The Things They Carried: Journal Two - Close Analysis

"When a man died, there had to be blame"(177). This point is expressed throughout Tim O'Brien's novel, The Things They Carried. One thing that most of the characters in the book struggled with at some point during the Vietnam war was where to place the blame when a fellow soldier died; "You could blame the war...You could blame the rain...You could blame the enemy...You could blame whole nations...You could blame God...In the field, though, the consequences were immediate. A moment of carelessness or bad judgement or plain stupidity carried consequences that lasted forever"(177). Tim O'Brien intentionally wrote the chapter "In The Field" (162-178) to show that the young man searching through the shit fields could represent any one's struggle to carry that blame, be it Tim himself, or Jimmy Cross, or any of the other men fighting alongside Kiowa in the war.

The story that Tim writes in this chapter could easily be meant to represent himself. He says that, "By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself"(158). This may be Tim's way of dealing with the trauma he had most definitely experienced while serving in the Vietnam war. On way he alludes to this being himself is that the character "Tim" modeled after himself is not in this chapter at all. Usually he puts Tim in the book when he wants the reader to understand how he felt at the time, but he has separated this story from himself to the point where he doesn't see this "young soldier"(170) as himself anymore. His repetition of the young man's guilt, "He, too, blamed himself...The boy recognized his own guilt and wanted only to lay out the full causes"(170), represents his feelings of guilt that he didn't understand without looking at them objectively as a writer. In the next chapter, "Field Trip"(181), Tim revisits the field where Kiowa was killed with his daughter, Kathleen. Since Tim has said that he has no daughter, this part of the book is purely fictional. Yet it is interesting that he brings the reader back to that field twenty years after the horrible mortar barrage in the field of shit. He wants this field to be memorable to everyone who reads this book, because it will help him cope with his own war experiences if people read his story, and understand and sympathize with how the young soldier was feeling.

The young soldier digging through the shit field could also represent the company's leader, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross. He and the young man are the only two men separate from the rest of the company, who are searching for Kiowa's body in the muck. As he approached the boy to attempt to console him, "Jimmy Cross remembered the kid's face but not the name. That happened sometimes. He tried to treat his men as individuals but sometimes the names just escaped him"(172). This means that the young man could be his inner conscience, wandering around completely lost because of the war. This separation happened to him because he had been forced to be something he didn't want to be for so long. Jimmy's heart was not in the war because, "military matters meant nothing to him. He did not care one way or the other about the war, and he had no desire to command" (168). Being forced to be a leader when, "Jimmy Cross did not want the responsibility of leading these men"(167), could be what's separated him from himself.

Since the war was such a traumatic experience for every soldier involved, this young man who seems to have lost himself to the war could represent soldiers fighting in war in general. So many people blamed themselves for the deaths of a close friend and/or fellow company member. Tim O'Brien, Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, even Azar suffered from survivor's guilt and blamed themselves for the death of Kiowa that terrible night stuck in the shit field. While talking about Kiowa, Norman says that it was, "Nobody's fault...Everyone's"(176). When Jimmy Cross is approaching the young man he is frantically searching for "Billie"(172), the picture of his girlfriend he had lost in the chaos of the night before. This carries a heavy burden for many soldiers seeing as the picture is symbolic to young men's girlfriends back at home, many who lose interest in their loved ones fighting thousands of miles away. The war changes people, and for everyone fighting in the war, at some point they will see that change, and think of themselves as almost a completely different person, there old self just wandering around lost in the "shit" of war.

The reason Tim O'Brien put all these different ways to interpret the stories in his novel was so that he can make his point relateable to as many people as possible. He wants people to understand that war isn't pretty; that you can easily lose yourself in war, without even being among the dead. By showing this from many different angles, he can share his story with a much wider audience of readers. Whether the reader thinks the young soldier to be a look at Tim through his own eyes, or Jimmy Cross's inner terrified conscience, or just another soldier at war, learning to cope with the blame of survivor's guilt, Tim O'Brien gives this story from The Things They Carried a powerful meaning.