The Things They Carried

The Way They Survived by The short story I chose to write my essay on is "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien. The soldiers in the story had to deal with not only accepting the deaths of those they became close with, but also dealing with the knowledge that they took another human beings' life. The author shows how they had to carry not only their equipment; but the emotions that came along with being in a war. The emotions I speak of are ones that come from knowing they were mere grunts-and as such, were replaceable. That moment where they silly cease to exist could arrive when they least expected it. This analysis is about the way Cross and his soldiers dealt with the war, not physically but emotionally. A part of the story that really stuck out to me was Lieutenant Cross's particular brand of love for a girl back home, Martha. Cross was a good leader, but he let his emotional drama from home begun to get in the way of the way he lead his company. Obviously, Cross was in love with Martha, it is mentioned several times how he carried mementos form her and that she was in his thoughts, night and day. "Whenever he looked at the photographs, he thought of new things he should've done." (Cross 806)She was one of the emotional burdens Cross was carrying with him throughout the story. This was Cross's way to cope with some of what was going on around him in Vietnam. He wanted Martha to love him as he loved her, but the letters she wrote were mostly chatty and elusive on the matter of love. This is interesting because Martha was a woman he had met one time; they had a great time on a date, but that was it. For Cross this appeared to be his last enjoyable memory he had before he left, and he carried it across the world with him to Vietnam. "Cross understood that love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it to be" (Cross ).It is easy for me to understand how Cross could put so much of his thoughts on this girl he spent little to no time with. This had to be what made it bearable to sleep in the middle of a jungle in a foreign country fighting a war. However would it really be a good idea to have those kind of hopes when sitting alone at night, with no real way of knowing what Martha was really doing or thinking? Having no clue what your partner was doing with no actual contact would drive anyone mad. You would start to have a sense of grief, an unsettling feeling of being alone. This started to drive him madd in some sense, he would sit and obsess about what he could have done differently, "He should have carried her up the stairs to her room and tied her to the bed and touched that knee all night long. He should've risked it" (Cross ). However Cross had taken his way of dealing with the war to another level and let it turn into an obsession that started putting the safety of his men in peril.

When he was walking yet another fallen solider to the helicopter his mind was not on the recently departed man a breath away from him but Martha, on his Martha and "the soft curve of her face". Cross came to a point he realized that he had to stop writing to her because of how she always found away to avoid speaking of the war. He began to realize they were living in two very different worlds, and he was fearing that with his constant thoughts on her would land either him or his men into trouble. This fear became a cold fact when while distracted once more by his love he had made a fatal mistake and lead a few of his men to their deaths. Through the fog of guilt he felt over having two of his men die, he comes to a slightly more livable realization that it was not directly because of him that they lost their lives. How ever he knows that though the incident was not his fault, it was by all means preventable. Cross had let his love for Martha fill his mind to the point of deadly distraction. With that he puts her thoughts and pictures away and focuses on leading his soldiers. (This is interesting because he has such love for something such passion but he has to deal with what is going on around him.) He had to leave those thoughts that once pledged his mind behind him and focus on the task that was in front of him now; be the leader he was assigned to be and complete his mission so he could get himself and his soldiers home safe. "He would look them in the eyes, keeping his chin level, and he would issue the new sop's in a calm, impersonal tone of voice, an officers voice, leaving no room for topic or discussion. Commencing immediately, he'd tell them, they would no longer abandon equipment along the route of march. They would police up their acts. They would get their shit together, and keep it together, and maintain it neatly and in good looking order."
Its hard just leaving your only hope and escape from a situation but at least Cross understands he has to do this before more lives are lost unnecessarily.

"They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased, they'd say. Offed, lit up, zapped while zipping. It wasn't cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors and the war came at them in 3-D. When someone died, it wasn't quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had their lines mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and because they called it by other names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of death." They had created a way to accept what was happening around them.
While on their march the men would kick dead bodies and crack jokes about how they died, they did this in an attempt to belittle death. This was all in the name of trying to belittle their fear so they could function. In war or anything else thats difficult in life you have to find a way of pushing threw your problems. The way the soldiers began joking with death sounds like one of the only reasonable thing you could do in their situation. It sounds horrible but if your surrounded by something long enough, your going to get used to it. It might not sound very pretty or make the soldiers out to be guys with no morals. There not insensitive but they have become numb to the brutality; "moral? Sanders wrapped the thumb in toilet paper and handed it to Norman Bowker. Smiling he kicked the boy's head, watched the flies scatter, and said, It's like that old TV show-Paladin. Have gun, will travel. Henrey Dobbins thinks about it. Yeah, well, he finally said. I don't see no moral. There it is, man." I

**(i want this to be the main part of your conclusion. the sum of your conclusion should contain;1)the real relationship Cross and Martha had )**
Though Martha had showed no actual indication that she truly loved Cross in return. It seemed instead, that she was in love with the idea of having having a love across seas in a war. "Martha wrote that she had found the pebble … at high tide, where things came together but also separated." She was mentioned to be an english major and lover of poems a few times. It seemed she liked to imagine herself as the center of one of the poems she loved so much, a tragic timeless tail of a girls love leaving to fight at war. And though she sat firmly on the fence when it came to her emotions with Cross, it seemed he did not mind. I say this because while there was a doctor there for their physical injuries, there wasn't anyone there for the hell they had to go through emotionally. And pretending that there was more between Martha and himself was his way to cope with the reality of what was happening around him was the hope of a loving relationship awaiting him at home.

*(transition sentence between Cross's obsession between martha and the paragraph you'r talking about the soldiers)While this was Cross's way of dealing with the constant threat of violence and death thrown in his face at every other turn, this was not how the soldiers chose to deal with their fears and insecurities about being killed or replaced.

(and the love he had for the soldiers he was leading.)
Thesis???: The way they delta with the war, not physically but emotionally.