The Things They Carried

It is estimated that about 30 out of every 100 of Vietnam Veterans have had PTSD in their lifetime. This shows that the war has had psychological effects on the men in the war. The Things They Carried is a collection of stories which focus on the Alpha Company and the soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War, dealing with emotions of fear, loneliness, grief, and much more as they are trying to stay alive and get back home to their families and friends back in America. Men who go to war are injured more so emotionally than physically because their emotional scars live with them forever and their methods of coping or lack of coping haunt them. In The Things They Carried the soldiers in the novel all go through things during and after the war. Mary Ann, an innocent girl who comes to the Vietnam War with her boyfriend and never is the same after it, Norman Bowker, a soldier in the war who feels as though he had no one to talk to about what he's going through, and the author Tim O’Brien, who uses writing and creating stories to help cope with the emotions he still has from the war.

Tim O’Brien uses his writing as a means to cope with the experience of fighting in the Vietnam War. In the last chapter of the book “The Lives of the Dead,” he compares his first experience of death as a little boy when his friend Linda dies to the his experience of death he sees when fighting in the war. “Sometimes I can even see Timmy skating with Linda under the yellow floodlights. I’m young and happy. I’ll never die. I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and 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.” Remembering experiences of the war and telling his stories help him cope and mourn when thinking of the painful and tragic events.

Norman Bowker has a hard time adjusting back to life in America because the Vietnam War has had such a negative impact on his life. In the chapter “ Speaking of Courage,” Norman feels that he's a failure, not because he did not win the medal his father was worried about but because of him not being able to save his friend. “‘The truth,’ Norman Bowker would've said, ‘is I let the guy go.’” Norman feels guilty that he couldn't save Kiowa. He feels as though he could of did a lot more to save