Getting By

“ ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Those dumb jokes—I didn’t mean anything.’
“ ‘We all say things.’
“ ‘Yeah, but when I saw the guy, it made me feel—I don’t know—like he was listening.’
“ ‘He wasn’t.’
“ ‘I guess not. But I felt sort of guilty almost, like if I’d kept my mouth shut none of it would’ve ever happened. Like it was my fault.’
“Norman Bowker looked out across the wet field. ‘Nobody’s fault,’ he said. ‘Everybody’s.’ ”

-The Things They Carried, p 168

It is interesting to observe the different coping mechanisms that each member of Alpha Company utilizes when faced with harsh realities of war. Some, such as Lt. Cross, feel immense guilt and resolve to become tougher to the cruelties of battle. Some, such as Rat Kiley, release their emotions violently and cathartically. Some, such as Henry Dobbins and Norman Bowker, keep their emotions within—in the case of Bowker, too much within.

Still others, such as Azar, employ perhaps the strangest coping mechanism: they turn traumatic experiences into humor. Instead of displaying grief and bitterness, Azar simply laughs and jokes death off. While most of the company view Azar as cold and unemotional because of this, in truth Azar could be viewed as the most affected by these events. He is so affected that is unable to bear it and is driven to create distractions through humor. Yet even Azar reaches a point where his humor is unable to distract him from the terror of war. In the end, few can escape the trauma of war.

No Hope

“Eight months later he hanged himself. In August of 1978 his mother sent me a brief note explaining what had happened…He used a jump rope; his friends found him hanging from a water pipe. There was no suicide note, no message of any kind. ‘Norman was a quiet boy,’ his mother wrote, ‘and I don’t suppose he wanted to bother anybody.’ ”

-The Things They Carried, p 154

It is a terrible tragedy that those who suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) are only now receiving substantial attention and diagnosis. For hundreds, even thousands, of years, soldiers would return home from war and be expected to move on from the bloodletting with grace and ease. If men were affected by the war, they were simply labeled cowards and were shunned, punished, and often even killed for their cowardice. Human emotion and normal response to senseless bloodshed, it seemed, were crimes punishable by death.

Even in recent times, the prevalent expectation of soldiers when they return home is to keep discussion of the war at a minimum and simply return to normal life as if they had never experienced the brutality of war. It has only been recently that soldiers are being examined for symptoms of PTSD, and even those who are medically diagnosed with the disorder often are forced to engage in legal battle with the military and government in order to receive pension for disabilities. Yet if PTSD is terrible enough to cause depression, violence, and even suicide, then why is the military not in the forefront of those researching and treating this disorder? If people really want soldiers to return home comfortably, the government must either further research PTSD or cease to send soldiers into such traumatic circumstances.

Music of the Night

“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.