The Things They Carried Sparknotes
From a general summary to chapter summaries to explanations of famous quotes, the SparkNotes The Things They Carried Study Guide has everything you. 'The Things They Carried' is a short story collection by Tim O'Brien. The title story lists all the items the soldiers carry with them: guns, ammunition, clothes, pills, comic books, pictures,.
Literature GuidesA Study Guide of The Things They Carried IntroductionThe Things They Carried is a powerful look into the lives and experiences of foot soldiers during and after the Vietnam war.
The Things They Carried SummaryWe meet a bunch of soldiers with a crazy amount of (mental and otherwise) baggage: First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, Rat Kiley, Kiowa, Mitchell Sanders, Ted Lavender, Norman Bowker, and others. Almost immediately, Ted Lavender dies. We learn that the soldiers carry lots of things, from guns to fear to expectations.As we go through the book—which does not flow chronologically, btw—we're told a lot of things. One of the most important is that it's impossible to generalize about war. War sucks, but it doesn't always suck. It corrupts our soldiers, but it also makes them feel totally alive.Curt Lemon dies (guess everyone who dies has a color-related name?), which leads O'Brien to tell us that truth is flexible in war.
The things that happen in war are so crazy that literal truth can't possibly capture them. Only emotional truth, or 'story-truth,' can, and O'Brien uses it liberally. Tim kills a guy on a trail and feels guilty about it, so he makes up a back-story for the kid in order to make the victim more human.Rat Kiley tells us the creepiest story in the world, 'Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,' in which a good down-home American girl is seduced by the Vietnam War into becoming a creepy jungle killer. Later, Kiowa drowns in a field that's literally full of poop, and we start to talk about blame.
Then, in 'Good Form,' O'Brien tells us that almost the entire book is made up, including parts that he claimed elsewhere were true.Wait, what? Just when we thought we were following alongIn the last third of the book, we start to get into stories a lot more. In a vengeful prank against a medic who nearly killed him with his negligence and then took his place in the brotherhood of the platoon, Tim creates a story that nearly drives the medic insane.Then, in 'The Lives of the Dead,' O'Brien tells us how he started to tell stories in the first place—to bring a nine-year-old girl named Linda, whom he loved, back to life—and how that method of storytelling still works, both to save the war dead and to save himself. The Things They Carried. First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carries letters from a girl named Martha, who's an English major at Mount Sebastian College.
He reads the letters every night. He's in love with her, but she's not in love with him.
The men carry the things they need, like can openers and pocketknives and Kool-Aid and water. Some necessities are more individual. Kiowa, for example, carries a copy of the New Testament, and Ted Lavender is scared, so he carries tranquilizers until he's shot in the head. (For more on what the characters carry and how it helps us see them as individuals throughout this story, head over to ). Some basic vocabulary: The soldiers are called 'legs' or 'grunts.'
To 'hump' something means to carry it. (Get your mind out of the gutter!). You can hump something that exists, tangibly, like a pack of ammunition, or you can hump something in the emotional sense, like the love that Jimmy Cross has for Martha.
(Out of the gutter, we said!). Almost everyone humps photographs. Jimmy Cross carries two of Martha.
In one, she's playing volleyball, and he's almost sure that she's a virgin (these facts are not related). After the war is over, Jimmy Cross visits Tim O'Brien and the two reminisce over coffee. Cross reveals that he never forgave himself for Ted Lavender's death, at which point O'Brien and Cross decide to switch from coffee to alcohol. The mood lightens and around midnight, O'Brien feels comfortable enough to ask Cross about Martha. Cross is shocked that he even remembered who Martha was.
He ends up showing O'Brien the same photograph that he carried of Martha when he was in Vietnam. It turns out that after Cross burned the first one, Martha gave him a new one after running into him at a college reunion. Here's what happened:. Cross and Martha spend almost an entire day together.
Martha hasn't married, and is now a Lutheran missionary who has done work in Ethiopia and Guatemala. Even though they seemed to be getting along okay, Martha is still distant, and doesn't even respond when Cross tells her that he loves her.
At the end of the evening, he tell her about his fantasy—previously mentioned in 'The Things They Carried'—about carrying her to the bed and tying her up so that he could hold her hand to his knee all night long. O'Brien starts the chapter off by telling us that the war 'wasn't all about terror and violence' and then launches into a number of very short stories that then show the sweetness in the war. A little boy with one leg asks Azar for chocolate, and Azar gives him some.
Aww. Lest we think that Azar is in any way a good person for more than a second, Azar then says that the boy's one leg showed how much war sucks, because it means that 'some poor f.er soldier ran out of ammo' (Spin.1).
Trust us, you'll hate him even more later. Mitchell Sanders spends an hour picking off his body lice, puts them in an envelope, and sends them to his draft board back in Ohio. O'Brien compares the war to a Ping Pong ball, saying that you could put a spin on it and make it dance. Norman Bowker and Henry Dobbins have a ritual checkers game every evening, one that the rest of the men often gather around to watch. There is order in checkers, two clear armies, rules.
It's restful. O'Brien sits at his typewriter, now forty-three years old, and remembers Kiowa dying in a field of excrement (yeah, like sewage) and Curt Lemon dead in a tree. And while he's remembering it, he can't help but relive it. But that wasn't the whole war. Back in Vietnam, Ted Lavender takes too many tranquilizers, he says that the war is nice and mellow. An old Vietnamese guy leads them through the mine fields in the Batangan Peninsula.
He knows exactly where the safe spaces are, and where you definitely do not want to step. Rat Kiley makes up a rhyme: 'Step out of line, hit a mine; follow the dink, you're in the pink' (Spin.8). The men fall in love with the old man, and when the choppers came to take the soldiers away, everyone is sad (including the old man). The war is about waiting as much as it is about humping.
It is boredom (a nerve-wracking boredom, but boredom nonetheless) interspersed with seriously gut-wrenching terror. O'Brien feels guilty for still writing war stories. Kathleen, his daughter, tells him it's an obsession. O'Brien agrees that maybe he should forget, but that 'the thing about remembering is that you don't forget' (Spin.13). His real obsession is not the war, but the stories. He tells a peace story. A guy—unnamed—goes AWOL and has a great time.
But he ends up returning to his unit, telling his buddies that the peace 'felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back' (Spin.16).
Mitchell Sanders told O'Brien that story, and even though it's probably made up, O'Brien still feels that it's true. He says that sometimes in a battle, even at the height of chaos, looking up at the fluffy clouds in the blue sky could make you feel amazingly at peace. He says that the memories that stick out the most are the fragments of stories:. Norman Bowker whispers to O'Brien that he wishes his dad didn't care if he (Bowker) wins any medals. Kiowa teaches Rat Kiley and Dave Jensen to do a rain dance.
Kiley is predictably disappointed when no rain ensues. Ted Lavender adopts a puppy, and then Azar straps it to a mine and blows it up. We told you that you were going to hate Azar.). The men in the platoon are about nineteen or twenty years old, to which O'Brien attributes Azar's pranks. Azar, naturally, has no idea why everybody is so angry with him for killing the puppy.
He says he's just a boy. O'Brien also remembers the smell of an empty body bag; the moon rising over the paddies; Henry Dobbins sewing on his sergeant stripes and singing; grass bending when a helicopter lands on it; a slim, dead, dainty young man of about twenty killed on a red clay trail outside the village of My Khe; and Kiowa trying to get him to talk about it. He says that stories are for joining the past to the future, and making sure memories last forever. O'Brien has never told anyone this story, and lets us know right away that he's ashamed of it because it exposes him as a coward. Here we go, then. It begins in June of 1968, when O'Brien drafted. O'Brien doesn't believe that the war is right, and thinks the country's reasons for going to war aren't solid enough to warrant a whole lot of killing.
When O'Brien gets his draft notice in the mail, he thinks (smugly but believably), that he's too good for the war—bound for grad school at Harvard, Phi Beta Kappa, and just obviously unsuited for combat. Lee Strunk and Dave Jensen get in a fight over a missing jackknife. Dave Jensen breaks Strunk's nose so hard that Strunk has to be flown back to the rear. When Strunk returns two days later, Dave Jensen gets nervous. He keeps away from Strunk and feels like he's always under attack. One afternoon, he starts shooting his gun in the air, yelling Strunk's name. All the other soldiers hit the ground (of course).
When he runs out of ammo, Jensen puts his head in his arms and refuses to move for two or three hours. That night, he breaks his own nose with a pistol. Then he goes up to Strunk and asks if they're even.
Strunk says they are. Later, though, Strunk is still laughing, saying that Jensen is crazy, and that he'd actually stolen Jensen's jackknife. It's kind of unclear whether Strunk means that Jensen is crazy to forgive Strunk for stealing his jackknife and that he didn't need to break his own nose to be even, or that Jensen is just crazy in general. Knowing this book, it's probably both.
Friends. Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk get to the point where they trust each other pretty well. They make a pact that if one of them should get a wound so bad it would put him in a wheelchair, the other will kill him to put him out of his misery. They even put it on paper. Of course, Lee Strunk eventually steps on a rigged mortar round and it blows his right leg off at the knee. He begs Dave Jensen not to kill him. Dave Jensen says not to worry—he won't be killing his friend.
Strunk doesn't believe him, but Jensen does as he was asked—he doesn't kill Strunk. Strunk dies as he is being airlifted out. It 'seemed to relieve Dave Jensen of an enormous weight' (Friends.13). When one of his friends is killed, Rat writes to the friend's sister. He explains what a great guy her brother was, and tells her how close the two of them were.
It's a long letter, and very personal. Rat is practically crying as he writes it.
She never writes back. O'Brien tells us that a true war story is not a moral story, that you can tell a war story is true if it contains obscenity and evil.
He says that because of Rat's response to the sister's non-response—that 'the dumb cooze never writes back'—you can tell that it's a true war story (How to Tell a True War Story.10). Rat's friend's name was Curt Lemon. The day of his death is a peaceful day. Rat and Lemon are playing chicken under a tree, tossing a smoke grenade back and forth in the sunlight. Lemon must have stepped on a mine, because all of a sudden it seems as if the sunlight has lifted him off the ground and right into the tree.
O'Brien explains that even though it wasn't the sunlight that really killed Lemon, that's what it seemed like—and therefore that's the truth of what happened. This is the first time that O'Brien gets really into his idea of story-truth and happening-truth, but there'll be a lot more later, so keep your eyes peeled. Another way that you can tell that a war story is true is if it sounds too crazy to be believed. Like this one, from Mitchell Sanders:.
A six-man patrol is supposed to go up into the mountains and listen for enemy movement for a week. They're supposed to be completely silent; just listen. They start to hear things. Chimes, xylophones, voices at a fancy cocktail party, a glee club, a choir. The voices of Vietnam. They freak out and order up a bunch of firepower on the mountain.
They completely destroy the place. The next morning, things are quiet. They go back down the mountain. A colonel asks what happened, what they heard, and why they just spent six trillion dollars on firepower. The men just stare at him, amazed at how little he hears.
Later, Sanders tells O'Brien that he figured out the moral of the story. It's that no one ever listens.
Later still, Sanders admits to O'Brien that he invented a few details—the glee club, the opera—but that the guys definitely did hear crazy things. O'Brien says that he gets it. Then Sanders tells us that the real moral (or maybe it's just another moral) is the quiet around them. Neither he nor O'Brien chooses to elaborate on that for us. O'Brien goes on to talk about whether or not there can even be a moral in a true war story; he says that if there is, it's not a coherent message that you can separate from the rest of the story.
He says that true war stories are about instinct, not trite generalizations like 'War is hell.' They should make your stomach believe. Here's another one:. After Curt Lemon is killed—could be the same day, could be a while after—the soldiers find a baby water buffalo. Rat Kiley pats its nose. He tries to feed it. Then he begins to shoot it.
(Yes, our face just contorted too.). He keeps shooting it until it is a mutilated lump of barely alive baby buffalo (you really need to read the book for the details), and then, crying, he goes off by himself. Dave Jensen keeps saying he'd never seen anything like it.
They drop the baby buffalo in the well. O'Brien tells us that we can't generalize about war any more than we can generalize about peace. It's hell, but it's other things besides that. Battles are grotesque, but also beautiful; napalm is devastating, but also astonishing. And after a battle, you feel immensely, wonderfully alive. There's no clarity in war.
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Which means that no war story is ever completely true. Sometimes in a true war story there's not even a point. After Curt Lemon is killed, all the parts of him are hanging in a tree. O'Brien and Dave Jensen have to climb up the tree and throw all the bits down. The gore is awful, but what really sticks in O'Brien's head is Jensen singing 'Lemon Tree' while they're up there.
You can tell if a war story is true by whether you'd feel cheated if it hadn't happened. If you'd feel betrayed by its untruth, then it's not true, even if it happened. If you wouldn't feel betrayed, then it's true, even if it didn't happen. O'Brien thinks that the truth is that the sunlight killed Curt Lemon, not a rigged 105 round.
Lemon must have believed that it was the sunlight. And O'Brien thinks that if he could get the story right, if he could describe it in just the right way, then we'd believe it, too. Okay, brace yourselves, because O'Brien's about to really screw with your heads:. He says that when he reads this story, sometimes a woman will come up to him and say she liked it, because of the poor baby buffalo and oh how horrible, he missed his friend, and O'Brien should really just try to put it behind him. O'Brien thinks that she's an idiot, because she's missed the point.
It's not a war story, it's a love story. So he retells the tale, taking out Rat and Lemon and the buffalo and the setting and everything, because it's all made up. And that really it happened in a totally different place and it happened to some guy named Stink Harris. O'Brien says that you can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it.
It's not about war, exactly, it's about all the things that go into war—sunlight and love and memory and people who don't listen. The Dentist. O'Brien wasn't a huge fan of Curt Lemon—he thought the guy was too cocky, too self-involved. But he wants to tell us a story about Curt Lemon anyway.
Once, when it is quiet, the higher-ups send an Army dentist out to the soldiers to check their teeth. Lemon starts to panic. While he is pretty fearless in combat, he really hates dentists. When he walks into the dentist's tent, he faints. After he wakes up, he sulks for a while.
Later that night, he goes to the dental tent and tells the dentist that he has a horrible toothache and he needs to have a tooth pulled. The dentist says that there's nothing wrong with his teeth, but Lemon insists, so the dentist pulls the tooth. After that, Lemon is back to normal. Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong. Rat Kiley often tells stories, and it's hard to know whether they actually happened or not; he believes in story-truth, not happening-truth. But the story that Rat is about to tell, he claims, is absolutely and completely true—something that he saw with his own eyes. Mitchell Sanders says that the story—about a medic who ships his girlfriend over to Vietnam from Ohio—couldn't possibly be true.
But Rat insists. The story starts when Rat is assigned to a small medical detachment in the mountains near a village called Tra Bong and a river called the Song Tra Bong. There isn't a lot of military oversight in the medics' compound, and the security is provided by a mix of RFs (Regional Forces), PFs (Popular Forces), and ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) infantry. The ARVN are, according to either Rat or Tim, useless as soldiers, and the RFs/PFs (also known as Ruff-and-Puffs) are South Vietnamese militias and are worse than useless. They are dangerous.
The only other soldiers on the compound are a squad of six Green Berets who use the compound as a base of operations. The Green Berets, or Greenies, have their own fortified hootch (hut) at the edge of the perimeter, and they keep to themselves, gliding in and out of camp when they need to.
(There are going to be a lot of creepy things in this story, we're just warning you now.). One night, Eddie Diamond, the ranking NCO (non-commissioned officer), suggests as a joke that the medics find a way to bring a girl into the camp (which kind of tells you exactly how slack discipline is at this place).
But one kid, Mark Fossie, takes the idea seriously. He says that if you did it right, you could fly a girl in. After all, there's no war at the compound, really. The rest of the medics don't really pay attention to the guy. And then his girlfriend arrives.
Her name is Mary Anne Bell, and she's seventeen and has long legs, blonde hair, and blue eyes, and she's wearing a pink sweater and culottes (knee-length shorts that are wide and look like a skirt). Now that's not what we were expecting. Turns out Mark Fossie just paid a lot of money for plane tickets to get Mary Anne to Saigon, and she hitched rides on military aircraft to get the rest of the way. Mary Anne and Mark have been sweethearts since sixth grade, and plan to get married and live near Lake Erie and have three children.
They are really in love. Her presence helps boost the morale for the rest of the guys, too; she's bubbly and happy and interested in everything, from how Claymore mines work to the geography of the country. She spends time with the ARVNs learning Vietnamese and insists on visiting the village of Tra Bong, despite the fact that none other than the Viet Cong control it. Then she swims in the Song Tra Bong, despite the possibility of ambush and snipers. While there are parts of the story that could have been funny, Rat never treats them that way.
It's a straight tragedy for him. And he insists that Mary Anne wasn't dumb—that she was like any of them when they'd first arrived in Vietnam, young and innocent. This, he says, is a story about human nature and Vietnam.
Back to the story: Mary Anne just keeps picking things up. She helps the medics when the wounded come in, unafraid of blood. She cuts her hair short and stops wearing makeup and jewelry. She learns to use an M-16. While she remains loving toward Mark Fossie, the details of their future plans became hazy. Marriage is no longer a given.
When Fossie tries to get her to go back home, she says she'd rather stay in Vietnam. She becomes more serious and distracted. She zones out when the medics play cards at night, staring into the dark. She says she'd never been happier. Creepy.). A couple of times, she doesn't come back in until late. Then she doesn't show up at all.
Fossie goes crazy looking for her all over the compound; Rat helps. She isn't sleeping with any of the medics.
Fossie assumed she was sleeping with someone. At this point, Rat interrupts the story and asks Mitchell Sanders where he thinks Mary Anne was. Sanders promptly guesses that she was with the Greenies, because it made narrative sense—why bring up the Greenies at the beginning of the story if they're not going to pop up later?. As it turns out, Mitchell Sanders is right, but Mary Anne isn't sleeping with any of the Greenies. Nope, she's out on an ambush with them. She comes trotting in with the Greenies just after sunrise and asks Fossie to wait until she's slept to yell at her. Fossie, unsurprisingly, chooses to yell at her immediately, and the two disappear to have a (serious?
Creepy?) talk. When Mary Anne comes out that evening, she's dressed in a skirt and a white blouse, and she and Fossie are engaged. Anyone who's ever read a story—and certainly any of the previous stories in this book—will know that this is not the story's happy ending.
The two of them seem happy from a distance, but in reality, their relationship is brittle. Fossie begins making plans for Mary Anne to go back home. Mary Anne starts to withdraw. She keeps staring at the jungle.
And then she disappears and the six Greenies disappear with her. Three weeks later, the Greenies come back, and Mary Anne is with them. But instead of her eyes glowing blue, Rat says, they seemed to glow jungle green. She doesn't stop to say hi to any of the medics, but goes straight to the Greenies' hootch and heads inside. Rat interrupts himself here to tell the soldiers that while the story sounds weird, it's true, really true, and that being seduced by the Greenies happens to guys all the time, so why shouldn't it happen to a lady? Mitchell Sanders tells Rat to stop digressing and tell the story right. Back to the story: Mark Fossie plants himself in front of the Special Forces area, waiting for Mary Anne to come out.
He waits there all day. At midnight, Rat and Eddie Diamond go to check on him. They hear crazy, atonal music coming from the hootch, and a woman singing. Fossie recognizes the woman's voice as Mary Anne's (and, well, there are no other women around anyway). The singing gets louder and crazier, and Fossie runs into the hootch. Rat and Eddie follow.
The next scene is definitely the creepiest scene in this entire book, and very possibly the creepiest scene in any book ever, so just prepare yourself. And we couldn't possibly do the creepiness of this justice, so you should really go read it right now. Still, we'll try to give a summary. The room is dark, lit by twelve candles.
There's the stench of incense and something else. There are human bones. There are dead animals. The Greenies are all lying around on hammocks or cots, and none of them move.
Mark Fossie asks for Mary Anne, and she steps forward. She's wearing her pink sweater and her culottes.
Her eyes are emotionless. Horrifyingly, she's wearing a necklace made out of human tongues. She tells Fossie that he doesn't understand Vietnam, that she feels like she wants to eat the whole country, that she can never get enough of it. Rat leads Fossie out of the hootch, telling him that Mary Anne is gone. That's where Rat Kiley stops telling the story.
Mitchell Sanders asks what happened to Mary Anne, and Rat says he isn't sure. He transferred to the Alpha Company a couple of days later, but he has some secondhand reports. He also says that he'd loved Mary Anne.
She's the only American girl he's met who really understood the war, because she'd been there. Rat got the end of the story from Eddie Diamond, who'd gotten it from a Greenie. Here it is:. Mary Anne loves the night patrols. She starts to blend in more and more, going barefoot and not carrying a weapon. She disappears every now and then for hours or days.
Finally, she walks into the mountains, never to return. No one finds a body. Mark Fossie is sent home on medical leave. Mary Anne is reported missing.
The Greenies, though, believe that Mary Anne is still out there in the dark, gliding around, wearing her culottes, pink sweater, and necklace of human tongues. Say it with us now: creepy. The men dig their foxholes in the yard of an abandoned pagoda.
There are two monks there, who seem basically okay with the arrangement. Kiowa isn't okay with it, though, saying that you shouldn't mess with churches. They stay there for a couple of days, and the monks especially take a shine to Henry Dobbins. They call him 'soldier Jesus' and help him clean his machine gun. Dobbins tells Kiowa that maybe he'll join the monks after the war.
Kiowa says that he didn't realize that Dobbins was religious. Dobbins agrees that he's not particularly religious, but he likes the idea of being a decent person. He ends up deciding, though, that he's simply not smart enough to be religious. He couldn't explain why God invented pneumonia. Plus, um, he hates church. Then Dobbins asks Kiowa if he planned to be a minister, what with Kiowa carrying around a Bible all the time.
Kiowa says he'd never be a preacher, but that he likes churches, the feeling you get when you're inside them. And that setting up for war inside one of them is absolutely wrong. When the monks are finished cleaning Dobbins' machine gun, he gives them each a can of peaches and a chocolate bar. And then he agrees with Kiowa, saying that all you can do is treat people decently.
The Man I Killed. There's a slim, dead, almost dainty young man lying on the ground. His jaw is in his throat, and O'Brien was the one to kill him. He wears a wedding band on his long, delicate fingers. O'Brien thinks that the man might have been a scholar, born in the village of My Khe, who was a citizen, not a communist, and who secretly would rather not have fought.
Azar, helpful as always, points out how extremely dead the young man is. Kiowa tells him to go away. Kiowa tries to get O'Brien to stop staring at the body and talk. O'Brien doesn't respond, but keeps staring at the body.
Kiowa tells him to take all the time he needs. O'Brien decides that the man he killed probably loved mathematics, and was never able to get in fights at school, and worried that he would shame himself and his village. Again, Kiowa tries to get O'Brien to talk. And, again, O'Brien ignores him. O'Brien thinks that maybe the young man went to college for mathematics and met a woman who loved him, and they got married. Kiowa tells O'Brien that they all had the young man in their sights, that it's only chance that Tim is the one who got him first.
The young man had only been a soldier for a day. O'Brien is sure. Kiowa begs O'Brien to talk. O'Brien's daughter Kathleen asks him if he'd ever killed anyone. She thinks that he must have because he keeps writing war stories. He tells her that he hadn't, but it's clearly a lie. He tells us now that he killed a young man of about twenty with a grenade on the trail outside My Khe.
Or, in more detail:. The Alpha Company is at the ambush site outside My Khe around midnight.
They are working in two-man teams, and O'Brien is on watch. He can see ten to fifteen meters up the trail. All of a sudden, he sees the young man come out of the fog. There is no sound. Out of instinct and terror, O'Brien pulls the pin on a grenade and throws it at the young man.
He's just trying to make the guy go away. When it occurs to O'Brien that the young man is about to die (not just go away), he has to fight the impulse to warn him. O'Brien doesn't, and the young man dies, and his eye become a star-shaped hole. O'Brien wasn't in any danger from the young man.
The guy probably would have just passed him by. Kiowa tries to help, telling O'Brien that the young man was dead even before O'Brien threw the grenade—someone would have gotten him. None of it makes a difference to O'Brien, who can't stop reliving it and imagining a version of the story in which he didn't throw the grenade and the man lived. Style.
The men find a girl dancing near a burned-down hamlet. She's dancing on her toes, smiling to herself. Azar can't figure out why she's dancing. Henry Dobbins says it doesn't matter why. Her family is burned to death inside her house. When the men drag the bodies out, she keeps dancing, but puts her hands over her ears.
Azar still doesn't get it. When the men leave, she's still dancing. Azar decides it's some kind of weird ritual, but Henry Dobbins says the girl just likes to dance. Later that night, Azar decides to mock the girl's dancing, making it suggestive and silly. (Of course he does. It's Azar.).
Henry Dobbins, endearing himself to the entire reading audience, grabs Azar and holds him over a well. He tells him that if he doesn't want to be dumped in, he'll dance right. Speaking of Courage. Back from Vietnam, on the Fourth of July, Norman Bowker is driving the seven-mile loop around the lake over and over again. The lake is calm and flat and silver.
It's a graceful lake, but not good for swimming; it drowned his best friend Max Arnold before he could go to the war. There's no one around for Bowker to talk to. Everyone's moved away. His old girlfriend, Sally, is married to another man, and happy. His father is watching baseball on TV.
Bowker starts another loop around the lake. He wishes he could stop in and talk to Sally and impress her with his new skill—he can tell time without a watch, thank you, Vietnam. He wants to tell her about how he almost won the Silver Star for valor. He wishes his father weren't watching baseball and were in the car with him instead, so that he could tell his father how he almost won the Silver Star for valor. He thinks his father would understand. And besides, Bowker has seven other medals, which are ordinary medals for doing ordinary soldier things.
Bowker would tell him why he didn't end up winning the medal, telling him first about the Song Tra Bong, a river that in the monsoon season changed from a normal river to a big, stinky, overflowing muck. And that he would've won the medal if not for that darn smell.
Bowker keeps driving through the town. He wants to tell it about the war, but it doesn't look like it would care.
He continues with how he would have told his father about the Silver Star, saying that there was a night when the Alpha Company camped in a field besides the Song Tra Bong. Locals told them not to camp there, that it was an evil field. But because the platoon had apparently never seen a horror movie, they went ahead and did it anyway. By midnight, the river had overflowed, and the rain made the field all oozy. What's more disgusting, it turned out the field was full of sewage, the village toilet. If Bowker were telling the story to Sally, she would at this point be offended by the obscenity. His father wouldn't, though.
Neither would Max. Bowker starts his eighth loop around the lake. If Max were here, he would talk to Max about the war, and courage. And if his father wanted to talk, he would talk to his father. He would say that late that night, the platoon came under attack, and the night went completely monkey-poo—impressive, given that they were already in poo.
The shells were going into the field, making it boil. The smell was beyond bad. All of a sudden, Kiowa got hit by something, and started to sink into the muck. He grabbed Kiowa's arm and tried to pull him out, but started to get pulled under himself. The smell was everywhere, and was just too much. So he let go of Kiowa and worked his way out of the field. Bowker thinks it would be a good war story, but no one wants to hear war stories about Vietnam.
He goes to the A&W and orders a burger, but he's been away, and he doesn't realize that things have changed and he's supposed to order from an intercom now, and that 'rootie-tootie' is the new slang for root beer. Suddenly, the intercom starts to talk to him, asking if Bowker has anything he wants to get off his chest. Bowker says no, there's nothing. On his eleventh tour around the lake, he realizes that he'll never be able to talk about it—not with anyone. He was extremely brave, but not as brave as he wanted to be.
If he told his dad, his dad might get it, and might say that at least he got seven other medals. The Fourth of July fireworks start. Bowker wades into the lake and stands there while he watches them. He thinks it's a pretty good show. Norman Bowker asks O'Brien to write 'Speaking of Courage,' and then hangs himself three years later.
In 1975, Bowker writes O'Brien a seventeen-page letter where he explains how he can't seem to adjust back to life in America after the war. He tells O'Brien that he still feels like he's back in the field with Kiowa. He suggests that O'Brien should write a story about the field, and a guy who feels like he's still stuck there, even when he's driving around his hometown. When O'Brien gets the letter, he feels guilty about his own easy transition from war to peace. While he doesn't think of his storytelling as therapy, it has actually been a way of navigating his memories in a healthy way. O'Brien tries to write the story as part of his novel Going After Cacciato.
He introduces the lake, changes the scenery, changes Bowker's name (as he'd requested). He has to take out the sewage field and Kiowa's death to fit in with the rest of the novel. Eventually, he publishes it as a separate short story, and sends it to Norman Bowker. Norman Bowker says it's fine, but he left out Vietnam, Kiowa, and the sewage in the field. He hangs himself eight months later. Ten years later, O'Brien rewrites the story.
He puts Bowker back in it, and the night in the sewage field, and the death of Kiowa. But he wants to make it very clear that in real life, it wasn't Bowker who let Kiowa go. It was O'Brien. In the Field. The morning after the incident in the sewage field, the soldiers look for Kiowa's body. Jimmy Cross helps in the search and watches his men. He sees a young soldier (this is presumably O'Brien, but O'Brien has chosen to tell this story in the third person) standing off by himself, shaking, in his own world.
Cross thinks about Kiowa's death, and how Kiowa, a brave and decent kid, absolutely didn't deserve to die in a field of sewage. He thinks about what he's going to write to Kiowa's father, and how he shouldn't mention the sewage field. Azar, of course, is cracking jokes about how Kiowa drowned in poop. Bowker tells him to shut up, but Azar, being Azar, just keeps making horrible puns. They still haven't found the body. Halfway across the field, Mitchell Sanders finds Kiowa's rucksack. When Bowker wants to tell Cross that they found it, Sanders says no.
He blames Cross for deciding to camp in a latrine. Bowker points out that none of them knew the field was the village toilet until it was too late.
Cross has finished writing the letter to Kiowa's father (in his head, anyway). He wishes he were playing golf. He wishes that he weren't the one in charge. He'd signed up to be an officer without really thinking about what it meant.
He blames himself. He should have paid attention to the old Vietnamese women who warned them away from the field in the first place. But he'd had orders to camp in the field, so he'd camped in the field. It was a mistake, and Kiowa had died. He'll tell Kiowa's father that the blame lies with him. They never should have camped there.
The young soldier is still shaking, and he seems to be searching for something in the field. Jimmy Cross goes over to the boy. The boy blames himself, too. He and Kiowa had been very close, and that night, he'd switched on his flashlight to show Kiowa a picture of his girlfriend, and then the field had exploded with mortars.
He heard Kiowa scream, and he crawled toward Kiowa. His head was under the surface of the mud, and the boy grabbed Kiowa's boot, but the field was pulling him under, and so he let go. Now he's digging frantically in the mud.
Jimmy Cross asks him what he's looking for, and the boy says he's looking for his girlfriend's picture. Jimmy Cross leaves him alone. Norman Bowker finds Kiowa; his heel is sticking out.
Mitchell Sanders, Bowker, and Azar try to pull Kiowa out of the mud, but he's stuck. They call Henry Dobbins and Rat Kiley over, but the body still won't come out. The men start to dig. The rest of the platoon comes over, except for Jimmy Cross and the young soldier. They finally get Kiowa out. It's horrible. They clean the body off and call in to the radio to get someone to come take the body away.
The men relax. Azar apologies to Norman Bowker for the jokes. (Any time Azar acts like a decent human being, we're a little suspicious, but he seems to mean it this time.) He tells Bowker that he feels that, by telling the jokes, he's responsible for Kiowa's death. Bowker says that it's nobody's fault, and everybody's. The young soldier wants to confess his part in Kiowa's death to Jimmy Cross—how he turned on his flashlight and drew the mortar fire—but Jimmy Cross isn't listening.
He's thinking about blame. He's thinking that while you could blame the war and every cause of the war and God and everything else there is, in the field, blame needs to be more immediate. He thinks that maybe when the war is over he'll write a letter to Kiowa's father, or maybe he'll just go play golf. Good Form. Okay, listen up, because Tim O'Brien is about to make your brain explode again. He tells us that while he is forty-three, and a writer, and was a foot soldier in Vietnam.
Everything else in the book is made up. The young man he killed on the trail outside My Khe? O'Brien didn't kill him. He was just there. Except that even that is made up. O'Brien says that story-truth, or how something felt, is sometimes truer than what actually happened, or happening-truth. The happening-truth is that there were a lot of bodies, and O'Brien never looked at them.
And now, with stories, he's giving those bodies faces. He's making himself feel again. So when Kathleen asks him if he's killed anybody, he can truthfully say that he has, and truthfully say that he has not. After he writes 'In the Field,' O'Brien takes a ten-year-old Kathleen to Vietnam with him. They go to the field where Kiowa died. The place looks smaller, and peaceful. It's twenty years after Kiowa's death.
Kathleen doesn't really get why they're there. She says it smells. During the touristy part of their trip, Kathleen has held up well. She asks why the war started. O'Brien says that some people wanted one thing, and others wanted another thing. When Kathleen asks what he wanted, he tells her that all he wanted was to stay alive. She doesn't understand why he can't forget the war, why he needed to come to Vietnam, and why he was in Vietnam in the first place.
At the field where Kiowa died, O'Brien takes a few pictures. Kathleen is bored.
O'Brien pulls out a cloth bundle from the jeep and wades into the river. Ignoring Kathleen's protests, he gets to the point where Mitchell Sanders had found Kiowa's rucksack, and takes Kiowa's moccasins out of the bundle.
He lets the moccasins sink down into the muck. He notices an old farmer watching him.
The old man raises his shovel grimly, then brings it down and begins to dig. O'Brien gets out of the water, and Kathleen observes, correctly, that he stinks to high heaven. She asks him if the old man is mad at him, and he says no. All that is over.
The Ghost Soldiers. O'Brien gets shot twice in his time in Vietnam. The first time, Rat Kiley is there and takes care of him. O'Brien is sent away to recover and is fine. Twenty-six days later, when he returns to the Alpha Company, Rat Kiley is no longer with the group—he was wounded and shipped to Japan—and the company has a new medic named Bobby Jorgenson, who's green. When O'Brien is shot the second time—this time in the butt—Jorgenson is too scared to crawl over to him. O'Brien nearly dies of shock, and the wound is so poorly treated that his butt then gets gangrene.
As you might imagine, O'Brien isn't too happy with Bobby Jorgenson. People make fun of O'Brien pretty much constantly.
It's the worst wound he's ever gotten, and he can't even talk about it without being an object of ridicule. After he's released from the hospital, O'Brien is transferred away from the Alpha Company to the battalion supply section. There's no fighting there, and he's basically safe.
Despite this, he misses the front. And he keeps thinking about how he can get back at Bobby Jorgenson when he sees the guy again. Eventually, the Alpha Company comes to the battalion supply section for a break. O'Brien gets to see most of his old friends—Mitchell Sanders, Azar, Norman Bowker, Henry Dobbins, Dave Jensen—and, as usual, there are plenty of stories to tell. Mitchell Sanders tells one (Azar interrupting all the while) about Morty Phillips and how he used up his luck:. It's an incredibly hot day, and Morty disappears. Everyone's flipping out, and then, at dark, Morty shows up again.
He's soaking wet. He went skinny dipping in a river. He could easily have been killed (it wasn't exactly safe territory) but he wasn't. But! The water wasn't safe to drink. Morty gets polio and then becomes paralyzed. It's a good story, but O'Brien can't stop thinking about how much he doesn't belong with these men anymore.
He misses the companionship. And he keeps wondering, and asking, where Bobby Jorgenson is. The butt wound continues to be humiliating. He has to spread ointment on it three times a day, which stains his pants and prompts another round of hilarious jokes. Mitchell Sanders tell O'Brien to forget about Bobby Jorgenson—the kid was new and scared and he's better at his job now. He tells O'Brien that Jorgenson's one of them now, and O'Brien isn't, really. That doesn't exactly make O'Brien feel better.
It just makes him feel betrayed. Jorgenson comes to talk to O'Brien and apologizes. He tells O'Brien he just froze, and he has nightmares about it.
He nearly cries, but gets it together. O'Brien ignores him. The apology just makes him angrier—now he can't even hate the guy. O'Brien realizes that it's probably wrong to want revenge, but he wants it anyway.
He thinks it needs to happen. He tries to enlist Mitchell Sanders to help him mess with Jorgenson's head, but Mitchell Sanders wants no part in it.
So he asks for Azar's help. (It's worth noting that the moment you've asked for Azar's help on anything is a moment for deep introspection and possibly a life change.) Azar, of course, agrees happily. Their plan is to scare Jorgenson while he's on watch, playing on the fears that all the soldiers feel in the dark. Azar and O'Brien rig up a whole series of contraptions to make Jorgenson think that there are ghosts out there. O'Brien considers backing out, but when he sees Jorgenson fitting in well with the group at evening chow, he decides to go ahead with it. The two wait until midnight to start, going to a Jane Fonda movie to kill time. O'Brien knows that dark is the best time to freak out a soldier, because soldiers will already be hearing plenty of things on their own.
O'Brien feels like he's in a movie. First, O'Brien and Azar pull on ropes that are hooked up to noisemakers. Jorgenson tenses. Watching Jorgenson, O'Brien feels himself rise out of his body. He feels like he's part of the country, part of the war, the atrocity itself. Next, after waiting a bit, they set off some trip flares.
It gets really bright, like daylight. Jorgenson panics and rolls for cover, terrified. O'Brien thinks this makes them even.
Now Jorgenson knows what it feels like to think you're going to die, and how completely not like a movie it is. He feels close to Jorgenson, even. He tries to call off the rest of the game, but Azar refuses. Azar loves this stuff. Azar mocks O'Brien's fear when O'Brien tries to call him off. He tells him that all O'Brien really wanted to was to pretend to be a soldier again, when he's really just a has-been. (This is why we don't enlist Azar as a partner-in-crime, among other things.).
O'Brien starts to freak out. He feels like he did when he got shot the second time. He's back there, and he feels himself rising out of his body, trying to tell Jorgenson to treat him for shock but unable to say a word.
He feels like he's dying. He tries to get Azar to stop, but Azar won't stop. Azar fires up a couple of red flares, and throws a tear-gas grenade. Finally, Azar pulls out the final touch, something that O'Brien devised himself: a pulley system with a white sandbag that looks like a ghost. Jorgenson shoots the sandbag.
He does not freak out. He shoots at the sandbag again. Then he walks out to the sandbag, sees it's a sandbag, yells O'Brien's name, and shoots the sandbag again, calmly, at point-blank range. Whoa. O'Brien is huddled on the ground, shivering. Azar drops the rope, glares at O'Brien, calls him pathetic, and kicks him in the head. (Again, this is why we don't make deals with Azar.).
Jorgenson treats O'Brien's head wound and admires the cinematic vision that went into playing the prank. He admits that it got him for a moment. He tells O'Brien that he should go into the movies or something. The two feel closer now.
O'Brien apologizes; so does Jorgenson. Then O'Brien suggests that the two of them kill Azar, and Jorgenson laughs. Night Life. This is how Rat Kiley got wounded. The platoon is working in slightly more stressful situations than usual; because of rumors about increased North Vietnamese troops, they move only at night. It's called the night life. Everyone is tense, but for Rat it's the worst—maybe because of all the bodies he's seen as medic.
First he's just quiet, but then he starts talking about the bugs in Vietnam and how crazy they are, and how they're all after him. He can't shut up about the bugs. He starts scratching his bug bites compulsively. The night life makes everyone feel a little crazy—in the dark, the countryside feels like it's alive—but Rat isn't even sleeping during the days, and he just completely loses it. He tells Mitchell Sanders that he can't shut off the part of him that's a medic, that when he's talking to people, he starts to picture them dead, or in pieces. He sees his own body, covered in bugs. He starts to ramble about the men who have died.
So he shoots himself in the foot. Cross lies for him, saying it was an accident so he doesn't get in trouble. Rat is airlifted to Japan, and he's out of the war. O'Brien says that stories can save us. Through the stories, O'Brien keeps Linda and Ted Lavender and Kiowa and Curt Lemon alive. (Don't worry, you're going to find out who Linda is later.).
When O'Brien has only been in Vietnam for four days, the platoon takes sniper fire from a village, so Jimmy Cross orders an air strike on the place. When they've completely destroyed it, they go in. The only person there is an old man lying dead by a pigpen. The other guys go over and shake his hand, introducing themselves. Dave Jensen tries to get O'Brien to do the same, but he can't. It's too real for him, and he's scared.
Later, Kiowa tells him that he thought that was impressive. He wishes he'd had the guts to say no.
He asks O'Brien if it was the first time he's seen a body, and O'Brien says that the body reminded him of his first date. (Um.). Linda and Timmy are nine and in love.
Timmy takes her out on his very first date. They go to a movie—with Timmy's parents, of course. Timmy likes Linda's new red cap, and compliments her on it. She smiles, but his mother glares at him.
In Vietnam, when Ted Lavender dies, Mitchell Sanders asks the body how the war is going, and someone answers 'mellow' in Lavender's voice. O'Brien says that stories animate bodies. Timmy and Linda watch The Man Who Never Was for their first date. O'Brien can't stop thinking about one of the dead bodies in the movie. They go to Dairy Queen afterwards, then say goodnight to each other. Linda keeps wearing her new cap to school. A kid named Nick Veenhof keeps teasing her about it.
Timmy doesn't do anything about the teasing. One day, Nick pulls the cap off, and reveals to the entire class that Linda is almost bald.
She has cancer. She looks at Timmy, and Timmy nods. Timmy and Nick walk her home that day. O'Brien uses stories to save Linda's life—to bring her back, however briefly. Linda dies. Timmy tries to imagine what it's like to be dead, picturing Linda, trying to make her alive.
He sees her in his mind, and he starts to cry. She tells him to stop crying—that it doesn't matter. Back in Vietnam, the soldiers pretend that death isn't as awful as it is. They tell stories about the dead as if they're still alive, like Ted Lavender and Curt Lemon. After Linda dies, Timmy gets his father to take him to see the body. When he looks at it, he doesn't recognize it as Linda.
One day, when O'Brien and Mitchell Sanders are assigned to pick up twenty-seven bloated, disgusting enemy bodies, death hits home. Mitchell Sanders tells O'Brien that death sucks, as if that's some great wisdom.
Timmy kept making up stories in which Linda was alive. She says things like 'Once you're alive, you can't ever be dead,' and 'Do I look dead?' (113-4).
They go ice-skating in his dreams. Linda tells him that death is like being inside a book that nobody's reading. In 1990, O'Brien is still dreaming of Linda being alive, along with Kiowa, and Ted Lavender, and Curt Lemon, and even himself, as Timmy.