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.

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.

Holding Out for a Hero? (Antihero)

“I passed through towns with familiar names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.”

-The Things They Carried, p 58

When one imagines a literary war hero, one can imagine a few different types of heroes. There is the valiant hero, the brawny, honorable soldier who vanquishes the Nazis singlehandedly while sparing a town of women and old people. There is the righteous hero, the upright, moralistic pacifist who refuses to kowtow to bloodthirsty minds and instead convinces others not to engage in battle as well. There is even the fallen hero, the simple, innocent participant who succumbs to bloodlust and transforms into a savage monster in the face of war.

O’Brien is none of these. He is not a man who saves the United States from a horrible war. He is not able to stand by his morals and escape violence. He is not changed into a serial killer who slaughters puppies for fun. No, O’Brien is simply an average man: not courageous enough to make a large impact on the war, nor brave enough to hold to his ideals. He is, in significant ways, a war antihero. Yet by admitting this, O’Brien points out a revealing truth about Vietnam: few of the soldiers were, in fact, heroes. They were average men, thrust into a savage war for which none were ready. Vietnam was, in truth, a war of antiheroes.