactly what each individual mentioned above carried and how much it weighed and what the object meant to that person. A great example would be Kiowa: he was a devout Baptist and carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father. Kiowa also carried his grandmother’s distrust of the white man and carried his grandfather’s old hunting hatchet. Nevertheless the segment of this story that is presented shows that First lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, who he was infatuated with and thought that she loved him, but in actuality she did not love him at all. He even licked the letters where her tongue had been to seal the letter. Cross later got a pebble from Martha and even sucked on it. He knew he was very distracted and that it could cause problems; he was right. As they were ordered to set up ambushes and destroy elaborate tunnel complexes, but before destroying them they were ordered to search them. All the men except for Henry Dobbins because he was a big man, would draw numbers to who would go town the tunnel. Whoever got the number seventeen would strip off everything and take a flashlight and Lieutenant Cross’s .45-caliber pistol down the tunnel. Nevertheless on April 16, after a couple of hours searching the tunnels , Ted Lavender went off to pee nearby while Lieutenant Cross examined the tunnel that one of the men had gone down to check. While checking the tunnel he immediately became distracted by thoughts of Martha and did not care about security of the area. Meanwhile as Ted Lavender came back from peeing he was shot in the head and fell with a loud flop. Many of the men dealt with his death in their own way. Some would not shut up about how he fell after being shot whereas Lieutenant Cross cried in his fox hole. Nevertheless at the end of the story he straightened up his act and gave up on his infatuation of Martha and truly led his men with a new attitude and a more commanding presence.
There was one section that was unclear the first read through of the story. There is a scene where Mitchell Sanders comes across a dead VC corpse, a young man around the age of fifteen or sixteen, and cut off one of the thumbs. The dead teenager was found in an irrigation ditch, badly burned, and flies on eyes and his mouth. Despite all this carnage, Mitchell Sanders states right before he cuts off one of the dead VC’s thumbs, he states that there is a moral to be learned from this. But while cutting the thumb off, Henry Dobbins asks Mitchell Sanders what the moral was, but only to never get a full answer. Sanders states “there it is” but both Dobbins and the reader of the story do not get a full clear understanding of what the moral to be learned is. Before Sanders states “there it is” he does mention an old show called Paladin which was about a gun for hire gentlemen who wore a fine clothes in a hotel he stayed at but once hired he would dress the old western cowboy look only in all black and he carried a .45-caliber revolver. The most famous line was “Have gun, will travel” as his calling card. Nevertheless it is still hard to see the moral of this scene after having researched some interesting facts about Paladin. However when Dobbins states that he does not see any moral, Sanders states the line “there it is” which could imply that there is no moral to that situation, but as the reader, it is still somewhat confusing. Nevertheless the moral could be that if you kill others you get what’s coming for you since the VC was near the location where Ted Lavender was shot, but this is just theoretical.
This story deals with the mental loads that men carry during warfare despite all the physical objects they carry. Even though they may have heavy burdens to carry literally, most have mental loads to carry just as much as the physical stuff. For some it’s love at first, but then realizes the burden of lives that they carry such as Lieutenant Cross, whereas others carry the horrors of what they have seen in warfare and the tragic deaths of fellow brothers in arms. Some even break under the stress of all the mental loads as Lieutenant Cross does at the death of Ted Lavender. But others just joke it off or keep restating how they died over and over again.
This interpretation matters since even though the writer of The Things They Carried tells to the utmost detail in what each man carried, the writer shows the most important things in life that all men and women carry in this lifetime: mental burdens. The writer just uses this story of a platoon during the Vietnam War to show how people deal with horrors or tragedies in war but can be seen as how people deal with bad situations in life. Overall this story can teach reader how to see how some deal with hard situations in life and have a better appreciation towards those who serve in the United States armed forces for their sacrifices and diligence over in a war zone.
