“Follow me? The rock—it’s talking. And the fog, too, and the grass and the goddamn mongooses. Everything talks. The trees talk politics, the monkeys talk religion. The whole country. Vietnam. The place talks. It talks. Understand? Nam—it truly talks.”
-The Things They Carried, p 71
Well, this is a rather interesting passage, no? To be honest, I don’t really know what to make of it. Whether or not the tale is true, though, is rather irrelevant. Thye purpose of the tale is not to make the reader believe that Vietnam is haunted or anything similar to that. In fact, it is not really even to illustrate the effects of Vietnam on the soldiers. Truthfully, this story is included to depict the effect of war in general. Yes, Vietnam was extremely traumatizing, yet it could easily be argued that the main reason modern wars are viewed as more traumatic is that trauma is better documented in recent times. History books give the facts and figures of war, but they don’t capture the humanity—or lack thereof—of battle and death. That is the true message of Mitchell Sanders’ story: the savagery and brutality of war in principle.
I struggled with this passage as well.
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