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The Idea Of Friendship In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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War: The Idea of Friendship In the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, the stories are mainly focused on the Vietnamese War and it’s effects on the soldiers. The two stories, Friends and Enemies clearly portray the personal problems faced by the soldiers during the war instead of problems in the actual war that the soldiers are fighting. In Enemies, Dave Jensen breaks Lee Strunk's nose over a stolen jackknife and is later found contemplating whether or not Strunk will get his revenge on him, causing him to become delusional. In Friends, however, both Strunk and Jensen agree to sign a pact that says if anyone of them gets hurt badly, the other will kill them. This pact allows room for the two soldiers to soon become friends. These …show more content…

In “Enemies”, Jensen is scared that Lee Strunk will try to hurt him as much as he hurt him, and this causes him to question the “distinction between good and bad guys” even though he and Lee Strunk are fighting on the same side(O’Brien, 60). Jensen believes he has no allies in the war even though he is fighting amongst a group of men on the same side in the war. Jensen always takes precaution by setting up a foxhole on the far side of the perimeter; he is “always on guard”(60). In “Friends”, just like in “Enemies” Jensen is still conflicted as to what it means to be a friend. When Lee Strunk gets his leg blown off after the pact is signed, Jensen is faced with the task of killing Strunk in order to fulfill the pact or sparing Strunk’s life because he swore to it. Faced with both these problems, Jensen feels as if he is betraying Strunk if he lets him live or if he lets him die. When he later hears that Strunk has died, Jensen seemed “relieved of an enormous weight” because suddenly he wasn’t betraying anyone anymore(63). War creates an undefinable version of the idea of friendship, where both parties don’t know where they stand amongst one

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