o’brien The Things They Carried 227
have been part of our culture since the 1960s. People such as O’Brien find their
actual experiences so bizarre and surreal that they foreground the incredibility of
the account, and, like O’Brien’s character Kiowa, they find that the incredibility
compels repetition. The story must be told again and again to be confirmed as
true, as the real, in Lacanian terms, resists language. O’Brien blurs the line
between fiction and autobiography, perhaps as an issue of definition. Student
readers may be tempted to skim through the story quickly, but to do so is to miss
its impact. The catalogs of burdens have a cumulative effect that builds as the
story humps on, interweaving physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, cultural,
and political burdens. The “climax” of the story — the death of Ted Lavender — is
first buried in the middle of a sentence, juxtaposed with seemingly trivial items
being carried, and then is repeated again and again. It is unlikely that Jimmy
Cross’s daydreams about Martha actually cause the man’s death, but the lieuten-
ant himself obviously takes responsibility for it. However, as we focus on this
psychological aspect and then compare Cross’s emotions with those of actual
letter writers, perspectives on love begin to emerge.
Although this is a war story, the first paragraph is about Martha’s letters. The
final section of “The Things They Carried” takes us back to Jimmy Cross’s per-
spective, beginning with the sentence “On the morning after Ted Lavender died,
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross crouched at the bottom of his foxhole and burned
Martha’s letters.” In this way, O’Brien frames the events in the middle of the
story, jumbled as they are in the surreal fashion of war, with the reasoned
thoughts of the protagonist. In the opening, Cross is conscious of “pretending”
that the relationship with Martha is more romantic than it is in reality, and he
uses these fantasies to block out the fear of death that surrounds him. In the end,
he discards romantic love entirely, accepting his blame as Ted Lavender’s com-
manding officer and realizing that his inattention may have been responsible for
the death of one of his men. In the midst of war, love is a luxury he cannot afford,
and we are told, “He would show strength, distancing himself. . . . [H]is obliga-
tion was not to be loved but to lead. He would dispense with love.” By showing
his dreamy sentimentality at the beginning of the story and repeating it through-
out the story, O’Brien prepares the reader for the change that the character
undergoes. Cross becomes hardened because he must.
College students in the twenty- first century will find Martha less real than
readers of her own 1960s generation might have interpreted her. Despite the
images coming out of Woodstock and other “flower power” versions of the 1960s,
many young women expected to be seen as virgins, whether they were or not.
That Jimmy Cross fantasizes about touching Martha’s knee would have been
amusing and ironic to his own generation, but his warrants are true to the mores
of the times. Ideally, the woman he fantasizes about is the American girl next
door whom most soldiers in this war wish their girlfriends to be. As an English
major reading Chaucer, perhaps Martha is not that innocent; and readers will
note the feminist implications in her admiration for Virginia Woolf. The times
they are a- changing, we might note, borrowing from a Bob Dylan song contem-
porary with the Vietnam era. We should also be aware of student protests taking
place on campuses, like the one protest Martha writes about, her letters perhaps
glossing over the truth with trivia meant for Jimmy’s peace of mind. Martha
seems more of a symbol than a real college student.
