The Things Tim Carried

The Things They Carried was a very intriguing read. Very seldom do you come across a book that has to be read for academic purposes and you actually enjoy reading it. Most of the time you get these fascinating stories about Benjamin Franklin and his contribution to the constitution and shaping America, and honestly, I mean no disrespect to historians, but who cares! However, when reading this I didn’t think “Who cares?” or why care, I thought “I care.”

When I first “encountered” the book it was in the fall of my sophomore year in a History class. I read some chapters and some stories but re-reading this made me look at the story a little differently. When first reading it, it was one of those stories that we had to read because it had some relevance to what we were learning, but truth be told, not much. We probably covered Vietnam in one lecture or two and kept moving, therefore I didn’t really focus much on the book nor did I feel pressured to learn its context. However, after learning so much about the war and seeing documentaries like Hearts and Minds and movies like Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, I think as a reader you can’t help but read the novel differently and see it in a different light. You now think about the soldiers, what they went through, how they felt, and the effects that it had on the victims of both sides of the war.

While reading this in the beginning I had to stop and ask myself, “Is this real?” The accounts that Brien details had me wondering did these things really happen. While being a fiction novel, some of it certainly doesn’t feel fiction. For instance, when Brien tells the story about private Lemon, which made me think almost immediately of Lot 49 and the rhetorical play on the naming of the characters, Brien tells of his fear of the dentists and what he did to overcome that fear. However, only overcome it, he went back and faced his fear just to face it complaining of a “tooth ache” that was really no physical ache at all, besides the ache of an unconquered fear. Hmmm, talk about what makes a man army strong, right!

Nevertheless, one of the most touching and memorable stories was when Brien tells the story of “Tim” and the man he killed. What I find so gut-wrenching about this scene was the fact that Brien describes every detail of what the man who was shot in the face looked like. “The skin on his left cheek was pulled back in three ragged strips,” talk about a description of the Saw movies, but no this was war and I definitely wouldn’t put it past the book that things like this didn’t happen. In fact, I know things like this happen, but something about this story, although fake, made me look beyond the fiction category and see it for a tale of soldier’s untold stories.