Death, Part II--As If One Wasn't Enough (Understatement)

“Death sucks.”

-The Things They Carried, p 230

Why yes, it does. This one two-word sentence is quite possibly the biggest understatement I have personally heard. Yet this is what the entire novel has been about. O’Brien does not trifle himself with grandiose or gruesome images of war, nor does he disregard the severity and brutality of battle. He simply yet powerfully describes war as he has experienced it, nothing more and nothing less. By doing so, though, O’Brien accomplishes his goal more successfully than many writers who attempt to write about war. The reader can sense the truth in his words. Even when the phrases are short and the accounts terse, the power of his writing remains.

In many ways, Vietnam cannot be described in grandiose terms; it simply was not a glorious war. A war of such vapidity should be described in a straightforward manner. That is what makes O’Brien’s writing so effective. This honest, abrupt style of writing in which the author can simply say, “Death sucks,” and actually have it carry immense weight and power, embodies the mood of the Vietnam War itself.