PDF Summary:The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien

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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...

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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...

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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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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...