Fin.

“The Things They Carried” has two major themes. First, and this is true of any book set in Vietnam, it is about the horrors of war and the way that it changes the people who live through it. In Vietnam especially that change, along with the deaths and injuries that were more easily counted, seemed like a tragic waste of the young men of an entire generation. Second, the message of “The Things They Carried” speaks to the baggage that we all carry around; those things from our history that we can’t or won’t forget so we can move past them.  O’Brien eventually makes peace with his experience and puts closure to Kiowa’s place in his own story. This gives us all hope that we can do the same.

Dig

Ultimately everyone in the book had something that digs at them, no matter how hard they tried. Dave Jenson carried guilt and paranoia that was so pervasive that it became a "sickness that cleverly attaches and multiplies" to the point that he believed he needed to break his own nose with a pistol in order to right the wrong of injuring Strunk over the jackknife. This individual act of insanity was surprisingly typical considering the type of war being fought. 

We all have a sickness
That cleverly attaches and multiplies
No matter how we try.
We all have someone that digs at us.
At least we dig each other.
So when sickness turns my ego up
I know you'll act as a clever medicine.

Life is a highway.

Back in the present, with the urge to reflect on the war beginning to wane, O’Brien begins to reconcile his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam with the truth of who he is as a writer and as a father in “Field Trip”. He clearly hasn’t exorcised the demons that haunt him and keep him from gaining closure from those days as a soldier, especially the feelings that remain surrounding the issues of Kiowa’s death. Even he was surprised by the emotions that came back when he returned years later and found the shit field where Kiowa died. It all comes rushing back when he says, “there it is” with a rough and chalky tone. His life has been a highway, with defined stops and points of interest along the way, and to move forward he must be at peace with what he sees in the rear-view mirror. He takes his daughter with him to Vietnam to return Kiowa’s sandals as an act of connecting these two points of his life’s journey so he can make peace with moving forward.

Life's like a road that you travel on
When there's one day here and the next day gone
Sometimes you bend, sometimes you stand
Sometimes you turn your back to the wind
There's a world outside every darkened door
Where blues won't haunt you anymore
Where brave are free and lovers soar
Come ride with me to the distant shore

America, Fuck Yeah!

It was the US Government that wanted our young men down in a hole. In spite of our country’s immense strength and wealth, were impotent in the face of a weaker enemy who was willing to employ a “hit and run” strategy. Our strategy in turn was to burn everything in sight like a petulant pyromaniac toddler. It was an imprecise and desperate method and spoke more about rage and frustration than strategy and strength. Today, we have a popular internet meme (see below) of using the panicked exclamation “Kill it with fire!” When a troop came under fire from just a single sniper, it was this overarching panic that led Lt. Cross to call in a napalm strike. This was obvious overkill meant to make the soldiers feel better about their own power rather than to actually improve their safety. Nothing sums that up better than the sentiment of “America, Fuck Yeah!”

Freedom is the only way yeah,

Terrorist your game is through cause now you have to answer too, 

America, FUCK YEAH!

Crooked Jack

Of course Kiowa never got to reflect on a lifetime of experiences; the joy and pain of a full time lived. Right up until he was blown up he was strong and vibrant, with all of the potential of a young, strong man. Most of soldiers who went off to Vietnam, never wanted to be there in the first place. They had no aptitude for life on the front lines or in a uniform. Their country needed to tap into their strength, their stamina, their testosterone-fueled rage, and their country used them for all they had before tossing them either into a hole or back into a society they were unprepared to face.

Crooked Jack talks about a man who was “tall and true, all of six foot two. But they broke him across the back” and “could work hard hours long.” When using up young men like natural resources, a society should take better care that they aren’t being wasted.

Our sweat and tears, our hopes and fears,
Bound up in shuttering jams
They say that honest toil is good
For the spirit and the soul
But believe me boys, it's for sweat and blood
That they want you down that hole

100 years

Linda’s story closes “The Lives of the Dead.” We all die, but as Mitchell Sanders reminds us, “death sucks.” As O’Brien recites the litany of those who have died throughout his life, we see them as they lived as well as the way they died. This chapter serves to tie together the stories of the past, how it is shaping the future, and what it may mean for the future. A dreamlike quality softens this chapter, and creates the sense of the writer reflecting upon a life that it about to end.

The words of “100 Years” serve the same purpose, but are more uplifting. They’re a welcome palate cleanser after basking in the heaviness and despair of the Vietnam war.

I'm 99 for a moment 
 Dying for just another moment 
 And I'm just dreaming Counting the ways to where you are 

Grey Street.

O’Brien’s first love, Linda, died as a child from cancer but her memory lives on as the affect her brief life had on O’Brien’s storytelling. When a child has a sibling or close friend die, it causes that child to face their own mortality and that of their loved ones. This often occurs at an age when they should have little more to worry about than whether or not their homework is done. O’Brien’s love for Linda was so intense that after her death, he was no longer able to view the world in the vivid colors of an innocent child. 
Even before reading the story of Linda’s life and death, it was clear that O’Brien’s point of view was that of a man with a damaged heart. For example, he would tell a story that was full of engaging detail, intimate truth, and food for thought then turn on a dime and admit that the events of the story had never occurred. Mixing the vivid colors of the story until what was left was grey.
It dulled the experience of reading the stories, no matter how interesting or brilliantly constructed they were, it became impossible to read without wondering all along what was coming around the corner to spoil things. The result was as if a talented painter had created a masterpiece and then, when it was dry, placed it face down on the glass and made a photocopy. Understanding O’Brien’s childhood pain made this mode of storytelling easier to sympathize with.

Linda’s story reminds me of these words from “Grey Street”, but so does the entire book.

There's a loneliness inside her
And she'd do anything to fill it in
And though it's red blood bleeding from her now,
It feels like cold blue ice in her heart
When all the colors mix together 

It's grey, and it breaks her heart 

Forever young.

Even though Norman made it home alive, the war killed him in the end. He joined Kiowa on the other side in 1978 when he committed suicide by hanging himself at the YMCA. This was the fate of so many veterans of the Vietnam war, other ended up homeless or succumbed to self-inflicted diseases such as alcoholism. America sent her young men off to war to be little more than child-soldiers, and they returned as men; their youth having been lost to the hell of war. In “The Man I Killed”, O’Brien shows us the tragedy of this lost youth. Even though the man that was killed in this fictionalized account was Vietnamese, he personifies the lost hopes and dreams of every young man who grew up thinking that he would be something else, be it a mill-worker or mathematician, and found himself becoming a soldier instead. Each one of these men who were plucked away from hopes and dreams, sweethearts back home, and mothers who worried sick about them was able to live forever in memory, frozen in history as a young man:

Some are like water, some are like the heat 
 Some are a melody and some are the beat 
 Sooner or later they all will be gone 
 Why don't they stay young 
 It's so hard to get old without a cause I don't want to perish like a fading horse 
Forever young, I want to be forever young 
 Do you really want to live forever, forever forever

Remember When it Rained?

Norman Bowker arrived home with one of those unnamable injuries. He’s living in this own private hell with his own type of craziness to deal with. He faces his pain in “Speaking of Courage” by driving the circle around 7-mile Lake 12 times alone in his truck. It’s July 4^th, and he’s searching for his own Independence; freedom from the pain and loneliness he’s suffered from ever since he returned from Vietnam. Each time he makes a loop around the lake, he replays to himself the night Kiowa died. In each loop, he imagines a different friend to whom he can tell the story of that night. Even though the story is just a little bit different every time he tells it, certain elements are always the same. The memory starts with the recollection of just how much it rained. He recalls the stench and how he almost won the Silver Star. Also, on each lap he makes around that lake he feels the pain of having no one real to talk to about his pain, especially his father who only cared about goddamn medals:

Ohhhhhh Remember when it rained.
 I felt the ground and looked up high And called your name.
 Ohhhhhh Remember when it rained. 
 In the water I remain Running down

Crazy

In war, there are no unwounded soldiers. Everyone who enters a war zone comes away with scars. They may not be visible, they may not be physical. But no one comes home with all of their pieces intact. In fact, it may even be possible that those with physical injuries have it easier. They get sympathy. They get the parades. It’s the soldiers who come home with invisible wounds whose tempers grow short, have difficulty working again at a regular job, and turn to alcohol and drugs to dull the pain. In getting to know the characters in “The Things They Carried”, we see that no matter how pure, kind-hearted, or wholesome a man was when he boarded the plane to Vietnam he’s still turned into a killer before its time to go back home. Even Mary-Anne can’t hold her grip on reality. She enters the story as the very picture of the American dream-girl. She’s beautiful and feminine, pure and sweet. But then she arrives in Vietnam and within just a few weeks, she goes crazy. See? Everything has it in them, it just takes a catalyst to draw it out:

Maybe I'm Crazy
Maybe Your Crazy
Maybe We're Crazy
Probably

(Artist conception)

Shoebox

O’Brien sets the mood and introduces us to the characters, their backgrounds, and their general psychology by listing the things they carried with them into war. There are, of course, the tools for war; the guns, ammunition, armor, and food rations. However, each man carries with him much more than that. Each man carries, standard issue, a shoebox of lies full of totems that remind him of life back home. Unfortunately, in each case the totem represents the lies the man is telling himself. Each photo, letter, rock, rabbit foot and pair of pantyhose is almost completely detached from the reality of each man’s life. War is hell, and the soldiers in “The Things They Carried” have each idealized life back home. They have built their own false version of heaven, built from the materials in their shoebox of lies:

Was it something I said, or was it something you read
That's making me think that I should never have come here
I can offer you lies, I can tell you good-bye,
I can tell you I'm sorry, But I can't tell you the truth, dear
And what if I could - would it do any good?
You'll still never get to see the contents of My shoe box
Shoe box of lies
Shoe box
Shoe box of lies