English 2600

"The Things They Carried" portrays the message that soldiers are required to carry great physical burdens, but that they also carry emotional burdens. The soldiers often carry things that have sentimental value often reminding them of something other than the war. The story focused heavily on what the soldiers physically carried and how much they weighed. Things such as a nylon-covered flak jacket that weighed 6.7 pounds or a .45 caliber pistol that weighed 2.9 pounds. The list of physical burdens is long and covers much of the story. It also focused on emotional burdens, "Leutenant Jimmy Cross humped his love for Martha up the hills and through the swamps." This exerpt is a used as a main example of an emotional burden that Leutenant Cross carried with him in the Vietnam war.


They story is meant to help us see how hard those emotional and physical burdens are on the soldiers. However it seems to contradict itself at the end. "It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt that they had to do. Instead he went back to his maps. He was now determined to do his duties firmly and without negligence." This exerpt is towards the end of the book when Leutenant Jimmy Cross burned Martha's letters and pictures. He overcame those emotional burdens and focused on his duties. It seemed to me the story contradicted itself at the end because it infered that soldiers could eliminate those emotional burdens. It says that they were doing things that they thought they had to do, but those things were not necessarily what they really had to do.