The Things They Carried
B.G.
Perhaps the most notable and poignant of O'Brien's writing about the Viet Nam war, the title chapter of The Things They Carried touches upon a number of different aspects of the war and its effect upon both its soldiers and the home nation.
In addition to the three standard weapons -- the M-6o, M-16, and M-79 -- they carried whatever presented itself, or whatever seemed appropriate as a means of killing or staying alive. They carried catch-as-catch-can. At various times, in various situations, they carried M-14s and CAR15s and Swedish Ks and grease guns and captured AK-47s and Chi-Coms and RPGs and Simonov carbines and black market Uzis and .38-caliber Smith & Wesson handguns and 66 min LAWS and shotguns and silencers and blackjacks and bayonets and C-4 plastic explosives. Lee Strunk carried a slingshot; a weapon of last resort, he called it. Mitchell Sanders carried brass knuckles. Kiowa carried his grandfather's feathered hatchet. Every third or fourth man carried a Claymore antipersonnel mine -- 3.5 pounds with its firing device. They all carried fragmentation grenades -- 14 ounces each. They all carried at least one M-18 colored smoke grenade -- 24 ounces. Some carried CS or tear gas grenades. Some carried white phosphorus grenades. They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.
[...]
Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself Vietnam, the place, the soil -- a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.
The men all carry their identities, preserving Americana and their home cultures by means of baubles and toys, representative of the larger burden of the American ideal that they bore on their backs. They also carried and indubitably large capacity for death and destruction, which obviously is a warping force upon each soldier.
The Things They Carried (the book, not the story) is a mix of current-day reflections of O'Brien's and fictional accounts. The juxtaposition of the war as viewed in the 90s and opposed to a view from the thick of it is especially telling, in that readers can see precisely how the construction of a Viet Nam vet identity and an American identity, post-war, are so difficult to do with a war at the heart of such division and turmoil. For that matter, war in general.