Story; Tim O’Brien “The things they carried” I will provide login for online book Compose an analytical essay of at least 1,200 words in which you offer an interpretation of a literary element in o

Story; Tim O’Brien “The things they carried” I will provide login for online book Compose an analytical essay of at least 1,200 words in which you offer an interpretation of a literary element in o
TIM O’BRIEN THE THINGS THEY CARRIED 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 kep t 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 th em with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste the envelope flap s, 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. S he 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 10 ounces. They were signed Love, Martha, but Lieutenant Cross understoo d that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant. At dus k, 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 near-ne- cessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewi ng kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together, these items weighed be- tween 15 and 20 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 peach es in heavy syrup over pound cake. Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-sized bars of soap he’d stolen on R&R in Sydney, Australia. Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April. By necessity, and because T 2 it was SOP, they all carried steel helmets that weighed 5 pounds including the lin er 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 6 or 7 ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the RTO, 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 booby-trapped, 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 becau se 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 2 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 Mar – tha up the hills and through the swamps. In its intransitive form, to hu mp meant to walk, or to march, but it implied burdens far beyond the intransitive. Almost everyone humped photographs. In his wallet, Lieutenant Cross carr ied two photo- graphs of Martha. The first was a Kodacolor 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 photograp h 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 sh orts. 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 100 pounds. Lieutenant Cross remember ed 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 l ooked at him in a sad, sober TIM O’BRIEN2 fiflfifl fifl 3 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 an d Clyde, how embarrassing it was, how slow and oppressive. He remembered kissing her good night at the dorm door. Right then, he thought, he should’ve done something brave. He should’ve carrie d her up the stairs to her room and tied her to the bed and touched that left knee all night long. He sh ould’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 speci alty. 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 loade d. 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, 26 pounds with its battery. As a medic, Rat Kiley carried a canvas satchel filled with morphine an d plasma and malaria tablets and surgical tape and comic books and all the things a medic mus t carry, including M&M’s for especially bad wounds, for a total weight of nearly 20 pounds. As a big man, therefore a machine gunner, Henry Dobbins carried the M-60, which weighed 23 pounds unloaded, but which was almost always loaded. In addition, Dobbin s carried between 10 and 15 pounds of ammunition draped in belts across his chest and shoulders. As PFCs or Spec 4s, most of them were common grunts and carried the standard M-16 gas-op- erated assault rifle. The weapon weighed 7.5 pounds unloaded, 8.2 poun ds with its full 20-round magazine. Depending on numerous factors, such as topography and psycholo gy, the riflemen carried anywhere from 12 to 20 magazines, usually in cloth bandoliers, adding on another 8.4 pounds at mini- mum, 14 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 ex- cept for the ammunition, which was heavy. A single round weighed 10 ounces. The typical load was 25 rounds. But Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried 34 rounds when he was shot and killed outside Than Khe, and he went down under an exceptional burden, more than 20 pou nds 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 o r something—just boom, then down—not like the movies where the dead guy rolls around and does fan cy spins and goes ass over teakettle—not like that, Kiowa said, the poor bastard just flat-fuc k fell. Boom. Down. Nothing else. It was a bright morning in mid-April. Lieutenant Cross felt the pain. He bl amed himself. They stripped off Lavender’s canteens and ammo, all the heavy things, and Rat Kiley said the obviou s, the guy’s TIM O’BRIEN2 fiflfifl fifl 4 dead, and Mitchell Sanders used his radio to report one U.S. KIA 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 pict ured 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 thi nking about her. When the dustoff arrived, they carried Lavender aboard. Afterward they burned Than Khe. They marched until dusk, then dug their holes, and that night Kiowa kept explaining h ow you had to be there, how fast it was, how the poor guy just dropped like so much concrete. Boom-d own, he said. Like cement.In addition to the three standard weapons—the M-60, M-16, and M-79— they carried whatev- er presented itself, or whatever seemed appropriate as a means of killin g or staying alive. They carried catch-as-catch-can. At various times, in various situations, they carrie d M-14s and CAR-15s and Swedish Ks and grease guns and captured AK-47s and Chi-Coms and RPGs and Simonov carbines and black market Uzis and .38-caliber Smith & Wesson handguns and 66 mm LAWs and shotguns and silencers and blackjacks and bayonets and C-4 plastic explosives. Le e Strunk carried a slingshot; a weapon of last resort, he called it. Mitchell Sanders carried brass kn uckles. Kiowa carried his grand- father’s feathered hatchet. Every third or fourth man carried a Claymore antipe rsonnel mine—3.5 pounds with its firing device. They all carried fragmentation grenades—14 ounces each. They all carried at least one M-18 colored smoke grenade—24 ounces. Some carri ed CS or tear gas grenades. Some 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 t he touch, it was a milky white color with flecks of orange and violet, oval-shaped, like a mini ature egg. In the accompanying letter, Martha wrote that she had found the pebble on the Jersey shoreline, pr ecisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated. It was this separate-but-to- gether 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 roma ntic. 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 unpa inted, 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 TIM O’BRIEN2 fiflfifl fifl 5 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 salt 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 risin g. 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 car – ried everything they could. In certain heavily mined AOs, where the land was dense with Toe Poppers and Bouncing Betties, they took turns humping a 28-pound mine detector. With its headphones and big sensing plate, the equipment was a stress on the lower back and shou lders, 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 cl aimed, 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 6.3 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 t o 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 i n the Than Khe area south of Chu Lai. To blow the tunnels, they carried one-pound blocks of pentrite high explo sives, four blocks to a man, 68 pounds in all. They carried wiring, detonators, and battery -powered clackers. Dave Jen- sen 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 jus t 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 17 men in the platoon, and whoever drew the number 17 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, TIM O’BRIEN2 fiflfifl fifl 6 listening to the ground beneath them, imagining cobwebs and ghosts, what ever was down there—the tunnel walls squeezing in—how the flashlight seemed impossibly heav y 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 fou nd yourself worrying about odd things: Will your flashlight go dead? Do rats carry rabies? If you screamed, ho w 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 17, he laughed and muttered something and went down quickly. The morning was hot and very still. Not good, Kiowa said. He looked at the tun- nel opening, then out across a dry paddy toward the village of Than Khe. Nothing moved. No clouds or birds or people. As they waited, the men smoked and drank Kool-Aid, n ot talking much, feeling sympathy for Lee Strunk but also feeling the luck of the draw. You win some, you lose some, said Mitchell Sanders, and sometimes you settle for a rain check. It was a ti red line and no one laughed. Henry Dobbins ate a tropical chocolate bar. Ted Lavender popped a tranquilizer and went off to pee. After five minutes, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross moved to the tunnel, leaned down, and examined the darkness. Trouble, he thought—a cave-in maybe. And then suddenly, without willing it, he was thinking about Martha. The stresses and fractures, the quick collapse, t he two of them buried alive under all that weight. Dense, crushing love. Kneeling, watching the hole , he tried to concentrate on Lee Strunk and the war, all the dangers, but his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he want- ed to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered. He wanted her to be a virgin and not a virgin, all at once. He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely, just alone—riding her bike across campus or sitting off by herself in the cafeteria—even dancing, she danced alone—and it was the aloneness that filled him with love. He remembered telling her that one evening. How she nodded and looked away. And how, later, when he kissed her, she received the kiss without returning it, her eyes wide open, not af raid, not a virgin’s eyes, just flat and uninvolved. Lieutenant Cross gazed at the tunnel. But he was not there. He was burie d with Martha under the white sand at the Jersey shore. They were pressed together, and the pebble in his mouth was her tongue. He was smiling. Vaguely, he was aware of how quiet the day was, the sullen paddies, yet he could not bring himself to worry about matters of security. He was beyond that. He was just a kid at war, in love. He was twenty-four years old. He couldn’t help it. A few moments later Lee Strunk crawled out of the tunnel. He came up gri nning, filthy but alive. Lieutenant Cross nodded and closed his eyes while the others clapped Strunk on the back and TIM O’BRIEN2 fiflfifl fifl 7 made jokes about rising from the dead.Worms, Rat Kiley said. Right out of the grave. Fuckin’ zombie. The men laughed. They all felt great relief. Spook city, said Mitchell Sanders. Lee Strunk made a funny ghost sound, a kind of moaning, yet very happy, and right then, when Strunk made that high happy moaning sound, when he went Ahhooooo, right then Ted Lavender was shot in the head on his way back from peeing. He lay with his mouth open . The teeth were broken. There was a swollen black bruise under his left eye. The cheekbone was gone. Oh shit, Rat Kiley said, the guy’s dead. The guy’s dead, he kept say- ing, which seemed profound—the guy’s dead. I mean really. The things they carried were determined to some extent by superstition. Lieutenant Cross car – ried his good-luck pebble. Dave Jensen carried a rabbit’s foot. Norman Bowker, otherwise a very gentle person, carried a thumb that had been presented to him as a gift by Mitc hell Sanders. The thumb was dark brown, rubbery to the touch, and weighed 4 ounces at most. It had b een cut from a VC corpse, a boy of fifteen or sixteen. They’d found him at the bottom of an i rrigation ditch, badly burned, flies in his mouth and eyes. The boy wore black shorts and sandals. At the tim e of his death he had been carrying a pouch of rice, a rifle, and three magazines of ammunition. You want my opinion, Mitchell Sanders said, there’s a definite moral here. He put his hand on the dead boy’s wrist. He was quiet for a time, as if counting a pulse, then he patted the stomach, almost affectionately, and used Kiowa’s hunting hatchet to remove the thumb. Henry Dobbins asked what the moral was. Moral? You know. Moral. Sanders wrapped the thumb in toilet paper and handed it across to Norman Bowker. There was no blood. Smiling, he kicked the boy’s head, watched the flies scatter, and said, It’s like with that old TV show—Paladin. Have gun, will travel. Henry Dobbins thought about it. Yeah, well, he finally said. I don’t see no moral. There it Is, man. Fuck off. They carried USO stationery and pencils and pens. They carried Sterno, s afety pins, trip flares, signal flares, spools of wire, razor blades, chewing tobacco, liberated joss sticks and statuettes of the smiling Buddha, candles, grease pencils, The Stars and Stripes, finger nail clippers, Psy Ops leaflets, bush hats, bolos, and much more. Twice a week, when the resupply choppers came in, they carried hot TIM O’BRIEN2 fiflfifl fifl 8 chow in green mermite cans and large canvas bags filled with iced beer and soda pop. They carried plastic water containers, each with a 2-gallon capacity. Mitchell Sanders carried a set of starched tiger fatigues for special occasions. Henry Dobbins carried Black Flag insecti cide. Dave Jensen carried emp- ty sandbags that could be filled at night for added protection. Lee St runk carried tanning lotion. Some things they carried in common. Taking turns, they carried the big PRC-77 scrambler radio, which weighed 30 pounds with its battery. They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself—Vietnam, the place, the soil—a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity. They moved like mules. By daylight they took sniper fire, at night the y were mortared, but it was not battle, it was just the endless march, village to village, without purpo se, nothing won or lost. They marched for the sake of the march. They plodded along slowly, dumbly, leaning forward against the heat, unthinking, all blood and bone, simple grunts, soldiering with their legs, toiling up the hi lls and down into the paddies and across the rivers and up again and down, just humping, one step and then the next and then another, but no volition, no will, because it was automatic, it was anatomy, and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was ever ything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility. Their principles were in their feet. Their calculations were biological. They had no sense of strategy or mission. They searched the villages without knowing what to look for, not caring, kicking over jars of rice, frisking children and old men, blowing tunnels, sometimes setting fires and sometimes not, then forming up and moving on to the next village, then other villages, where it would always be the same. They carried their own lives. The pressures were enormous. In the heat o f early afternoon, they would remove their helmets and flak jackets, walking bare, which was dangerous but which helped ease the strain. They would often discard things along the route of march. Pu rely for comfort, they would throw away rations, blow their Claymores and grenades, no matter, because by nightfall the resupply choppers would arrive with more of the same, then a day or two later sti ll more, fresh watermelons and crates of ammunition and sunglasses and woolen sweaters—the resources were stunning—sparklers for the Fourth of July, colored eggs for Easter—it was the great American war chest—the fruits of science, the smokestacks, the canneries, the arsenals at Hartford, the Minnesota forests, the machine shops, the vast fields of corn and wheat—they carried like freight trains; they carried it on their backs TIM O’BRIEN2 fiflfifl fifl 9 and shoulders—and for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss fo r things to carry.After the chopper took Lavender away, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross led his men into the village of Than Khe. They burned everything. They shot chickens and dogs, they t rashed the village well, they called in artillery and watched the wreckage, then they marched for several hours through the hot afternoon, and then at dusk, while Kiowa explained how Lavender died , Lieutenant Cross found himself trembling. He tried not to cry. With his entrenching tool, which weighed 5 pounds, he began digging a hole in the earth. He felt shame. He hated himself. He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a conse- quence Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to ca rry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war. All he could do was dig. He used his entrenching tool like an ax, slashing, feeling both love and hate, and then later, when it was full dark, he sat at the bottom of his foxhole and wept. It went on for a long while. In part, he was grieving for Ted Lavender, but mostly it was for Martha, and for himself, because she belonged to another world, which was not quite real, and bec ause she was a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey, a poet and a virgin and uninvolved, and because he realized she did not love him and never would. Like cement, Kiowa whispered in the dark. I swear to God—boom, down. Not a word. I’ve heard this, said Norman Bowker. A pisser, you know? Still zipping himself up. Zapped while zipping. All right, fine. That’s enough. Yeah, but you had to see it, the guy just— I heard, man. Cement. So why not shut the fuck up? Kiowa shook his head sadly and glanced over at the hole where Lieutenant Jimmy Cross sat watching the night. The air was thick and wet. A warm dense fog had sett led over the paddies and there was the stillness that precedes rain. After a time Kiowa sighed. One thing for sure, he said. The lieutenant’s in some deep hurt. I mean that crying jag—the way he was carrying on—it wasn’t fake or anything, it was real heavy-duty hurt. The man cares. Sure, Norman Bowker said. Say what you want, the man does care. TIM O’BRIEN2 fiflfifl fifl 1f We all got problems. Not Lavender. No, I guess not, Bowker said. Do me a favor, though. Shut up? That’s a smart Indian. Shut up. Shrugging, Kiowa pulled off his boots. He wanted to say more, just to li ghten up his sleep, but instead he opened his New Testament and arranged it beneath his head as a pillow. The fog made things seem hollow and unattached. He tried not to think about Ted Lavender, but then he was think- ing how fast it was, no drama, down and dead, and how it was hard to fee l anything except surprise. It seemed unchristian. He wished he could find some great sadness, or even anger, but the emotion wasn’t there and he couldn’t make it happen. Mostly he felt pleased to be alive. He liked the smell of the New Testament under his cheek, the leather and ink and paper and glue, whatev er the chemicals were. He liked hearing the sounds of night. Even his fatigue, it felt fi ne, the stiff muscles and the prickly awareness of his own body, a floating feeling. He enjoyed not being dead. Lying there, Kiowa admired Lieutenant Jimmy Cross’s capacity for grief. He wanted to share the man’s pain, he wanted to care as Jimmy Cross cared. And yet when he closed his eyes, all he could think was Boom-down, and all he could feel was the pleasure of having his boots off and the fog c urling in around him and the damp soil and the Bible smells and the plush comfort of night. After a moment Norman Bowker sat up in the dark. What the hell, he said. You want to talk, talk. Tell it to me. Forget it. No, man, go on. One thing I hate, it’s a silent Indian. For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity. Now and then, however, there were times of panic, when they squealed or wanted to squeal but co uldn’t, when they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons blindly and cringed and sobbed and begge d for the noise to stop and went wild and made stupid promises to themselves and to God and to their mothers and fathers, hop- ing not to die. In different ways, it happened to all of them. Afterward, when the firing ended, they would blink and peek up. They would touch their bodies, feeling shame, then quickly hiding it. They would force themselves to stand. As if in slow motion, frame by frame, t he world would take on the old logic—absolute silence, then the wind, then sunlight, then voices. It was the burden of being alive. Awkwardly, the men would reassemble themselves, first in private, then in group s, becoming soldiers again. They would repair the leaks in their eyes. They would check for c asualties, call in dustoffs, light cigarettes, try to smile, clear their throats and spit and begin cleanin g their weapons. After a time TIM O’BRIEN2 fiflfifl fifl 11 someone would shake his head and say, No lie, I almost shit my pants, and someone else would laugh, which meant it was bad, yes, but the guy had obviously not shit his pant s, it wasn’t that bad, and in any case nobody would ever do such a thing and then go ahead and talk about it. They would squint into the dense, oppressive sunlight. For a few moments, perhaps, they wo uld fall silent, lighting a joint and tracking its passage from man to man, inhaling, holding in the humil iation. Scary stuff, one of them might say. But then someone else would grin or flick his eyebrows and say, Roger-dodger, almost cut me a new asshole, almost.There were numerous such poses. Some carried themselves with a sort of w istful resignation, others with pride or stiff soldierly discipline or good humor or macho zeal. They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it. They found jokes to tell. They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased th ey’d say. Offed, lit up, zapped while zipping. It wasn’t cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors. When someone died, it wasn’t quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had their lines mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and because they called it by other names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of death itself. They kicked corpses. They cut off t humbs. They talked grunt lingo. They told stories about Ted Lavender’s supply of tranquilizers, how the poor guy didn’t feel a thing, how incredibly tranquil he was. There’s a moral here, said Mitchell Sanders. They were waiting for Lavender’s chopper, smoking the dead man’s dope. The moral’s pretty obvious, Sanders said, and winked. Stay away from drugs. No jok e, they’ll ruin your day every time. Cute, said Henry Dobbins. Mind blower, get it? Talk about wiggy. Nothing left, just blood and brains. They made themselves laugh. There it is, they’d say. Over and over—there it is, my friend, there it is—as if the repetition itself were an act of poise, a balance between crazy and almost crazy, knowing without going, there it is, which meant be cool, let it ride, because Oh yeah, man, you can’t change what can’t be changed, there it is, there it absolutely and positively and fucking well is. They were tough. They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terr or, love, longing— these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and speci fic gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret o f cowardice barely re- strained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of TIM O’BRIEN2 fiflfifl fifl 12 all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment. They crawled into tunnels and walked point and advanced under fire. Ea ch morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move. They endured. They kept humping. They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.By and large they carried these things inside, maintaining the masks of composure. They sneered at sick call. They spoke bitterly about guys who had found relea se by shooting off their own toes or fingers. Pussies, they’d say. Candy-asses. It was fierce, mocking talk, with only a trace of envy or awe, but even so the image played itself out behind their eyes. They imagined the muzzle against flesh. So easy: squeeze the trigger a nd blow away a toe. They imagined it. They imagined the quick, sweet pain, then the evacuation to Japan, then a hospital with warm beds and cute geisha nurses. And they dreamed of freedom birds. At night, on guard, staring into the dark, they were carried away by jum bo jets. They felt the rush of takeoff. Gone! they yelled. And then velocity—wings and engin es—a smiling stewardess—but it was more than a plane, it was a real bird, a big sleek silver bird wi th feathers and talons and high screeching. They were flying. The weights fell off; there was nothing to bear. They laughed and held on tight, feeling the cold slap of wind and altitude, soaring, thinking It’s over, I’m gone!—they were naked, they were light and free—it was all lightness, bright and fast and buoyant, light as light, a helium buzz in the brain, a giddy bubbling in the lungs as they were tak en up over the clouds and the war, beyond duty, beyond gravity and mortification and global entanglements—Sin loi ! they yelled. I’m sorry, motherfuckers, but I’m out of it, I’m goofed, I’m on a space cruise, I’m gone!—and it was a restful, unencumbered sensation, just riding the light waves, sailing th at big silver freedom bird over the mountains and oceans, over America, over the farms and great sleepin g cities and cemeteries and highways and the golden arches of McDonald’s, it was flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through the vast, silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything weighed exactly nothing—Gone! they screamed. I’m sorry but I’m gone!—and so at night, not quite dr eaming, they gave themselves over to TIM O’BRIEN2 fiflfifl fifl 13 lightness, they were carried, they were purely borne.On the morning after Ted Lavender died, First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross crouched at the bottom of his foxhole and burned Martha’s letters. Then he burned the two photographs. There was a steady rain falling, which made it difficult, but he used heat tabs and Stern o to build a small fire, screening it with his body, holding the photographs over the tight blue flame with the tips of h is fingers. He realized it was only a gesture. Stupid, he thought. Sentimental, too, but mostly just stupid. Lavender was dead. You couldn’t burn the blame. Besides, the letters were in his head. And even now, without photographs, Lieutenant Cross could see Martha playing volleyball in her white gym shorts and yellow T -shirt. He could see her moving in the rain. When the fire died out, Lieutenant Cross pulled his poncho over his shoulders and ate breakfast from a can. There was no great mystery, he decided. In those burned letters Martha had never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. She wasn’t involved. She signed the letters Love, but it wasn’t love, and all the fine lines and technicalities did not matter. Virginity was no longer an issue. He hated her. Yes, he did. He hated her. Love, too, but it was a hard, hating kind of love. The morning came up wet and blurry. Everything seemed part of everything else, the fog and Martha and the deepening rain. He was a soldier, after all. Half smiling, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross took out his maps. He shook his hea d hard, as if to clear it, then bent forward and began planning the day’s march. In ten minutes, or maybe twenty, he would rouse the men and they would pack up and head west, where the maps showe d the country to be green and inviting. They would do what they had always done. The rain might ad d some weight, but other – wise it would be one more day layered upon all the other days. He was realistic about it. There was that new hardness in his stomach. H e loved her but he hated her. No more fantasies, he told himself. Henceforth, when he thought about Martha, it would be only to think that she belonged elsewhere. He would shut down the daydreams. This was not Mount Sebastia n, it was another world, where there were no pretty poems or midterm exams, a place where men died because of carelessness and gross stupidity. Kiowa was right. Boom-down, and you were dead, never partly dead. Briefly, in the rain, Lieutenant Cross saw Martha’s gray eyes gazing back at him. He understood. It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things m en did or felt they TIM O’BRIEN2 fiflfifl fifl 14 had to do.He almost nodded at her, but didn’t. Instead he went back to his maps. He was now determined to perform his d uties firmly and without negligence. It wouldn’t help Lavender, he knew that, but from this point on he would com- port himself as an officer. He would dispose of his good-luck pebble. Swallow it, maybe, or use Lee Strunk’s slingshot, or just drop it along the trail. On the march he would impo se strict field discipline. He would be careful to send out flank security, to prevent straggling or bunching up, to keep his troops moving at the proper pace and at the proper interval. He would insist on clean weapons. He would confiscate the remainder of Lavender’s dope. Later in the day, perhaps, he would call the men together and speak to them plainly. He would accept the blame for what had happened to Ted Lavender. He would be a man about it. He would look them in the eyes, keeping his chi n level, and he would issue the new SOPs in a calm, impersonal tone of voice, a lieutenant’s voice, leaving no room for argument or discussion. Commencing immediately, he’d tell them, they would no longer abandon equipment along the route of march. They would police up their acts. They would ge t their shit together, and keep it together, and maintain it neatly and in good working order. He would not tolerate laxity. He would show strength, distancing himself. Among the men there would be grumbling, of course, and maybe worse, because their days would seem longer and their loads heavier, but Lieutenant Jimmy Cross reminded himself that his obligation was not to be loved but to lead. He would dispense with love; it was not now a factor. And if anyone quarreled or complained, he would simply tighten his lips and arrange his shoulders in the correct command posture. He might give a curt little nod. Or he might not. He might just shrug and say, Carry on, then they would saddle up and form into a column and move ou t toward the villages west of Than Khe. Autbor: Tim O’Brien; A1rticle Title: Tbe Tb1ings Tbey Carried; Source Title1: Tbe Vintage Book of Contemporary Ame1rican Sbort Stories; Pub1lication Date: 1994; Editor: Tobias Wolff; City of Publication: New York, NY; Publisber: Vintage Books; Pages: 366-384; URL: bttp://www.cen- gage.com/custom/static_content/OLC/s76656_76218lf/obrien.pdf. TIM O’BRIEN2 fiflfifl fifl