PDF Summary:The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien
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1-Page PDF Summary of The Things They Carried
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien tells the stories of a small company of American soldiers serving in the Vietnam War. Through the narrative, the book blurs the line between autobiography and fiction, leaving the reader unsure as to what is fact and what is myth. In reading these stories, we explore the harrowing physical and psychological toll of warfare and the dehumanizing and brutalizing effects of combat on human beings. We also see the transformative power that narrative and storytelling have to help us make sense of our experiences and give meaning and clarity to even the most shocking, chaotic, and traumatizing events.
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Brutalization
As the men spend more time in Vietnam and become more exposed to life in a war zone, they become hardened and emotionally callous. O’Brien comes to believe that he has lost some essential part of his former self because of the things he has seen and done. The men of Alpha Company burn down villages, terrorize the local Vietnamese population, slaughter animals, and mock the grief of the people they see lamenting the loss of their homes and families. At other times, they desecrate corpses of dead soldiers and civilians—kicking them, cutting off their limbs as trophies, and mockingly “shaking hands” with them.
But they also brutalize and dehumanize with language. The men joke and put on a mask of weary indifference to cope with the threat of death that hangs over their entire existence. When someone dies, they are, “offed,” “lit up,” or “zapped.” Even when some of their own are killed, the reaction is the same—jokes, callous remarks, and outward displays of cold indifference.
Fear of Shame
O’Brien shares an early, pre-Vietnam experience from his childhood, in which he fails to defend a friend who was suffering from a brain tumor from having her cap yanked off in class by a bully, revealing her bald head. He says that he failed to show moral courage and act on his principles because he didn’t want to look weak or effeminate in defending a vulnerable friend. He felt compelled to socially sanction an act of cruelty.
He faces similar dilemmas as a soldier. When first drafted into the war, O’Brien contemplates fleeing to Canada, but also feels immense pressure from his conservative Minnesota hometown to fight, and fears being seen as a coward. While he believes that the war is morally wrong and politically unjustified, he ultimately succumbs to his fear of how he would be perceived by his peers and goes to Vietnam—a decision which he, ironically, looks back on as having been the cowardly one.
Later, in Vietnam, he sees that the men of Alpha Company disdain outward displays of compassion and celebrate those fellow soldiers who seem to relish the violence of combat. Those who deliberately injure themselves to escape active duty are castigated as dishonorable and shameful “pussies” and “candy-asses.”
The Power of Storytelling
A frequent theme throughout the book is how telling fictionalized narrative stories brings true experiences alive. O’Brien discusses the difference between happening-truth and story-truth. Happening-truth is just the literal recounting of events that happened, while story-truth is imbued with fictional or exaggerated elements. Story-truth, however, is more real, because its sensationalized features more fully convey to the reader the emotional power of what happened. Stories can be truer than truth.
O’Brien experiments with this theme throughout the book, by relating emotionally traumatic episodes to us (like his killing of a young Vietnamese soldier), only to reveal to us later in the narrative that they did not actually happen the way he told us. Nevertheless, the stories are “true” because they convey to us what it felt like for O’Brien to be in these situations in a way that the literal truth (or happening-truth) never could.
He notes that true war stories aren’t parables—they’re not meant to instruct, impart morals, serve as examples of good conduct, generalize, or engage in abstraction. What makes the story true is the reaction it produces, not the content itself. Thus, something may happen and still be a complete lie, while another thing may be pure fiction and yet truer than the actual truth.
For O’Brien, a writer, storytelling is an act of both catharsis and resurrection. He can process his own war experiences and make sense of them by reshaping them into a narrative. But he can also see the dead again, make them smile and speak. He likens his characters to books on a library shelf that haven’t been checked out for a long time. They are lying dormant, waiting for him to check them out and bring them to life once more—to make them immortal through storytelling.
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PDF Summary Part One: Burdens
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What each man chooses to carry is a window into who they are and what is most important to them. Some carry extra rations, condoms, comic books, marijuana, or copies of the New Testament. Beyond the physical, the men of Alpha company also carry a great many burdens—including diseases both biological and psychological.
Cross carries two photographs of Martha. Another man, Dave Jensen, carries a rabbit’s foot as a good-luck charm. Henry Dobbins carries his girlfriend’s pantyhose, tied around his neck. Disturbingly, Norman Bowker carries a rotting thumb taken from the corpse of a slain Vietcong (VC) soldier, a boy of perhaps 15 or 16.
War and Death
Much of the war is spent in passive waiting and long spells of boredom. It often seems to be a continual march, without end and without purpose, humping their burdens from one poor village to the next. Of course, it is war—and war still brings the fearsome anticipation and knowledge that, at any moment, death and destruction may descend upon the company.
In moments of combat when the unit is under fire, the boredom drains away and the tough exterior the men put on drops immediately. They fall to the ground in terror...
PDF Summary Part Two: Stories
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Rather impulsively, he one day decided to make a break for the Canadian border, quitting his job at a meatpacking plant, and not even saying goodbye to his parents. Something inside him had snapped under the pressure. He drove his car north, stopping at an old fishing lodge a half-mile from the Canadian border.
It was there that O’Brien met the man who, with hindsight, he says saved his life. Elroy Berdahl, the proprietor of the lodge, was 81 years old and immediately saw that O’Brien was in trouble. As tourist season was over, the two of them were the only people in the lodge. They spent six days together, fishing, eating, listening to records, and hiking through the woods. But never once did Berdahl ask O’Brien why he was there or what was troubling him.
During those six days, O’Brien recalls that he was tempted to steal a boat and row to the other side of the river to freedom in Canada. But, despite being so close, he could never bring himself to leave his life behind. It was not out of a sense of duty—indeed, his conscience is what told him to make a break for Canada. He still believed that avoiding fighting in Vietnam was the morally correct decision. **What kept him...
PDF Summary Part Three: The Field
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One night, Mary Anne didn’t come back to the base. At first thinking she was sleeping with one of the other soldiers, Fossie and Kiley searched the entire camp, but found no trace of her. It dawned on them that Mary Anne wasn’t missing or captured—she had gone out on ambush with the Green Berets. Vietnam had consumed her. She had gone native.
She would go off on ambush often after this, sometimes for as long as three weeks, with fewer and fewer return trips to the camp. One night, Kiley claimed to have seen her returning from a mission with the Greenies, like a silhouette, ethereal and mysterious. She had become one with the strangely compelling chaos of Vietnam.
One night, Kiley and Fossie went out to the Special Forces area. From inside the Greenies’ compound, they could hear ghostly, otherworldly, chanting, not unlike what the men on the listening patrol had heard up in the mountains. Inside, they found Mary Anne singing, chanting, and swaying to some sort of tribal music, wearing a necklace made of human tongues. She was flat and indifferent, betraying no emotion and displaying no sign of the person she had once been. She told Fossie that **she wanted to consume...
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Learn more about our summaries →PDF Summary Part Four: Reflections
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O’Brien notes how ordinary and mundane the field looks today, nothing like the filthy hellscape it was the night Kiowa died. It is hard to imagine that this place has loomed so large in his mind for all these years—this field, after all, had killed his close friend, while transforming O’Brien himself into a different person than who he’d been before. This field was the cornerstone of his Vietnam trauma, the place that embodied all the filth and terror of the war. Now, however, he sees it for what it really is: just a drab and unremarkable patch of dirt in a far-flung corner of rural Vietnam, obscure and unremarkable.
In what he hopes is a final act of closure, O’Brien returns Kiowa’s moccasins to the field, letting them sink into the mud. Although a gifted writer, words fail him in this instant. He is unable to come up with anything poignant or meaningful to say during this moment of remembrance. He simply says, “Well, there it is,” as he looks back at the field one last time. He feels that he has been buried in that field ever since that terrible night, but that now, perhaps, he has finally found his way out.
Three Shots
O’Brien reflects on two separate...
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