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What Makes A Soldier In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

660 Words3 Pages

Soldiers, while in combat, have difficult thoughts going through their heads. “No, I can’t kill these people, it’s unethical. This is for my country, I have to do what it takes to protect my home.” Soldier are disillusion when going to war. They expect glory and honor, but in actuality, they will do the unspeakable and will not expect an impact on their life. Soldiers who survives in combat decide to write about their experiences, often as a coping mechanism. War can physically and emotionally change a person. Humanity makes a person feel alive, happy and good-natured however, experiences can alter these feelings. Throughout the pieces, The Things They Carried, Soldier's Home and “We Never Know”, the characters experience the horrors of war …show more content…

In, The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien, the narrator and protagonist, kills a man who he believes is innocent. This impacts him because he is a sensitive man before the war. He becomes an emotional mess after the grenade goes off; seeing what his actions does to other people. He does not speak to Kiowa, his best friend, or stops staring at the body. Tim writes, “I try not to dwell on it, but now and then… I’ll look up and see the young man coming out of the morning fog” (O’Brien 134). When the war is over, he thinks about the man he kills everyday. His mind is altered due to the war because Tim is being haunted by the horrendous act he commits. It marks him and Tim knows from his experiences and hallucinations that he will never forget his first …show more content…

In the short story, The Soldier’s Home, Krebs, protagonist, takes what he learns in the war and applies it to his daily life. Krebs thought, “Still none of it had touched him. He had felt sorry for his mother and she had made him lie” (Hemingway 76). As he comes back from the war, his attitude is different when it comes to the people he loves. The war teaches him to uncomplicate his life however, his mother is complicated and he does not want to see her upset. Krebs becomes emotionless and desensitized by emotions like when his mother starts to shed

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Tim O’Brien, in his novel The Things They Carried, provides a first-hand account of the experiences of a platoon of young American soldiers in the Vietnam War. Through the stories he tells, O’Brien is able to relate to the reader the atmospheres of the situations that the soldiers were placed in. He also emphasizes the roles of both the physical and mental “things” that he and every other soldier carried on their missions throughout the war. Many of the physical objects that the soldiers kept with them either served a vital purpose to their survival or an emotional purpose to help remind them of the things they loved.

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