Plot Overview Chapter 1: “the things they carried” THIS CHAPTER DESCRIBES THE PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL BURDENS EACH SOLDIER IN ALPHA COMPANY CARRIES. THESE VARY DEPENDING ON THE PERSONALITY, RANK, MENTAL STABILITY, RELIGION, SUPERSTITION, AND POSITION. FOR EXAMPLE LIEUTENANT JIMMY CROSS CARRIES LETTERS FROM A GIRL NAME MARTHA (10 OUNCES) WHO HE LOVES BUT DOES NOT FEEL THE SAME ABOUT HIM, MEMORIES OF HER, A LITTLE PEBBLE MARTHA HAD SENT HIM, COMPASS, MAPS, CODE BOOKS, BINOCULARS, .45 CABLE PISTOL, STROBE LIGHT, RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE LIVES OF HIS MEN, AND AROUND 25 POUNDS OF OTHER NECESSARY ITEMS ALL SOLDIERS HAD TO HAVE TO STAY ALIVE. THE REST OF THE CHAPTER GOES ON TO EXPLAIN WHAT THE OTHER MEN CARRIED AND THEN THE DEATH OF TED LAVENDER. THIS DEATH ALLOWING THE READER TO THE SITUATION THE SOLDIERS ARE REALLY IN, THEIR REACTION IS WORTH NOTING BECAUSE UNLIKE THE MORNING SURROUNDING SOMEONE GETTING SHOT IN THE HEAD BRINGS ABOUT IN SOCIETY IN WAR THE REACTION IS VERY DIFFERENT. LAVENDER’S DEATH LEADS JIMMY CROSS TO BURN MARTHA’S LETTERS AND PHOTOGRAPHS BECAUSE HE FEELS RESPONSIBLE FOR LAVENDER’S DEATH. HE BELIEVES THAT HE TRADED HIS JOB AS LEADER AND PROTECTOR OF THE MEN’S LIVES TO DAY DREAM ABOUT MARTHA, WHO WAS SAFE, MILES AWAY, AND HAPPY WITHOUT HIM. THIS CHAPTER BRINGS THE READER DIRECTLY INTO THE WAR, DESCRIBING HOW IT FEELS TO BE IN THE MIDDLE OF FIRE (O’BRIAN 19), SEE A SOLDIER DIE, SEE CORPSES AND WALK PAST KNOWING IT COULD BE THEM. O’BRIAN DESCRIBES THE FEAR, GUILT, LOVE, TERROR, PURE LIFE, AND SEVER DEADLINESS SOLDIERS ENCOUNTER IN WAR, THEMSELVES AND EACH OTHER. - “THEY CARRIED THEIR REPUTATIONS. THEY CARRIED THE SOLDIER’S GREATEST FEAR, WHICH WAS THE FEAR OF BLUSHING. THEY KILLED AND DIED BECAUSE THEY WERE EMBARRASSED NOT TO. IT WAS THIS THAT HAD BROUGHT THEM TO THE WAR IN THE FIRST PLACE, NOTHING POSITIVE, NO DREAMS IF GLORY OR HONOR, JUST TO AVOID THE BLUSH OF DISHONOR. THEY DIED SO AS NOT TO DIE OF EMBARRASSMENT”
CHAPTER 2 “LOVE” THIS CHAPTER ADDRESSES THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN JIMMY CROSS AND MARTHA. IT IS SET MANY YEARS AFTER THE WAR WHEN JIMMY CROSS IS AT THE HOME OF TIM O’BRIAN IN MASSACHUSETTS. THIS CHAPTER SHOWS THE EFFECTS OF WAR ON SOME MEN (O’BRIAN AD CROSS) THE EFFECTS OF WAR ON OTHER MEN ARE ADDRESSED LATER. CHAPTERS 3 “SPIN” Insisting that sometimes war is less violent and more sweet, O’Brien shares disconnected memories of the war. Azar gives a bar of chocolate to a little boy with a plastic leg. Mitchell Sanders sits under a tree, picking lice off his body and depositing them in an envelope addressed to his Ohio draft board. Every night, Henry Dobbins and Norman Bowker dig a foxhole and play checkers. The narrator stops the string of anecdotes to say that he is now forty-three years old and a writer, and that reliving the memories has caused them to recur. He insists that the bad memories live on and never stop happening. He says his guilt has not ceased and that his daughter Kathleen advises him to write about something else. Nevertheless, he says, writing about what one remembers is a means of coping with those things one can’t forget. O’Brien describes when the Alpha Company enlists an old Vietnamese man whom they call a “poppa-san” to guide the platoon through the mine fields on the Batangan Peninsula. When he is done, the troops are sad to leave their steadfast guide. Mitchell Sanders tells a story of a man who went AWOL in order to sleep with a Red Cross nurse. After several days, the man rejoined his unit and was more excited than ever about getting back into combat, saying that after so much peace, he wanted to hurt again. Norman Bowker whispers one night that if he could have one wish it would be for his father to stop bothering him about earning medals. Kiowa teaches Rat Kiley and Dave Jensen a rain dance, and when they ask him, afterward, where the rain was, he replies, “The earth is slow, but the buffalo is patient.” Ted Lavender adopts a puppy, and Azar later kills it, claiming his own immaturity as an excuse. Henry Dobbins sings to himself as he sews on his new buck-sergeant stripes. Lavender occasionally goes too heavy on the tranquilizers and calls the war “nice” and “mellow.” After Curt Lemon is killed, he hangs in pieces on a tree. Last comes the vision of a dead, young man and Kiowa’s voice ringing in O’Brien’s ear, assuring him, repeatedly, that O’Brien didn’t have a choice.
Chapter 4 “On the Rainy River” O’Brien says he has not told this story to his parents, siblings, or wife. He speaks of living with the shame of the story, whose events occurred during the summer of 1968. On June 17, 1968, a month after he graduates from Macalaster College, Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, and president of the student body, Tim O’Brien receives his draft notice to fight in the Vietnam War. The war seems wrong to him, its causes and effects uncertain. Like most Americans, the young O’Brien doesn’t know what happened to the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin, and he can’t discern what type of person Ho Chi Minh, the president of North Vietnam, really is. In college, O’Brien took a stand against the war. The day the draft notice is delivered, O’Brien thinks that he is too good to fight the war. Although his community pressures him to go, he resists making a decision about whether to go to war or flee. In the middle of the summer, O’Brien begins thinking seriously about fleeing to Canada, eight hours north of Worthington. His conscience and instincts tell him to run. He worries, however, that such an action will lose him the respect of his family and community. He imagines the people he knows gossiping about him in the local café. During his sleepless nights, he struggles with his anger at the lack of perspective on the part of those who influenced him. One day, O’Brien cracks. Feeling what he describes as a physical rupture in his chest, he leaves work suddenly, drives home, and writes a vague note to his family. He heads north and then west along the Rainy River, which separates Minnesota from Canada. The next afternoon, after spending the night behind a closed-down gas station, he pulls into a dilapidated fishing resort, the Tip Top Lodge, and meets the elderly proprietor, Elroy Berdahl. The two spend six days together, eating meals, hiking, and playing Scrabble. Although O’Brien never mentions his reason for going to the Canadian border, he has the sense that Elroy knows, since the quiet old man is sharp and intelligent. One night O’Brien inquires about his bill, and after the two men discuss O’Brien’s work—washing dishes and doing odd jobs—in relation to the cost of the room, Elroy concludes that he owes O’Brien more than a hundred dollars and offers O’Brien two hundred. O’Brien refuses the money, but the next morning he finds four fifty-dollar bills in an envelope tacked to his door. On O’Brien’s last full day at the Tip Top Lodge, Elroy takes him fishing on the Rainy River. During the voyage it occurs to O’Brien that they must have stopped in Canadian territory—soon after, Elroy stops the boat. O’Brien stares at the shoreline of Canada, twenty yards ahead of him, and wonders what to do. Elroy pretends not to notice as O’Brien bursts into tears. O’Brien tells himself he will run to Canada, but he silently concludes that he will go to war because he is embarrassed not to. Elroy pulls in his line and turns the boat back toward Minnesota. The next morning, O’Brien washes the breakfast dishes, leaves the two hundred dollars on the kitchen counter, and drives south to his home. He then goes off to war.
Chapter 5 “Enemies” One morning on patrol Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk get into a fistfight over a missing jackknife that Jensen thinks Strunk has stolen. Jensen breaks Strunk’s nose, hitting him repeatedly and without mercy. Afterward, Jensen is nervous that Strunk will try to get revenge and pays special attention to Strunk’s whereabouts. Finally, crazed by apprehension, Jensen fires his gun into the air and calls out Strunk’s name. Later that night, he borrows a pistol and uses it to break his own nose in order to even the score. The next morning, Strunk is amused by the news, admitting that he did steal Jensen’s jackknife. Chapter 6 “Friends” Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk learn to trust each other. They resolve that if one gets seriously wounded, the other will kill him to put him out of his misery. In October, Strunk’s lower leg gets blown off by a mortar round. Jensen kneels at his side and Strunk repeatedly begs not to be killed. Strunk is loaded into a helicopter, and later Jensen is relieved to learn that Strunk didn’t survive the trip.
Chapter 7 “How to tell a true war story” O’Brien prefaces this story by saying that it is true. A week after his friend is killed, Rat Kiley writes a letter to the friend’s sister, explaining what a hero her brother was and how much he loved him. Two months pass, and the sister never writes back. Kiley, frustrated, spits and calls the sister a “dumb cooze.” He describes a story that Mitchell Sanders tells. Sanders recounts the experience of a troop that goes into the mountains on a listening post operation. He says that after a few days, the men hear strange echoes and music—chimes and xylophones—and become frightened. One night, the men hear voices and noises that sound like a cocktail party. After a while they hear singing and chanting, as well as talking monkeys and trees. They order air strikes and they burn and shoot down everything they can find. Still, in the morning, they hear the noises. So they pack up their gear and head down the mountain, where their colonel asks them what they heard. They have no answer. He relays the story of Curt Lemon’s death in a few, brief vignettes. He explains that the platoon crossed a muddy river and on the third day Lemon was killed and Kiley lost his best friend. Later that day, higher in the mountains, Kiley shot a Viet Cong water buffalo repeatedly—though the animal was destroyed and bleeding, it remained alive. Finally Kiowa and Sanders picked up the buffalo and dumped it in the village well. O’Brien remembers how Lemon died. Lemon was smiling and talking to Kiley one second and was blown into a tree the next. Jensen and O’Brien were ordered to climb the tree to retrieve Lemon’s body, and Jensen sang “Lemon Tree” as they threw down the body parts. Thinking of Curt Lemon, O’Brien concludes he must have thought the sunlight was killing him. O’Brien wishes he could get the story right—the way the sunlight seemed to gather Lemon and carry him up in the air—so that we could believe what Lemon must have seen as his final truth. - “ a true war story is never moral” (68) - “you can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don’t care for obscenity you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty” (69). - “It’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own truth” (71). - “A true war story cannot be believed... Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t...in other cases you can’t even tell a true war story. Sometimes it’s just beyond telling” (71) - “You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end” (76). - “war makes you a man, i makes you dead” (80) - “To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true....Proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life” (81) - “you are never more alive than when you’re almost dead: (81) - “A true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that drawn spreads out on a river when you know you mist cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do, it’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen”. (85)
Chapter 8 “The dentist” O’Brien says that mourning Curt Lemon was difficult for him because he didn’t know him well, but in order to avoid getting sentimental, he tells a brief Curt Lemon story. In February, the men are at work in an area of operations along the South China Sea. One day, an Army dentist is flown in to check the men’s teeth. As the platoon sits, waiting to be checked one by one, Curt Lemon begins to tense up. Finally, he admits that in high school he had some bad experiences with dentists. He says that no one messes with his teeth and that when he’s called, he’ll refuse to go in. However, a few moments later, when the dentist calls him, Lemon rises and goes into the tent. He faints before the dentist can even lay a finger on him. Later that night he creeps back to the dental tent and insists that he has a killer toothache. Though the dentist can’t find any problem, Lemon demands his tooth be pulled. Finally, the dentist, shrugging, gives him a shot and yanks the perfectly good tooth out, to Lemon’s delight.
Chapter 9 “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” O’Brien says the most enduring Vietnam stories are those that are between the absolutely unbelievable and the mundane. Rat Kiley, who has a reputation for exaggeration, tells a story of his first assignment in the mountains of Chu Lai, in a protected and isolated area where he ran an aid station with eight other men near a river called the Song Tra Bong. One day, Eddie Diamond, the highest ranking man in his company and a pleasure-seeker, jokingly suggests that the area is so unguarded and seemingly safe that you could even bring a girl to the camp there. A younger medic, Mark Fossie, seems interested in the idea and goes off to write a letter. Six weeks later, his elementary school sweetheart, Mary Anne Bell, arrives, carried in by helicopter with a resupply shipment. Fossie explains that getting her to camp was difficult but not impossible and for the next two weeks, they carry on like school children. Mary Anne is curious and a fast learner—she picks up some Vietnamese and learns how to cook. When four casualties come in, she isn’t afraid to tend to them, learning how to repair arteries and shoot morphine. She drops her fussy feminine habits and cuts her hair short. After a while, Fossie suggests that Mary Anne think about going home, but she argues that she is content staying. She makes plans to travel before she and Fossie marry. She begins coming home later and a few times not at all. One night she is missing, and when Fossie goes out looking, he discovers that she has been out the entire night on an ambush, where she refused to carry a gun. The next morning, Fossie and Mary Anne exchange words and seem to have reached a new understanding. They become officially engaged and discuss wedding plans in the mess hall, but over the next several nights it becomes clear that there is a strain on their relationship. Fossie makes arrangements to send her home but Mary Anne is not pleased with the prospect—she becomes withdrawn, and she eventually disappears. Mary Anne returns three weeks later, but she doesn’t even stop at her fiancé’s bunk—she goes straight to the Special Forces hut. The next morning, Fossie stations himself outside the Special Forces area, where he waits until after midnight. When Kiley and Eddie Diamond go to check on Fossie, he says he can hear Mary Anne singing. He lunges forward into the hut, and the two others follow. Inside they see dozens of candles burning and hear tribal music. On a post near the back of the bunk is the head of a leopard—its skin dangles from the rafters. When Fossie finally sees Mary Anne she is in the same outfit—pink sweater, white blouse, cotton skirt—that she was wearing when she arrived weeks before. But when he approaches her, he sees a necklace made of human tongues around her neck. She insists to Fossie that what she is doing isn’t bad and that he, in his sheltered camp, doesn’t understand Vietnam. Kiley says that he never knew what happened with Mary Anne because three or four days later he received orders to join the Alpha Company. But he confesses that he loved Mary Anne—that everyone did. Two months after he left, when he ran into Eddie Diamond, he learned that Mary Anne delighted in night patrols and in the fire. She had crossed to the other side and had become part of the land. - “She had crossed to the other side. She was part of the land. She was wearing her culottes, her pink sweater, and necklace of human tongues. She was dangerous. She was ready for the kill” (116)
Chapter 10 “Stockings” O’Brien relates that on ambushes, and sometimes in bed, Henry Dobbins wears his girlfriend’s pantyhose around his neck. Superstitions are prevalent in Vietnam, and the pantyhose are Dobbins’s good luck charm. With the pantyhose around his neck, Dobbins survives tripping over a land mine, and a week later he survives a firefight. In October, Dobbins’s girlfriend dumps him. Despite the pain of the rejection, he ties the pantyhose around his neck, remarking that the magic hasn’t been lost. Chapter 11 “church” One afternoon, the platoon comes across an abandoned pagoda that seems to function as a church. Every day during the men’s stay there, which lasts more than a week, two monks bring them water and other goods. One day, while the monks clean and oil Dobbins’s M-60 machine gun, Dobbins says that though he isn’t a religious man and wouldn’t enjoy taking part in the sermons, he might like to join the church because he would enjoy interacting with people. Kiowa says that although he carries a Bible everywhere because he was raised to, he wouldn’t enjoy being a preacher. He does say, though, that he enjoys being in a church. When the monks finish cleaning the gun, Dobbins wipes off the excess oil and hands them each a can of peaches and a chocolate bar. Making a washing motion with his hands, he says that all one can do is be nice to them.
Chapter 12 “the man i killed” “The Man I Killed” begins with a list of physical attributes and possible characteristics of the man whom O’Brien killed with a grenade in My Khe. O’Brien describes the wounds that he inflicted. The man’s jaw was in his throat, he says, and his upper lip and teeth were missing. One eye was shut, and the other looked like a star-shaped hole. Kiowa confesses that maybe he doesn’t understand what O’Brien is going through, but he rationalizes that the young man was carrying a weapon and that they are fighting a war. He asks if O’Brien would rather trade places with him. O’Brien doesn’t respond to Kiowa. He imagines that the boy began studying at the university in Saigon in 1964, that he avoided politics and favored calculus. - “He knew he would fall dead and wake up in the stories of his village people” (130) Chapter 13 “Ambush” More than twenty years after the end of the war, O’Brien’s daughter Kathleen asks O’Brien if he has ever killed anyone. She contends that he can’t help himself from obsessively writing war stories because he killed someone. O’Brien, however, insists that he has never killed anyone. Reflecting on his lie, O’Brien pretends Kathleen is an adult and imagines that he might tell her the entire story of My Khe. Chapter 14 “Style” Though most of her village has burned to the ground and her family has been burned to death by the American soldiers, a Vietnamese girl of fourteen dances through the wreckage. The men of the platoon cannot understand why she is dancing. Azar contends that the dance is a strange ritual, but Dobbins insists that the girl probably just likes to dance. Later that night, Azar mocks the girl’s dancing by jumping and spinning, putting his hands against his ears and then making an erotic motion with his hips. Dobbins grabs Azar from behind, carries him over to the mouth of a well, and threatens to dump him in if he doesn’t dance properly.
Chapter 15 “Speaking of courage” After the war, Norman Bowker returns to Iowa. On the Fourth of July, as he drives his father’s big Chevrolet around the lake, he realizes that he has nowhere to go. He reminisces about his high school girlfriend, Sally Kramer, who is now married. He thinks about his friend Max Arnold, who drowned in the lake. He thinks also of his father, whose greatest hope, that Norman would bring home medals from Vietnam, was satisfied. Norman won seven medals in Vietnam, including the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, the Air Medal, the Army Commendation Medal, the Bronze Star, and the Purple Heart. He thinks about his father’s pride in those badges and then recalls how he almost won the Silver Star but blew his chance. He drives around the town again and again, flicks on the radio, orders a hamburger at the A&W, and imagines telling his father the story of the way he almost won the Silver Star, when the banks of the Song Tra Bong overflowed. The night the platoon settled in a field along the river, a group of Vietnamese women ran out to discourage them, but Lieutenant Jimmy Cross shooed them away. When they set up camp, they noticed a sour, fishlike smell. Finally, someone concluded that they had set up camp in a sewage field. Meanwhile, the rain poured down, and the earth bubbled with the heat and the excess moisture. Suddenly, rounds of mortar fell on the camp, and the field seemed to boil and explode. When the third round hit, Kiowa began screaming. Bowker saw Kiowa sink into the muck and grabbed him by the boot to pull him out. Yet Kiowa was lost, so Bowker let him go in order to save himself from sinking deeper into the muck. Bowker wants to relate this memory to someone, but he doesn’t have anyone to talk to. On his eleventh trip around the lake, he imagines telling his father the story and admitting that he did not act with the courage he hoped he might have. He imagines that his father might console him with the idea of the seven medals he did win. He parks his car and wades into the lake with his clothes on, submerging himself. He then stands up, folds his arms, and watches the holiday fireworks, remarking that they are pretty good, for
Chapter 16 “Notes” O’Brien says that “Speaking of Courage” was written at the request of Norman Bowker who, three years after the story was written, hung himself in the YMCA. O’Brien says that in 1975, right before Saigon finally collapsed, he received a seventeen-page, handwritten letter from Bowker saying that he couldn’t find a meaningful use for his life after the war. He worked several short-lived jobs and lived with his parents. At one point he enrolled in junior college, but he eventually dropped out. In his letter, Bowker told O’Brien that he had read his first book, If I Die in a Combat Zone, and that the book had brought back a great deal of memories. Bowker then suggested that O’Brien write a story about someone who feels that Vietnam robbed him of his will to live—he said he would write it himself but he couldn’t find the words. O’Brien explains that when he received Bowker’s letter he thought about how easily he transitioned from Vietnam to graduate school at Harvard University. He thought that without writing, he himself might have been paralyzed. While he was working on a new novel entitled Going After Cacc-iato, O’Brien thought of Bowker’s suggestion and began a chapter titled “Speaking of Courage.” But, following Bowker’s request, he did not use Bowker’s name. He substituted his own hometown scenery for Bowker’s and he omitted the story of the sewage field and the rain and Kiowa’s death in favor of his own protagonist’s story. The writing was easy, and he published the piece as a separate short story. Later, O’Brien realized that the postwar piece had no place in Going After Cacciato, a war novel, and that in order to be successful, the story would have to stand on its own in truth, no matter how much the prospect frightened O’Brien. When the story was anthologized a year later, O’Brien sent a copy to Bowker, who was upset about the absence of Kiowa. Eight months later Bowker hung himself. A decade later, O’Brien has revised the story and has come to terms with it—he says the central incident, about the night on the Song Tra Bong and the death of Kiowa, has been restored. But he contends that he does not want to imply that Bowker did not have a lapse of courage that was responsible for the death of Kiowa. - “By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened... and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but nonetheless help to clarify and explain.
Chapter 17 “In the field” The morning after Kiowa’s death, the platoon wades in the mud of the sewage field with Jimmy Cross leading the way. Cross thinks of Kiowa and the crime that is his death. He concludes that although the order to camp came from a higher power, he made a mistake letting his men camp on the dangerous riverbank. He decides to write a letter to Kiowa’s father saying what a good soldier Kiowa was. When the search for Kiowa’s body gets underway on the cold, wet morning, Azar begins cracking jokes about “eating shit” and “biting the dirt,” and Bowker rebukes him. Halfway across the field, Mitchell Sanders discovers Kiowa’s rucksack, and the men begin wading in the muck, desperately searching for the body. Meanwhile, Jimmy Cross finishes composing the letter in his head and reflects that he never wanted the responsibility of leadership in the first place—he signed up for Reserve Officers Training Corps without giving thought to the consequences. He blames himself for making the wrong decision, concluding that he should have followed his first impulse and removed the men from the field. He feels that his oversight caused Kiowa’s death. In the distance he notices the shaking body of a young soldier and goes over to speak to him. The soldier too blames himself for being unable to save Kiowa and becomes determined to find the body because Kiowa was carrying the only existing picture of the soldier’s ex-girlfriend. After the platoon has spent a half a day wading in the field, Azar ceases his joking. The men find Kiowa’s body wedged between a layer of mud, take hold of the two boots, and pull. Unable to move it, they call over Dobbins and Kiley, who also help pull. After ten minutes and more pulling, Kiowa’s body rises to the surface covered with blue-green mud. Harrowed and relieved, the men clean him up and then try to take their mind off him. Azar apologizes for the jokes. Cross squats in the muck, revising the letter to Kiowa’s father in his head. He notices the unnamed soldier, still searching for the missing picture. The soldier tries to get Cross’s attention, saying he has to explain something. But Cross ignores him, choosing instead to float in the muck, thinking about blame, responsibility, and golf.
Chapter 18 “Good form” O’Brien talks about the difference between real truth and story truth. He says he wants to explain the structure of his book. He says that he saw a man die on a trail near My Khe, but that he did not kill him. He then says that he made up this story. He says he wants us to feel what he felt and because of that, sometimes story truth is truer than happening truth. He says that what stories can do is make things present. Imagining Kathleen asking him if he’s ever killed anyone, O’Brien envisions saying yes and then envisions saying no. Chapter 19 “Field trip” O’Brien says that a few months after finishing the story “In the Field,” he returns to the site of Kiowa’s death with his daughter Kathleen and an interpreter. He says though the field does look familiar, it is not how he remembers it—everything, he says, is dry. Kathleen complains that the land stinks. She has just turned ten and has received the trip as a birthday gift intended to grant her insight into her father’s history. But though she attempts to act tolerant, she is bored. She can’t understand the war or why her father fought in it. As she and O’Brien approach the field, Kathleen is amused by the interpreter’s display of magic tricks. O’Brien reflects on the way the field, which now looks so different, could have the power to swallow his best friend and part of his life. He goes for a quick swim, surprising and disgusting Kathleen, who threatens to tell her mother. But before he leaves the river, he takes Kiowa’s moccasins and leaves them in the spot where he imagines his friend settled into the river. When O’Brien returns, Kathleen asks him if an old man in the field is mad at him. O’Brien says that all the anger is finished.
O’Brien recalls that he was shot twice—the first time, images from Gene Autry movies race through his head, and he ends up on the lap of Rat Kiley, the medic. During and after his treatment, O’Brien appreciates Kiley’s skill, courage, and ease. When O’Brien returns from his recovery almost a month later, Kiley has been wounded and shipped off and a new medic named Bobby Jorgenson has taken his place. When O’Brien is shot the second time, Jorgenson is incapable of treating his shock, and the result is a harrowing, painful experience for O’Brien. The realization that he was near death for no good reason leaves O’Brien seething—he vows to exact revenge on the frightened, incompetent Jorgenson. He spends more time in the hospital and then is transferred to the battalion supply section, a far more comfortable and less dangerous assignment. Meanwhile, his backside hurts and he is forced to sleep on his stomach and smear antibacterial ointment on himself several times a day. During the miserable nights, he renews his vow to make Jorgenson pay. When the company comes for a routine operation to where O’Brien is recovering, O’Brien meets the helicopters. He listens to stories from his friends—especially one about a soldier who decided to go for a swim and ended up with a disease that was later treated by Jorgenson—but he is most concerned with finding Jorgenson. Mitchell Sanders encourages O’Brien to leave Jorgenson alone, saying that he is one of the Alpha Company now and implying that O’Brien is no longer a member of the company. The next morning, O’Brien runs into Jorgenson, who apologizes for his inept treatment of O’Brien, saying that he was scared and that since O’Brien was shot, he has felt a great deal of remorse. O’Brien begins resenting Jorgenson for making him feel guilty. O’Brien attempts to enlist his friends in his plans for revenge, but the only one who will concede to get involved is Azar. The two go to spook Jorgenson as he serves all-night duty. O’Brien says the amount of fear one feels multiplies as one sits alone, wondering and worrying. At midnight, they jerk some ropes, which gives the illusion of the enemy in the bush. O’Brien identifies with Jorgenson and feels his fear. Later, they set flares, and when Jorgenson bursts from his position and rolls toward a heap of sandbags, O’Brien finally feels vindicated. He tells Azar that he’s had enough, but Azar, who loves to make trouble, wants to finish what they’ve started. O’Brien has a flashback of being shot, thinks about being in shock, and once again resents Jorgenson’s deficiencies. He resolves to follow through. Azar and O’Brien set off flare after flare and make a white sandbag move to spook Jorgenson further. But Jorgenson does not lose his cool—instead he advances toward O’Brien, calling out his name. Azar kicks O’Brien in the head, declares him pathetic, and goes off to bed. He later reconciles with O’Brien. The two men shake hands, and Jorgenson compliments O’Brien’s dramatic touch and asks him if they’re even now. The two jokingly decide to scare Azar. - “. . . after seven months in the bush I realized that those high, civilized trappings had somehow been crushed under the weight of the simple daily realities. I'd turned mean inside” (200)
Chapter 21 “Night Life” Although O’Brien isn’t there when Rat Kiley sustains the injury that gets him sent to Japan, Mitchell Sanders relays the story later. When the platoon is in the foothills west of Quang Ngai City, they receive word of possible danger, so they sleep all day and march all night. The tension affects the men in different ways—Jensen takes vitamins, Cross takes NoDoz, and Kiley simply retreats into himself. For six days he says nothing, and then he can’t stop talking. He begins scratching himself constantly and complaining of the bugs. It is sad, Sanders later remembers, and strange, but everyone feels the effects of the operation. They are chasing ghosts. One afternoon, Kiley almost breaks down, confessing to Sanders that he doesn’t think he is cut out to be a medic, always picking up parts and plugging up holes. He mentions Ted Lavender and Curt Lemon, incredulous that they could be so alive one moment and so dead the next. He says that he is haunted by images of body parts, especially at night. He sees his own body and he imagines bugs chewing through him. The next morning, he shoots himself in the toe—an injury large enough to earn his release from duty. No one blames him, and Cross, the biggest critic of Kiley’s cowardice, says that he will vouch for him.
Chapter 22 “The lives of the dead” O’Brien has been at war for only four days when the platoon is fired on by a village near the South China Sea. Cross orders an air strike and the platoon watches the village burn. Dave Jensen pokes fun at a dead old man whose right arm has been blown off and encourages O’Brien to do the same, to “show a little respect for your elders.” O’Brien refuses, and Kiowa tells him he’s done the right thing. He asks if the old man was O’Brien’s first experience with a dead body, and O’Brien says no, thinking of his first date, Linda. During the spring of 1956, O’Brien was in love with nine-year-old Linda, his beautifully fragile schoolmate who had taken to wearing a red cap everywhere. He arranged for his parents to take him and Linda to the movies, to see The Man Who Never Was—a World War II film that contained an image of a corpse falling into the sea. When the movie was over, and the two couples had made a stop at Dairy Queen, they dropped Linda off, and the fourth-grade O’Brien knew then that he was in love. Linda continued to wear her red cap every day, despite being taunted for it. One day a fellow classmate, Nick Veenhof, pulled off the cap, revealing Linda’s slowly balding head. Linda said nothing. O’Brien later explains that Linda had a brain tumor and soon died. He had known she was sick, but Nick was the one to break the news, saying O’Brien’s girlfriend had “kicked the bucket.” O’Brien went to the funeral home with his father and marveled at how strange and unreal it was to see Linda’s body in a casket. He stared for a while, saying nothing, until his father, unable to address the situation, proposed a trip to the ice cream store. Later, O’Brien became withdrawn and obsessed with falling asleep. In daydreams and night dreams, he could make up stories about Linda, imagine her, and bring her back to life. In those dreams, Linda comforted O’Brien, telling him that it didn’t matter that she was dead. O’Brien says that in Vietnam, the soldiers devised ways to make the dead seem less dead—they kept them alive with stories, such as the stories of Ted Lavender’s tranquilizer use or Curt Lemon’s trick-or-treating. O’Brien remembers that he saw Linda’s body in the funeral home, but that it upset him because it didn’t seem real. He says that he picked Curt Lemon out of a tree and watched Kiowa sink into the muck of the Song Tra Bong, but that he still dreamed Linda alive in stories and in dreams. In his dreams, when he was young, Linda waited for him and stayed alive, if just sometimes obscured by other things happening. In stories, O’Brien concludes, the dead live. . . when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story” (246). - “I don’t know, i guess it’s like being inside a book that nobody’s reading” (245)
Work cited: SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on The Things They Carried.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2002. Web. 1 Dec. 2010 O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York, N.Y: Broadway Books, 1998. Print.
Themes: Physical vs. Emotional Burdens O’Brien’s characters carry heavy physical loads, as well as heavy emotional loads. The soldiers’ physical burdens often go hand in hand with their emotional burdens. Henry Dobbins carries his girlfriend’s pantyhose and, with them, the longing for love and comfort. Jimmy Cross carries compasses and maps and, with them, the responsibility for the men in his charge. After the war, the men continue to struggle with their psychological burdens. Fear of Shame O’Brien shows that the fear of being shamed before one’s peers is a powerful motivating factor in war. His story “On the Rainy River” is an example, he does not want to fight in a war he believes is wrong, but he does not want to be thought a coward. What keeps O’Brien from fleeing into Canada is not admirable like patriotism or dedication to his country’s cause, but concern over what others will think of him if he doesn’t fight. This conflict is explored throughout The Things They Carried, between the expectations of a character’s peers and that character’s uncertainty. Truth in Story Telling O’Brien often blurs the distinction between fact and fiction, making it impossible to know whether or not any given event in the stories was true. He does this intentionally when his characters contradict themselves. O’Brien’s point is that objective truth of a war story is less relevant than the act of storytelling. O’Brien is not attempting to write a history of the Vietnam War but rather to explore the ways that story telling establishes or fails to establish bonds between a soldier and his audience. The technical facts are less important than what the war meant to soldiers and how it changed them. Work cited: SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on The Things They Carried.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2002. Web. 1 Dec. 2010O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York, N.Y: Broadway Books, 1998. Print.
Characters (in no particular order) Jimmy Cross • First Lieutenant • In love with Martha • Always felt a huge burden of responsibility when things went wrong (Kiowa dying) • “He carried a strobe light and the responsibility for the lives of his men.” Page 5 Martha • The ballet dancer that Jimmy Cross is in love with • Gave Jimmy a pebble from the sea that he would carry in his mouth Henry Dobbins • “In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot but always plodding long, always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor.” Page 111 • Wore his girlfriend’s panties as a good luck charm even when she broke up with him Dave Jensen • Created pact with Lee Strunk, but then is relieved when Lee Strunk dies after injury because then he doesn’t have to kill him Ted Lavender • A super paranoid soldier that got shot while taking tranquilizers showing the brutality of the war even when for someone to takes so many cautionary measures Mitchell Sanders • One of the more wise characters that tried to keep Tim calm when seeing Bobby Jorgenson again • “believed in the power of morals” page 183 Norman Bowker • The veteran that drove in circles and circles like he used to do with Sally Kramer (now Sally Gustafson) because he didn’t know who to talk to when he got home • Killed himself in a YMCA locker room Rat Kiley • Medic for the Alpha Company who had seen a lot • Told the story about Mary Anne Bell and Mark Fossie • Couldn’t handle the war anymore and shot his foot Kiowa • The Native American who wore moccasins on night runs • Helps Tim after Tim kills a man • Drowned in the mud field which a lot of the men in the company felt responsible for Lee Strunk • Made pact with Dave Jensen that if one of them gets badly injured the other would kill him Curt Lemon • Died because he stepped on the trap while playing catch with a smoking grenade with Rat Kiley • Showed that there were a lot of soldiers that were too young for war Mark Fossie • Soldier who sent for his high school sweetheart to come to war • Left the war without his love and lost his innocence in that Mary Anne Bell • Mark Fossie’s girlfriend who came over from the US and stayed with the soldiers • Came innocent and pretty, but she was interested in the war and helped out • Eventually became a soldier and lost her innocence by being a Greenie • Said to be part of the forest now, showed the effect that war can have Tim O’Brien • The narrator during most of the book and often confuses the reader by contradicting himself about the “truth” • Ran away up north when he found out he was going to the army • Gets shot in the butt and has to recover and thus grows apart from the Alpha Company • Mentions himself as Timmy who was friends with Linda, a girl who died Morty Phillips • A soldier who took a swim in My Khe and ended up getting super sick Linda • Tim’s first love • Wore a hat because she had a brain tumor and later died • Showed how Timmy dealt with death back then and how he’s changed into Tim Kathleen • Tim’s daughter who continues to ask if Tim has ever killed anyone • Goes to My Khe with Tim Azar • A soldier that was hard to get along with and didn’t know his limits • When Tim and Azar go forward with the plan of scaring Bobby Jorgenson while on night guard duty, Azar showed his true colors for wanting to cause trouble and not knowing when to stop Bobby Jorgenson • The medic that replaced Rat Kiley who panicked when Tim O’Brien got shot for the second time • Tim hated Bobby because he was the reason he had to be sent away to recover and he kind of replaced Tim when he left Elroy Berdahl • Owner of the Tip Top Lodge on Rainy River where Tim ran away to • Helped Tim make a decision about going to war by not saying anything, but by being there
20 comments:
Thank you to Michelle, Marie, Claire and Cameron - Per 5
OOPS... okay, let's do a group of 3: Michelle, Marie, Claire.
Plot Overview
Chapter 1: “the things they carried”
THIS CHAPTER DESCRIBES THE PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL BURDENS EACH SOLDIER IN ALPHA COMPANY CARRIES. THESE VARY DEPENDING ON THE PERSONALITY, RANK, MENTAL STABILITY, RELIGION, SUPERSTITION, AND POSITION. FOR EXAMPLE LIEUTENANT JIMMY CROSS CARRIES LETTERS FROM A GIRL NAME MARTHA (10 OUNCES) WHO HE LOVES BUT DOES NOT FEEL THE SAME ABOUT HIM, MEMORIES OF HER, A LITTLE PEBBLE MARTHA HAD SENT HIM, COMPASS, MAPS, CODE BOOKS, BINOCULARS, .45 CABLE PISTOL, STROBE LIGHT, RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE LIVES OF HIS MEN, AND AROUND 25 POUNDS OF OTHER NECESSARY ITEMS ALL SOLDIERS HAD TO HAVE TO STAY ALIVE.
THE REST OF THE CHAPTER GOES ON TO EXPLAIN WHAT THE OTHER MEN CARRIED AND THEN THE DEATH OF TED LAVENDER. THIS DEATH ALLOWING THE READER TO THE SITUATION THE SOLDIERS ARE REALLY IN, THEIR REACTION IS WORTH NOTING BECAUSE UNLIKE THE MORNING SURROUNDING SOMEONE GETTING SHOT IN THE HEAD BRINGS ABOUT IN SOCIETY IN WAR THE REACTION IS VERY DIFFERENT. LAVENDER’S DEATH LEADS JIMMY CROSS TO BURN MARTHA’S LETTERS AND PHOTOGRAPHS BECAUSE HE FEELS RESPONSIBLE FOR LAVENDER’S DEATH. HE BELIEVES THAT HE TRADED HIS JOB AS LEADER AND PROTECTOR OF THE MEN’S LIVES TO DAY DREAM ABOUT MARTHA, WHO WAS SAFE, MILES AWAY, AND HAPPY WITHOUT HIM. THIS CHAPTER BRINGS THE READER DIRECTLY INTO THE WAR, DESCRIBING HOW IT FEELS TO BE IN THE MIDDLE OF FIRE (O’BRIAN 19), SEE A SOLDIER DIE, SEE CORPSES AND WALK PAST KNOWING IT COULD BE THEM. O’BRIAN DESCRIBES THE FEAR, GUILT, LOVE, TERROR, PURE LIFE, AND SEVER DEADLINESS SOLDIERS ENCOUNTER IN WAR, THEMSELVES AND EACH OTHER.
- “THEY CARRIED THEIR REPUTATIONS. THEY CARRIED THE SOLDIER’S GREATEST FEAR, WHICH WAS THE FEAR OF BLUSHING. THEY KILLED AND DIED BECAUSE THEY WERE EMBARRASSED NOT TO. IT WAS THIS THAT HAD BROUGHT THEM TO THE WAR IN THE FIRST PLACE, NOTHING POSITIVE, NO DREAMS IF GLORY OR HONOR, JUST TO AVOID THE BLUSH OF DISHONOR. THEY DIED SO AS NOT TO DIE OF EMBARRASSMENT”
CHAPTER 2 “LOVE”
THIS CHAPTER ADDRESSES THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN JIMMY CROSS AND MARTHA. IT IS SET MANY YEARS AFTER THE WAR WHEN JIMMY CROSS IS AT THE HOME OF TIM O’BRIAN IN MASSACHUSETTS. THIS CHAPTER SHOWS THE EFFECTS OF WAR ON SOME MEN (O’BRIAN AD CROSS) THE EFFECTS OF WAR ON OTHER MEN ARE ADDRESSED LATER.
CHAPTERS 3 “SPIN”
Insisting that sometimes war is less violent and more sweet, O’Brien shares disconnected memories of the war. Azar gives a bar of chocolate to a little boy with a plastic leg. Mitchell Sanders sits under a tree, picking lice off his body and depositing them in an envelope addressed to his Ohio draft board. Every night, Henry Dobbins and Norman Bowker dig a foxhole and play checkers. The narrator stops the string of anecdotes to say that he is now forty-three years old and a writer, and that reliving the memories has caused them to recur. He insists that the bad memories live on and never stop happening. He says his guilt has not ceased and that his daughter Kathleen advises him to write about something else. Nevertheless, he says, writing about what one remembers is a means of coping with those things one can’t forget. O’Brien describes when the Alpha Company enlists an old Vietnamese man whom they call a “poppa-san” to guide the platoon through the mine fields on the Batangan Peninsula. When he is done, the troops are sad to leave their steadfast guide. Mitchell Sanders tells a story of a man who went AWOL in order to sleep with a Red Cross nurse. After several days, the man rejoined his unit and was more excited than ever about getting back into combat, saying that after so much peace, he wanted to hurt again. Norman Bowker whispers one night that if he could have one wish it would be for his father to stop bothering him about earning medals. Kiowa teaches Rat Kiley and Dave Jensen a rain dance, and when they ask him, afterward, where the rain was, he replies, “The earth is slow, but the buffalo is patient.” Ted Lavender adopts a puppy, and Azar later kills it, claiming his own immaturity as an excuse. Henry Dobbins sings to himself as he sews on his new buck-sergeant stripes. Lavender occasionally goes too heavy on the tranquilizers and calls the war “nice” and “mellow.” After Curt Lemon is killed, he hangs in pieces on a tree. Last comes the vision of a dead, young man and Kiowa’s voice ringing in O’Brien’s ear, assuring him, repeatedly, that O’Brien didn’t have a choice.
Chapter 4 “On the Rainy River”
O’Brien says he has not told this story to his parents, siblings, or wife. He speaks of living with the shame of the story, whose events occurred during the summer of 1968. On June 17, 1968, a month after he graduates from Macalaster College, Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, and president of the student body, Tim O’Brien receives his draft notice to fight in the Vietnam War. The war seems wrong to him, its causes and effects uncertain. Like most Americans, the young O’Brien doesn’t know what happened to the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin, and he can’t discern what type of person Ho Chi Minh, the president of North Vietnam, really is. In college, O’Brien took a stand against the war.
The day the draft notice is delivered, O’Brien thinks that he is too good to fight the war. Although his community pressures him to go, he resists making a decision about whether to go to war or flee. In the middle of the summer, O’Brien begins thinking seriously about fleeing to Canada, eight hours north of Worthington. His conscience and instincts tell him to run. He worries, however, that such an action will lose him the respect of his family and community. He imagines the people he knows gossiping about him in the local café. During his sleepless nights, he struggles with his anger at the lack of perspective on the part of those who influenced him.
One day, O’Brien cracks. Feeling what he describes as a physical rupture in his chest, he leaves work suddenly, drives home, and writes a vague note to his family. He heads north and then west along the Rainy River, which separates Minnesota from Canada. The next afternoon, after spending the night behind a closed-down gas station, he pulls into a dilapidated fishing resort, the Tip Top Lodge, and meets the elderly proprietor, Elroy Berdahl. The two spend six days together, eating meals, hiking, and playing Scrabble. Although O’Brien never mentions his reason for going to the Canadian border, he has the sense that Elroy knows, since the quiet old man is sharp and intelligent. One night O’Brien inquires about his bill, and after the two men discuss O’Brien’s work—washing dishes and doing odd jobs—in relation to the cost of the room, Elroy concludes that he owes O’Brien more than a hundred dollars and offers O’Brien two hundred. O’Brien refuses the money, but the next morning he finds four fifty-dollar bills in an envelope tacked to his door.
On O’Brien’s last full day at the Tip Top Lodge, Elroy takes him fishing on the Rainy River. During the voyage it occurs to O’Brien that they must have stopped in Canadian territory—soon after, Elroy stops the boat. O’Brien stares at the shoreline of Canada, twenty yards ahead of him, and wonders what to do. Elroy pretends not to notice as O’Brien bursts into tears. O’Brien tells himself he will run to Canada, but he silently concludes that he will go to war because he is embarrassed not to. Elroy pulls in his line and turns the boat back toward Minnesota. The next morning, O’Brien washes the breakfast dishes, leaves the two hundred dollars on the kitchen counter, and drives south to his home. He then goes off to war.
Chapter 5 “Enemies”
One morning on patrol Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk get into a fistfight over a missing jackknife that Jensen thinks Strunk has stolen. Jensen breaks Strunk’s nose, hitting him repeatedly and without mercy. Afterward, Jensen is nervous that Strunk will try to get revenge and pays special attention to Strunk’s whereabouts. Finally, crazed by apprehension, Jensen fires his gun into the air and calls out Strunk’s name. Later that night, he borrows a pistol and uses it to break his own nose in order to even the score. The next morning, Strunk is amused by the news, admitting that he did steal Jensen’s jackknife.
Chapter 6 “Friends”
Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk learn to trust each other. They resolve that if one gets seriously wounded, the other will kill him to put him out of his misery. In October, Strunk’s lower leg gets blown off by a mortar round. Jensen kneels at his side and Strunk repeatedly begs not to be killed. Strunk is loaded into a helicopter, and later Jensen is relieved to learn that Strunk didn’t survive the trip.
Chapter 7 “How to tell a true war story”
O’Brien prefaces this story by saying that it is true. A week after his friend is killed, Rat Kiley writes a letter to the friend’s sister, explaining what a hero her brother was and how much he loved him. Two months pass, and the sister never writes back. Kiley, frustrated, spits and calls the sister a “dumb cooze.”
He describes a story that Mitchell Sanders tells. Sanders recounts the experience of a troop that goes into the mountains on a listening post operation. He says that after a few days, the men hear strange echoes and music—chimes and xylophones—and become frightened. One night, the men hear voices and noises that sound like a cocktail party. After a while they hear singing and chanting, as well as talking monkeys and trees. They order air strikes and they burn and shoot down everything they can find. Still, in the morning, they hear the noises. So they pack up their gear and head down the mountain, where their colonel asks them what they heard. They have no answer.
He relays the story of Curt Lemon’s death in a few, brief vignettes. He explains that the platoon crossed a muddy river and on the third day Lemon was killed and Kiley lost his best friend. Later that day, higher in the mountains, Kiley shot a Viet Cong water buffalo repeatedly—though the animal was destroyed and bleeding, it remained alive. Finally Kiowa and Sanders picked up the buffalo and dumped it in the village well.
O’Brien remembers how Lemon died. Lemon was smiling and talking to Kiley one second and was blown into a tree the next. Jensen and O’Brien were ordered to climb the tree to retrieve Lemon’s body, and Jensen sang “Lemon Tree” as they threw down the body parts.
Thinking of Curt Lemon, O’Brien concludes he must have thought the sunlight was killing him. O’Brien wishes he could get the story right—the way the sunlight seemed to gather Lemon and carry him up in the air—so that we could believe what Lemon must have seen as his final truth.
- “ a true war story is never moral” (68)
- “you can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don’t care for obscenity you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty” (69).
- “It’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own truth” (71).
- “A true war story cannot be believed... Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t...in other cases you can’t even tell a true war story. Sometimes it’s just beyond telling” (71)
- “You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end” (76).
- “war makes you a man, i makes you dead” (80)
- “To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true....Proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life” (81)
- “you are never more alive than when you’re almost dead: (81)
- “A true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that drawn spreads out on a river when you know you mist cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do, it’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen”. (85)
Chapter 8 “The dentist”
O’Brien says that mourning Curt Lemon was difficult for him because he didn’t know him well, but in order to avoid getting sentimental, he tells a brief Curt Lemon story. In February, the men are at work in an area of operations along the South China Sea. One day, an Army dentist is flown in to check the men’s teeth. As the platoon sits, waiting to be checked one by one, Curt Lemon begins to tense up. Finally, he admits that in high school he had some bad experiences with dentists. He says that no one messes with his teeth and that when he’s called, he’ll refuse to go in. However, a few moments later, when the dentist calls him, Lemon rises and goes into the tent. He faints before the dentist can even lay a finger on him.
Later that night he creeps back to the dental tent and insists that he has a killer toothache. Though the dentist can’t find any problem, Lemon demands his tooth be pulled. Finally, the dentist, shrugging, gives him a shot and yanks the perfectly good tooth out, to Lemon’s delight.
Chapter 9 “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”
O’Brien says the most enduring Vietnam stories are those that are between the absolutely unbelievable and the mundane. Rat Kiley, who has a reputation for exaggeration, tells a story of his first assignment in the mountains of Chu Lai, in a protected and isolated area where he ran an aid station with eight other men near a river called the Song Tra Bong. One day, Eddie Diamond, the highest ranking man in his company and a pleasure-seeker, jokingly suggests that the area is so unguarded and seemingly safe that you could even bring a girl to the camp there. A younger medic, Mark Fossie, seems interested in the idea and goes off to write a letter. Six weeks later, his elementary school sweetheart, Mary Anne Bell, arrives, carried in by helicopter with a resupply shipment. Fossie explains that getting her to camp was difficult but not impossible and for the next two weeks, they carry on like school children. Mary Anne is curious and a fast learner—she picks up some Vietnamese and learns how to cook. When four casualties come in, she isn’t afraid to tend to them, learning how to repair arteries and shoot morphine. She drops her fussy feminine habits and cuts her hair short.
After a while, Fossie suggests that Mary Anne think about going home, but she argues that she is content staying. She makes plans to travel before she and Fossie marry. She begins coming home later and a few times not at all. One night she is missing, and when Fossie goes out looking, he discovers that she has been out the entire night on an ambush, where she refused to carry a gun. The next morning, Fossie and Mary Anne exchange words and seem to have reached a new understanding. They become officially engaged and discuss wedding plans in the mess hall, but over the next several nights it becomes clear that there is a strain on their relationship. Fossie makes arrangements to send her home but Mary Anne is not pleased with the prospect—she becomes withdrawn, and she eventually disappears.
Mary Anne returns three weeks later, but she doesn’t even stop at her fiancé’s bunk—she goes straight to the Special Forces hut. The next morning, Fossie stations himself outside the Special Forces area, where he waits until after midnight. When Kiley and Eddie Diamond go to check on Fossie, he says he can hear Mary Anne singing. He lunges forward into the hut, and the two others follow. Inside they see dozens of candles burning and hear tribal music. On a post near the back of the bunk is the head of a leopard—its skin dangles from the rafters. When Fossie finally sees Mary Anne she is in the same outfit—pink sweater, white blouse, cotton skirt—that she was wearing when she arrived weeks before. But when he approaches her, he sees a necklace made of human tongues around her neck. She insists to Fossie that what she is doing isn’t bad and that he, in his sheltered camp, doesn’t understand Vietnam.
Kiley says that he never knew what happened with Mary Anne because three or four days later he received orders to join the Alpha Company. But he confesses that he loved Mary Anne—that everyone did. Two months after he left, when he ran into Eddie Diamond, he learned that Mary Anne delighted in night patrols and in the fire. She had crossed to the other side and had become part of the land.
- “She had crossed to the other side. She was part of the land. She was wearing her culottes, her pink sweater, and necklace of human tongues. She was dangerous. She was ready for the kill” (116)
Chapter 10 “Stockings”
O’Brien relates that on ambushes, and sometimes in bed, Henry Dobbins wears his girlfriend’s pantyhose around his neck. Superstitions are prevalent in Vietnam, and the pantyhose are Dobbins’s good luck charm. With the pantyhose around his neck, Dobbins survives tripping over a land mine, and a week later he survives a firefight. In October, Dobbins’s girlfriend dumps him. Despite the pain of the rejection, he ties the pantyhose around his neck, remarking that the magic hasn’t been lost.
Chapter 11 “church”
One afternoon, the platoon comes across an abandoned pagoda that seems to function as a church. Every day during the men’s stay there, which lasts more than a week, two monks bring them water and other goods. One day, while the monks clean and oil Dobbins’s M-60 machine gun, Dobbins says that though he isn’t a religious man and wouldn’t enjoy taking part in the sermons, he might like to join the church because he would enjoy interacting with people. Kiowa says that although he carries a Bible everywhere because he was raised to, he wouldn’t enjoy being a preacher. He does say, though, that he enjoys being in a church. When the monks finish cleaning the gun, Dobbins wipes off the excess oil and hands them each a can of peaches and a chocolate bar. Making a washing motion with his hands, he says that all one can do is be nice to them.
Chapter 12 “the man i killed”
“The Man I Killed” begins with a list of physical attributes and possible characteristics of the man whom O’Brien killed with a grenade in My Khe. O’Brien describes the wounds that he inflicted. The man’s jaw was in his throat, he says, and his upper lip and teeth were missing. One eye was shut, and the other looked like a star-shaped hole.
Kiowa confesses that maybe he doesn’t understand what O’Brien is going through, but he rationalizes that the young man was carrying a weapon and that they are fighting a war. He asks if O’Brien would rather trade places with him. O’Brien doesn’t respond to Kiowa.
He imagines that the boy began studying at the university in Saigon in 1964, that he avoided politics and favored calculus.
- “He knew he would fall dead and wake up in the stories of his village people” (130)
Chapter 13 “Ambush”
More than twenty years after the end of the war, O’Brien’s daughter Kathleen asks O’Brien if he has ever killed anyone. She contends that he can’t help himself from obsessively writing war stories because he killed someone. O’Brien, however, insists that he has never killed anyone. Reflecting on his lie, O’Brien pretends Kathleen is an adult and imagines that he might tell her the entire story of My Khe.
Chapter 14 “Style”
Though most of her village has burned to the ground and her family has been burned to death by the American soldiers, a Vietnamese girl of fourteen dances through the wreckage. The men of the platoon cannot understand why she is dancing. Azar contends that the dance is a strange ritual, but Dobbins insists that the girl probably just likes to dance.
Later that night, Azar mocks the girl’s dancing by jumping and spinning, putting his hands against his ears and then making an erotic motion with his hips. Dobbins grabs Azar from behind, carries him over to the mouth of a well, and threatens to dump him in if he doesn’t dance properly.
Chapter 15 “Speaking of courage”
After the war, Norman Bowker returns to Iowa. On the Fourth of July, as he drives his father’s big Chevrolet around the lake, he realizes that he has nowhere to go. He reminisces about his high school girlfriend, Sally Kramer, who is now married. He thinks about his friend Max Arnold, who drowned in the lake. He thinks also of his father, whose greatest hope, that Norman would bring home medals from Vietnam, was satisfied. Norman won seven medals in Vietnam, including the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, the Air Medal, the Army Commendation Medal, the Bronze Star, and the Purple Heart. He thinks about his father’s pride in those badges and then recalls how he almost won the Silver Star but blew his chance. He drives around the town again and again, flicks on the radio, orders a hamburger at the A&W, and imagines telling his father the story of the way he almost won the Silver Star, when the banks of the Song Tra Bong overflowed.
The night the platoon settled in a field along the river, a group of Vietnamese women ran out to discourage them, but Lieutenant Jimmy Cross shooed them away. When they set up camp, they noticed a sour, fishlike smell. Finally, someone concluded that they had set up camp in a sewage field. Meanwhile, the rain poured down, and the earth bubbled with the heat and the excess moisture. Suddenly, rounds of mortar fell on the camp, and the field seemed to boil and explode. When the third round hit, Kiowa began screaming. Bowker saw Kiowa sink into the muck and grabbed him by the boot to pull him out. Yet Kiowa was lost, so Bowker let him go in order to save himself from sinking deeper into the muck.
Bowker wants to relate this memory to someone, but he doesn’t have anyone to talk to. On his eleventh trip around the lake, he imagines telling his father the story and admitting that he did not act with the courage he hoped he might have. He imagines that his father might console him with the idea of the seven medals he did win. He parks his car and wades into the lake with his clothes on, submerging himself. He then stands up, folds his arms, and watches the holiday fireworks, remarking that they are pretty good, for
Chapter 16 “Notes”
O’Brien says that “Speaking of Courage” was written at the request of Norman Bowker who, three years after the story was written, hung himself in the YMCA. O’Brien says that in 1975, right before Saigon finally collapsed, he received a seventeen-page, handwritten letter from Bowker saying that he couldn’t find a meaningful use for his life after the war. He worked several short-lived jobs and lived with his parents. At one point he enrolled in junior college, but he eventually dropped out.
In his letter, Bowker told O’Brien that he had read his first book, If I Die in a Combat Zone, and that the book had brought back a great deal of memories. Bowker then suggested that O’Brien write a story about someone who feels that Vietnam robbed him of his will to live—he said he would write it himself but he couldn’t find the words. O’Brien explains that when he received Bowker’s letter he thought about how easily he transitioned from Vietnam to graduate school at Harvard University. He thought that without writing, he himself might have been paralyzed.
While he was working on a new novel entitled Going After Cacc-iato, O’Brien thought of Bowker’s suggestion and began a chapter titled “Speaking of Courage.” But, following Bowker’s request, he did not use Bowker’s name. He substituted his own hometown scenery for Bowker’s and he omitted the story of the sewage field and the rain and Kiowa’s death in favor of his own protagonist’s story. The writing was easy, and he published the piece as a separate short story. Later, O’Brien realized that the postwar piece had no place in Going After Cacciato, a war novel, and that in order to be successful, the story would have to stand on its own in truth, no matter how much the prospect frightened O’Brien. When the story was anthologized a year later, O’Brien sent a copy to Bowker, who was upset about the absence of Kiowa. Eight months later Bowker hung himself.
A decade later, O’Brien has revised the story and has come to terms with it—he says the central incident, about the night on the Song Tra Bong and the death of Kiowa, has been restored. But he contends that he does not want to imply that Bowker did not have a lapse of courage that was responsible for the death of Kiowa.
- “By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened... and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but nonetheless help to clarify and explain.
Chapter 17 “In the field”
The morning after Kiowa’s death, the platoon wades in the mud of the sewage field with Jimmy Cross leading the way. Cross thinks of Kiowa and the crime that is his death. He concludes that although the order to camp came from a higher power, he made a mistake letting his men camp on the dangerous riverbank. He decides to write a letter to Kiowa’s father saying what a good soldier Kiowa was.
When the search for Kiowa’s body gets underway on the cold, wet morning, Azar begins cracking jokes about “eating shit” and “biting the dirt,” and Bowker rebukes him. Halfway across the field, Mitchell Sanders discovers Kiowa’s rucksack, and the men begin wading in the muck, desperately searching for the body.
Meanwhile, Jimmy Cross finishes composing the letter in his head and reflects that he never wanted the responsibility of leadership in the first place—he signed up for Reserve Officers Training Corps without giving thought to the consequences. He blames himself for making the wrong decision, concluding that he should have followed his first impulse and removed the men from the field. He feels that his oversight caused Kiowa’s death. In the distance he notices the shaking body of a young soldier and goes over to speak to him. The soldier too blames himself for being unable to save Kiowa and becomes determined to find the body because Kiowa was carrying the only existing picture of the soldier’s ex-girlfriend.
After the platoon has spent a half a day wading in the field, Azar ceases his joking. The men find Kiowa’s body wedged between a layer of mud, take hold of the two boots, and pull. Unable to move it, they call over Dobbins and Kiley, who also help pull. After ten minutes and more pulling, Kiowa’s body rises to the surface covered with blue-green mud. Harrowed and relieved, the men clean him up and then try to take their mind off him. Azar apologizes for the jokes.
Cross squats in the muck, revising the letter to Kiowa’s father in his head. He notices the unnamed soldier, still searching for the missing picture. The soldier tries to get Cross’s attention, saying he has to explain something. But Cross ignores him, choosing instead to float in the muck, thinking about blame, responsibility, and golf.
Chapter 18 “Good form”
O’Brien talks about the difference between real truth and story truth. He says he wants to explain the structure of his book. He says that he saw a man die on a trail near My Khe, but that he did not kill him. He then says that he made up this story. He says he wants us to feel what he felt and because of that, sometimes story truth is truer than happening truth. He says that what stories can do is make things present. Imagining Kathleen asking him if he’s ever killed anyone, O’Brien envisions saying yes and then envisions saying no.
Chapter 19 “Field trip”
O’Brien says that a few months after finishing the story “In the Field,” he returns to the site of Kiowa’s death with his daughter Kathleen and an interpreter. He says though the field does look familiar, it is not how he remembers it—everything, he says, is dry. Kathleen complains that the land stinks. She has just turned ten and has received the trip as a birthday gift intended to grant her insight into her father’s history. But though she attempts to act tolerant, she is bored. She can’t understand the war or why her father fought in it.
As she and O’Brien approach the field, Kathleen is amused by the interpreter’s display of magic tricks. O’Brien reflects on the way the field, which now looks so different, could have the power to swallow his best friend and part of his life. He goes for a quick swim, surprising and disgusting Kathleen, who threatens to tell her mother. But before he leaves the river, he takes Kiowa’s moccasins and leaves them in the spot where he imagines his friend settled into the river. When O’Brien returns, Kathleen asks him if an old man in the field is mad at him. O’Brien says that all the anger is finished.
Chapter 20 “The Ghost Soldiers”
O’Brien recalls that he was shot twice—the first time, images from Gene Autry movies race through his head, and he ends up on the lap of Rat Kiley, the medic. During and after his treatment, O’Brien appreciates Kiley’s skill, courage, and ease. When O’Brien returns from his recovery almost a month later, Kiley has been wounded and shipped off and a new medic named Bobby Jorgenson has taken his place. When O’Brien is shot the second time, Jorgenson is incapable of treating his shock, and the result is a harrowing, painful experience for O’Brien.
The realization that he was near death for no good reason leaves O’Brien seething—he vows to exact revenge on the frightened, incompetent Jorgenson. He spends more time in the hospital and then is transferred to the battalion supply section, a far more comfortable and less dangerous assignment. Meanwhile, his backside hurts and he is forced to sleep on his stomach and smear antibacterial ointment on himself several times a day. During the miserable nights, he renews his vow to make Jorgenson pay.
When the company comes for a routine operation to where O’Brien is recovering, O’Brien meets the helicopters. He listens to stories from his friends—especially one about a soldier who decided to go for a swim and ended up with a disease that was later treated by Jorgenson—but he is most concerned with finding Jorgenson. Mitchell Sanders encourages O’Brien to leave Jorgenson alone, saying that he is one of the Alpha Company now and implying that O’Brien is no longer a member of the company. The next morning, O’Brien runs into Jorgenson, who apologizes for his inept treatment of O’Brien, saying that he was scared and that since O’Brien was shot, he has felt a great deal of remorse. O’Brien begins resenting Jorgenson for making him feel guilty.
O’Brien attempts to enlist his friends in his plans for revenge, but the only one who will concede to get involved is Azar. The two go to spook Jorgenson as he serves all-night duty. O’Brien says the amount of fear one feels multiplies as one sits alone, wondering and worrying. At midnight, they jerk some ropes, which gives the illusion of the enemy in the bush. O’Brien identifies with Jorgenson and feels his fear. Later, they set flares, and when Jorgenson bursts from his position and rolls toward a heap of sandbags, O’Brien finally feels vindicated. He tells Azar that he’s had enough, but Azar, who loves to make trouble, wants to finish what they’ve started. O’Brien has a flashback of being shot, thinks about being in shock, and once again resents Jorgenson’s deficiencies. He resolves to follow through.
Azar and O’Brien set off flare after flare and make a white sandbag move to spook Jorgenson further. But Jorgenson does not lose his cool—instead he advances toward O’Brien, calling out his name. Azar kicks O’Brien in the head, declares him pathetic, and goes off to bed. He later reconciles with O’Brien. The two men shake hands, and Jorgenson compliments O’Brien’s dramatic touch and asks him if they’re even now. The two jokingly decide to scare Azar.
- “. . . after seven months in the bush I realized that those high, civilized trappings had somehow been crushed under the weight of the simple daily realities. I'd turned mean inside” (200)
Chapter 21 “Night Life”
Although O’Brien isn’t there when Rat Kiley sustains the injury that gets him sent to Japan, Mitchell Sanders relays the story later. When the platoon is in the foothills west of Quang Ngai City, they receive word of possible danger, so they sleep all day and march all night. The tension affects the men in different ways—Jensen takes vitamins, Cross takes NoDoz, and Kiley simply retreats into himself. For six days he says nothing, and then he can’t stop talking. He begins scratching himself constantly and complaining of the bugs. It is sad, Sanders later remembers, and strange, but everyone feels the effects of the operation. They are chasing ghosts. One afternoon, Kiley almost breaks down, confessing to Sanders that he doesn’t think he is cut out to be a medic, always picking up parts and plugging up holes. He mentions Ted Lavender and Curt Lemon, incredulous that they could be so alive one moment and so dead the next. He says that he is haunted by images of body parts, especially at night. He sees his own body and he imagines bugs chewing through him. The next morning, he shoots himself in the toe—an injury large enough to earn his release from duty. No one blames him, and Cross, the biggest critic of Kiley’s cowardice, says that he will vouch for him.
Chapter 22 “The lives of the dead”
O’Brien has been at war for only four days when the platoon is fired on by a village near the South China Sea. Cross orders an air strike and the platoon watches the village burn. Dave Jensen pokes fun at a dead old man whose right arm has been blown off and encourages O’Brien to do the same, to “show a little respect for your elders.” O’Brien refuses, and Kiowa tells him he’s done the right thing. He asks if the old man was O’Brien’s first experience with a dead body, and O’Brien says no, thinking of his first date, Linda.
During the spring of 1956, O’Brien was in love with nine-year-old Linda, his beautifully fragile schoolmate who had taken to wearing a red cap everywhere. He arranged for his parents to take him and Linda to the movies, to see The Man Who Never Was—a World War II film that contained an image of a corpse falling into the sea. When the movie was over, and the two couples had made a stop at Dairy Queen, they dropped Linda off, and the fourth-grade O’Brien knew then that he was in love.
Linda continued to wear her red cap every day, despite being taunted for it. One day a fellow classmate, Nick Veenhof, pulled off the cap, revealing Linda’s slowly balding head. Linda said nothing. O’Brien later explains that Linda had a brain tumor and soon died. He had known she was sick, but Nick was the one to break the news, saying O’Brien’s girlfriend had “kicked the bucket.” O’Brien went to the funeral home with his father and marveled at how strange and unreal it was to see Linda’s body in a casket. He stared for a while, saying nothing, until his father, unable to address the situation, proposed a trip to the ice cream store. Later, O’Brien became withdrawn and obsessed with falling asleep. In daydreams and night dreams, he could make up stories about Linda, imagine her, and bring her back to life. In those dreams, Linda comforted O’Brien, telling him that it didn’t matter that she was dead.
O’Brien says that in Vietnam, the soldiers devised ways to make the dead seem less dead—they kept them alive with stories, such as the stories of Ted Lavender’s tranquilizer use or Curt Lemon’s trick-or-treating. O’Brien remembers that he saw Linda’s body in the funeral home, but that it upset him because it didn’t seem real. He says that he picked Curt Lemon out of a tree and watched Kiowa sink into the muck of the Song Tra Bong, but that he still dreamed Linda alive in stories and in dreams. In his dreams, when he was young, Linda waited for him and stayed alive, if just sometimes obscured by other things happening. In stories, O’Brien concludes, the dead live.
. . when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story” (246).
- “I don’t know, i guess it’s like being inside a book that nobody’s reading” (245)
Work cited:
SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on The Things They Carried.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2002. Web. 1 Dec. 2010
O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York, N.Y: Broadway Books, 1998. Print.
Themes:
Physical vs. Emotional Burdens
O’Brien’s characters carry heavy physical loads, as well as heavy emotional loads. The soldiers’ physical burdens often go hand in hand with their emotional burdens. Henry Dobbins carries his girlfriend’s pantyhose and, with them, the longing for love and comfort. Jimmy Cross carries compasses and maps and, with them, the responsibility for the men in his charge. After the war, the men continue to struggle with their psychological burdens.
Fear of Shame
O’Brien shows that the fear of being shamed before one’s peers is a powerful motivating factor in war. His story “On the Rainy River” is an example, he does not want to fight in a war he believes is wrong, but he does not want to be thought a coward. What keeps O’Brien from fleeing into Canada is not admirable like patriotism or dedication to his country’s cause, but concern over what others will think of him if he doesn’t fight. This conflict is explored throughout The Things They Carried, between the expectations of a character’s peers and that character’s uncertainty.
Truth in Story Telling
O’Brien often blurs the distinction between fact and fiction, making it impossible to know whether or not any given event in the stories was true. He does this intentionally when his characters contradict themselves. O’Brien’s point is that objective truth of a war story is less relevant than the act of storytelling. O’Brien is not attempting to write a history of the Vietnam War but rather to explore the ways that story telling establishes or fails to establish bonds between a soldier and his audience. The technical facts are less important than what the war meant to soldiers and how it changed them.
Work cited:
SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on The Things They Carried.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2002. Web. 1 Dec. 2010O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York, N.Y: Broadway Books, 1998. Print.
Characters (in no particular order)
Jimmy Cross
• First Lieutenant
• In love with Martha
• Always felt a huge burden of responsibility when things went wrong (Kiowa dying)
• “He carried a strobe light and the responsibility for the lives of his men.” Page 5
Martha
• The ballet dancer that Jimmy Cross is in love with
• Gave Jimmy a pebble from the sea that he would carry in his mouth
Henry Dobbins
• “In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot but always plodding long, always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor.” Page 111
• Wore his girlfriend’s panties as a good luck charm even when she broke up with him
Dave Jensen
• Created pact with Lee Strunk, but then is relieved when Lee Strunk dies after injury because then he doesn’t have to kill him
Ted Lavender
• A super paranoid soldier that got shot while taking tranquilizers showing the brutality of the war even when for someone to takes so many cautionary measures
Mitchell Sanders
• One of the more wise characters that tried to keep Tim calm when seeing Bobby Jorgenson again
• “believed in the power of morals” page 183
Norman Bowker
• The veteran that drove in circles and circles like he used to do with Sally Kramer (now Sally Gustafson) because he didn’t know who to talk to when he got home
• Killed himself in a YMCA locker room
Rat Kiley
• Medic for the Alpha Company who had seen a lot
• Told the story about Mary Anne Bell and Mark Fossie
• Couldn’t handle the war anymore and shot his foot
Kiowa
• The Native American who wore moccasins on night runs
• Helps Tim after Tim kills a man
• Drowned in the mud field which a lot of the men in the company felt responsible for
Lee Strunk
• Made pact with Dave Jensen that if one of them gets badly injured the other would kill him
Curt Lemon
• Died because he stepped on the trap while playing catch with a smoking grenade with Rat Kiley
• Showed that there were a lot of soldiers that were too young for war
Mark Fossie
• Soldier who sent for his high school sweetheart to come to war
• Left the war without his love and lost his innocence in that
Mary Anne Bell
• Mark Fossie’s girlfriend who came over from the US and stayed with the soldiers
• Came innocent and pretty, but she was interested in the war and helped out
• Eventually became a soldier and lost her innocence by being a Greenie
• Said to be part of the forest now, showed the effect that war can have
Tim O’Brien
• The narrator during most of the book and often confuses the reader by contradicting himself about the “truth”
• Ran away up north when he found out he was going to the army
• Gets shot in the butt and has to recover and thus grows apart from the Alpha Company
• Mentions himself as Timmy who was friends with Linda, a girl who died
Morty Phillips
• A soldier who took a swim in My Khe and ended up getting super sick
Linda
• Tim’s first love
• Wore a hat because she had a brain tumor and later died
• Showed how Timmy dealt with death back then and how he’s changed into Tim
Kathleen
• Tim’s daughter who continues to ask if Tim has ever killed anyone
• Goes to My Khe with Tim
Azar
• A soldier that was hard to get along with and didn’t know his limits
• When Tim and Azar go forward with the plan of scaring Bobby Jorgenson while on night guard duty, Azar showed his true colors for wanting to cause trouble and not knowing when to stop
Bobby Jorgenson
• The medic that replaced Rat Kiley who panicked when Tim O’Brien got shot for the second time
• Tim hated Bobby because he was the reason he had to be sent away to recover and he kind of replaced Tim when he left
Elroy Berdahl
• Owner of the Tip Top Lodge on Rainy River where Tim ran away to
• Helped Tim make a decision about going to war by not saying anything, but by being there
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