the things they carried

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Shame and guilt are constant and often inextricable themes in The Things They Carried. Soldiers felt obligated to go to war for fear of embarrassing themselves, their families, and their towns if they fled. This embarrassment is bolstered by the guilt of not being “masculine” enoughnot being brave, heroic, and patriotic enough. O’Brien reflects on how he thought he had a secret reserve of bravery and heroism stored away, waiting for the moment when he would be called to warif that day ever camein the story “On The Rainy River,” and how in reality no such reserve existed.

The feelings of shame and guilt follow the soldiers into the war as well, and make them do irrational and crazy things. In “The Dentist,” Curt Lemon faints when an army dentist treats him, much to his own shame. To prove to the men in his Company, as well as to himself, that he’s man enough and brave enough to see the dentist (and, by extension, fight in the war) he goes to the dentist’s tent in the middle of the night and demands that he pull out some of Lemon’s perfectly healthy teeth. Survivor’s guilt haunts many of O’Brien’s friends, as well as O’Brien himself. Norman Bowker can’t shake the shame of not winning The Silver Star of Valor because he thinks that he would have won it if he had not failed to save Kiowa’s in “Speaking of Courage.” Shame and guilt follow Bowker with such intensity that he eventually hangs himself.

In “In the Field,” it’s revealed that O’Brien is shaken by a similar shame and guilt over Kiowa, believing that he’s the one that was actually responsible for Kiowa’s death. Meanwhile, the other soldiers in the company blame Lieutenant Jimmy Cross in “In the Field” for stationing them in such a vulnerable position. Even Cross wavers between blaming himself (he first wants to write a letter to Kiowa’s father commending how great of a soldier his son was) and blaming the cruelty of war (resolving not to write the letter). The war created impossible situations where death was inevitable, but that didn’t stop those who survived from blaming themselves for the deaths of their friendsmaybe if they’d just been a little braver, a little faster, a little smarter, they could have done something to save their comrade, and so they can’t ever escape the guilt.

The solders even feel guilt about the deaths of the enemy. In “The Man I Killed” O’Brien throws a grenade into the path of an anonymous young man, killing him, and then tries to “un-kill” him by creating a history and future for the manO’Brien, after seeing his own friends die, can’t help but understand that the man he killed is just that, a man, just like O’Brien himself. Every story in The Things They Carried is riddled with feelings of shame and guilt. It is a feeling that no soldier in the collection, and as O’Brien insinuates, no soldier in Vietnam, was able to escape.

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