"The Things They Carried"

One impression that I got from reading "The Things They Carried" was that O'Brien is using the experience of these soldiers to symbolize the way we experience our lives. We're wondering along "the path of life" with everything we need. I thought of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: We start with our basic needs, both physiological and safety (the soldiers carry food, water, weapons for safety) and then progress to love, belonging and esteem (the soldiers carry objects that have sentimental value, particularly Lieutenant Cross with his photos, letters and lucky rock). All of these things were important to these soldiers, but I think O'Brien wanted to place particular emphasis on the items needed for physical survival. Each one of the tangible objects essential to survival and safety had a weight to go along with it - the medical supplies weighed 20 pounds, the M-60 weighed 23 pounds, so on and so forth. This would mean he's saying in life, these items at the bottom of Maslow's Hierarchy weigh more on our minds and are therefore more important.

A contradiction or deconstruction of this theme would be that, through most of this story, Lieutenant Cross has Martha on his mind and little else. He puts his emotional needs above not only his safety, but the safety of those around him, resulting in the death of a soldier. Actually, all of the soldiers contradict this theory. "They would often dicard things along the route of the march".. The things they threw away were rations or weapons, showing a disregard for the things that kept them alive so that they would have more strength the carry the emotional burdens.