The Things They Carried—final post

The problem with this book is that it is a collection of short stories all strung together to make a bigger story that really doesn’t make much sense. The major and obvious conflict was the war itself but enough stories have been written about that, next was man vs. self like when boker couldn’t save kiowa from the shit field. He later hangs himself…man vs. nature is easy, the rain, and rivers, and jungles, and of course that crazy Mary Ann. If there was a climax at all it would have been the shit field the rest was just falling action, tying up the loose ends like when Tim took his daughter to Vietnam and laid Kiowa moccasins in the field under the sludge. The rest of the story is how Rat is taken to Japan, and probably a mental ward, how Rat was replaced with a green field medic, and then Tim being transferred to the back lines. We see Tim go from idealistic grad student to hardened soldier, then back to civilian once he was shot his mentality changes completely; Tim learned the true value of a man is not in the future, but in the now. Over all Tim O’Brien’s book was a very good read, he creates this characters that you can’t help but love, and then he kills them…well this is a book with a main premise of the Vietnam war after all. We see how friendships are formed, and then lost. How a couple of young kids were forced to become something that they are not. Mostly you could say that this was in fact a story of growing up, about friendship and love. You don’t realize any of this until you read the final chapter and that poor girl Linda. Each man had his faults, that was true but each man also had his shining moments. They each lost friends, comrades, and brothers to the war and the memories will forever haunt them. The sins, stories, and regrets weigh much more than the things they carried.