The Things They Carried By Justin Duttera

1. The Things They Carried

In the Vietnam jungles of the Vietnam War, we are given a description of the characters like Jimmy Cross, First lieutenant and his girlfriend Martha. The things they carried are both emotional and physical. Jimmy burns Martha's letters and pictures because Jimmy forgets about Martha and the love for her so he can keep focusing on his job. He also throws away the good-luck pebble to symbolize the acceptance of the reality of war.

2. Love

Years after the war, Tim O'Brien explains that Jimmy Cross came to Massachusetts to visit. There they talked about all of the things that the platoon carried with them. the lesson is that war is over, yet not forgotten. There are photos of the including Rat Kiley and Kiowa. Jimmy still feels the guilt of Lavender's death. O'Brien explains that he carries his own feelings of guilt and blame about things that happened during the war.

3. Spin

O'Brien admits to being forty-three years old and a writer that only writes about the war. Although his daughter, Kathleen, urges him to write about more things as a joke rather than serious things. O'Brien always returns to the war. Oddly, though the memories are often horrifying, and though the horrors seem to live on in the stories, the war was more than horrible. O'Brien compares to the war to a ping-pong ball that you can put a spin on. 

4. On the Rainy River

O'Brien explains that he is about to tell a story that he has never told anyone before. It begins in 1968 while O’Brien is in college. O’Brien imagines himself as a hero that would certainly stand up to evil. Though he has not done anything heroic, he tells himself that he could save up his courage for a time when he might really need it, a theory that the narrator looks back on as “comfortable.” He then talks about running away from his parents and goes to Elroy Berdahl's place and is stopped from going o Canada.

5.  Enemies

When the story begins, the soldiers are on patrol in the LZ Gator. It is July, and Lee Strunk and Dave Jensen get into a fistfight. The fight is over something small,  a missing jackknife. The fight is close and it goes back and forth until Jensen, the larger man, eventually wins the fight, breaking Strunk’s nose. However, he continues to throw punches into Strunk’s face and it takes three other soldiers to pull him off. Strunk is taken to the rear by chopper and returns two days later with his nose covered in gauze and held in a splint.

6. Friends

It follows the events of the previous story, “Enemies,” in which Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk get into a fistfight over a missing jackknife. Though the two soldiers appeared to make peace, they do not become close friends. However, they would they go on to learn to trust each other, in part because they would team up on ambushes, cover each other while on patrol, and they shared a foxhole. At night, they would take turns on guard. By late August, they would make a pact that if one of them was ever incapacitated, or given a “wheelchair wound,” that the other would “automatically find a way to end it.” The narrator admits that he was convinced that they were serious because they turned the pact into a written contract, signed it, and even found witnesses.

7. How to Tell a True War Story

 It begins with a brief story about Bob Kiley, nicknamed Rat, and an assurance that “this is true.” Rat Kiley loses his friend, Curt Lemon, while on patrol in the mountains. After the patrol, Rat decides to write to Curt’s sister. He explains how heroic and tough Curt was in the letter, and that the two of them were close. He promises to take care of the sister when the war ends. However, the sister never writes back. O'Brien explains that a true war story is never about a moral. There are no generalizations that can be taken from it.

8. The Dentist

O'Brien explains that people often feel sentimental about the dead, and so he wants to tell a story about Curt Lemon. O'Brien is quick to admit that he found it difficult to mourn when Curt Lemon was killed. Lemon was the sort of person that pretended to be tough, and the best thing that O'Brien can remember about Lemon is when the latter dressed up and went trick-or-treating for Halloween. But Lemon was the sort of person that would brag and exaggerate about his accomplishments. Ultimately, O'Brien suspects that Lemon either had too high an opinion of himself or else that he had a low opinion of himself that he was trying to erase. 

9. Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong

O'Brien explains that there are a lot of stories from Vietnam, but the best are the ones that rest between the improbable and bedlam. “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” is a story he heard from Rat Kiley, who had a reputation for exaggeration, but who swore this story was true. It begins when Kiley was stationed as a medic at an aid station in the mountains west of Chu Lai, near the village Tra Bong. The compound overlooks the river, Song Tra Bong. Though the compound was not very secure, the soldiers enjoyed their duty there because there was little military discipline.

10. Stockings

O'Brien explains, is like America in many ways: he was a good person, an excellent solider, and he was always plodding along, however slowly. He was not a sophisticated man, he had a roll of fat in his belly, and “the ironies went beyond him.” He was a soldier who was there when needed. He believed in simplicity, direct thoughts, and hard work.

11. Church

The platoon is in the Batangan Peninsula when they come across a pagoda that they initially think is abandoned. The platoon digs foxholes around the pagoda so that they can base their operations out of the pagoda for the next week. When the monks see that the platoon has turned their pagoda into a fortress, one of them makes a washing motion with his hands. None of the soldiers understand what the gesture means. Still, the platoon and the monks get along. They even bring the soldiers watermelons and buckets of water and Lieutenant Cross is given an old chair to honor his position. However, none of the soldiers bond as strongly with the monks as Henry Dobbins does.

12. The Man I Killed

O'Brien stands before the body of a man he has just killed. He looks down at the body and notices that the face is mangled. One eye is shut and the other is a “star-shaped hole.” The man had been a soldier because he had a gun and ammo. However, as O'Brien looks down at the man he killed, he notices the dead man’s fine wrists and his arched eyebrows. He is poorly muscled. He wears an ammunition belt and a gold ring. O'Brien guesses that he was born in 1946 in the village of My Khe, which is near the coastline of Quang Ngai Province. He was not a Communist, but rather someone who fought because of Quang Ngai’s tradition of patriotic resistance. He was not a fighter, but a scholar—someone that wanted to someday teach mathematics.

13. Ambush

O'Brien explains that his daughter, Kathleen, once asked him whether he killed anyone during the war. She was nine at the time, knew he had been in the war, and knew that he wrote war stories. O'Brien explains that it seemed right to tell her that he had not killed anyone, which is what he ultimately told her. However, he hopes that she will someday ask him again. In this story, O'Brien explains, he will pretend that she is grown up and explain what he remembers when he killed that man. This is also, O'Brien explains, why he continues to write war stories. 

14. Style

 The story is set against the backdrop of a burning Vietnamese village. In front of one house, a girl stands dancing. The dark-haired girl is perhaps fourteen, her eyes are half closed, and she stands barefoot. She is dancing on her toes, but there is no music playing. Azar wonders why the girl is dancing and Henry Dobbins replies that it does not matter. O'Brien explains that the girl’s family is dead. The dead family's bodies were burned when the soldiers discovered them. There was an old woman, a woman whose age the soldiers cannot discern, and an infant. There was also a girl, whom they dragged out of the wreckage, and who is dancing in small steps with an occasional smile on her face. She sometimes covers her ears, a gesture that the soldiers try and fail to interpret. They look at her movements, sometimes backwards, sometimes side to side, sometimes swaying her hips, and again cannot figure out the girl’s dance.

15. Speaking of Courage

 Norman Bowker is in a small and prosperous American town on the prairie, driving around a lake in his father’s Chevy. It is early evening, the Fourth of July, and as Bowker drives clockwise, repeatedly, around the lake, he thinks of how he almost won the Silver Star for bravery. Bowker is driving alone, but he thinks about the people that he might like to talk to. He used to carry a photograph of Sally Kramer in his wallet, but she is now married, named Sally Gustafson, and lives in a nice house near the lake. It would have been a good time to talk, and Bowker wonders about what he might say to his father.

16. Notes

It is a series of notes about the previous story in the collection, “Speaking of Courage.” O'Brien explains that he got the idea for the story after receiving a letter from Norman Bowker. Three years after sending the letter, Bowker would hang himself in the gym of his local YMCA. In the letter, Bowker explained how he was struggling to find a purpose now that he had returned to America. He had taken on a variety of jobs and he had enrolled in school, but none of these pursuits seemed immediate and meaningful. He slept through the mornings, played pickup basketball in the afternoons, and drove around in the evenings. He wanted to talk about the war, but he could not find the words.

17. In the Field

 The men are searching for Kiowa, who has just drowned in a field of human waste outside of a Vietnamese ville. They are near the river Song Tra Bong, which has flooded the flat plain where the men were camped. The flood water turned the field to a mix of mud and excrement, and the men were attacked during the night as well. Now, the men consider their role in Kiowa's death as they wade through the field searching for his body.

18. Good Form

In this story, O'Brien discusses the nature of truth within his experiences in Vietnam. He reflects on events recorded in previous stories from The Things They Carried like “The Man I Killed” and “Ambush.” O'Brien begins “Good Form” by admitting that he is forty-three years old. He now works as a writer, but in his youth he was a foot soldier in a platoon that humped through Quang Ngai Province during the Vietnam War. After that, almost every detail in his stories is invented. 

19. Field Trip

It is twenty years after the war, and O'Brien has returned to Vietnam with his daughter, Kathleen, who is ten years old. O'Brien has taken her to regular tourist sites, though he wishes that he could take her to all of the places that keep him awake at night. The only place that he takes her that is connected to his experience in the war is the field where Kiowa died.

20. The Ghost Soldiers

Here, O'Brien explains how he was shot twice. The first shot hit him in the side and Rat Kiley was there to take care of him. Even though the platoon was caught in a firefight, Kiley returned to check on O’Brien several times. When O'Brien returned to the platoon, Kiley was injured and had been replaced by Bobby Jorgenson. Jorgenson is so green that when O'Brien is shot again, this time in the buttocks, the medic leaves O’Brien wounded for ten minutes before he works up the nerve to check up on him. Even then he forgets to check for shock. 

21. Night Life

 It tells the story of how Rat Kiley was injured during O’Brien’s convalescence from the first time he was shot. Word reaches the platoon that the Russians have supplied the Vietcong with fresh artillery. Fresh troops are supposed to be in the area as well. No one, not even Lieutenant Cross, takes this warning seriously, but they agree to take precautions anyway. They stay off the trails and only hump at night, living the “night life.” Though the soldiers turn it into a joke, it is actually disconcerting to hump during the night, which is pitch-black due to steady cloud cover. There is the sound of insects and the chattering of monkeys. The men start to worry about getting cut off from the rest of the group, trapped in the darkness. During the day, it is hot, humid, and difficult to sleep. 

22. The Lives of the Dead

 In it, O'Brien remembers the dead bodies that he has seen. He explains that stories are like dreams in which the dead can sit up and smile at you. Sometimes, he uses stories to dream about the people that he has lost, people like Ted Lavender, Kiowa, Curt Lemon, and a young girl he once loved named Linda.