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Lieutenant Cross Character Analysis

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In the story written by Tim O’Brien called “The Things They Carried”, he tells a story set during a war about the evolution of young soldiers as their mindset is affected by what they see and feel. The soldiers each carry physical and emotional weights that allow them to keep their humanity but in war, the same things that are valued in the outside world become a distraction and potentially fatal. While Martha is not physically fighting the mind with them she is subconsciously in the mind of Lieutenant Cross. Martha represents everything war is not, she represents innocence, love, and affection, that to him is a way to get away from what’s going on around him. Martha is described as a very artistic person; she is a junior at Saint Sebastian college and in the letters Lieutenant cross carries with him she writes in a very beautiful way about trivial things like her professors, roommates and her midterm exams. The letters she writes are not

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