The Things They Carried

by Tim O'Brien

They all carried ghosts.

They moved like mules. By daylight they took sniper fire, at night they were mortared, but it was not battle, it was just the endless march, village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost. They marched for the sake of the march.

and for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.

They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it. They found jokes to tell.

Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.

They spoke bitterly about guys who had found release by shooting off their own toes or fingers. Pussies, they’d say. Candy-asses. It was fierce, mocking talk, with only a trace of envy or awe, but even so the image played itself out behind their eyes.

There should be a law, I thought. If you support a war, if you think it’s worth the price, that’s fine, but you have to put your own precious fluids on the line.

They didn’t know history. They didn’t know the first thing about Diem’s tyranny, or the nature of Vietnamese nationalism, or the long colonialism of the French—this was all too damned complicated, it required some reading—but no matter, it was a war to stop the Communists, plain and simple, which was how they liked things, and you were a treasonous pussy if you had second thoughts about killing or dying for plain and simple reasons.

Twenty-one years old, an ordinary kid with all the ordinary dreams and ambitions, and all I wanted was to live the life I was born to—a mainstream life—I loved baseball and hamburgers and cherry Cokes—and now I was off on the margins of exile, leaving my country forever, and it seemed so grotesque and terrible and sad.

But even more than that, I think, the man understood that words were insufficient. The problem had gone beyond discussion.

I was ashamed of my conscience, ashamed to be doing the right thing.

I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.

“Well, that’s Nam,” he said. “Garden of Evil. Over here, man, every sin’s real fresh and original.”

When I’m out there at night, I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and my fingernails, everything, it’s like I’m full of electricity and I’m glowing in the dark—I’m on fire almost — I’m burning away into nothing—but it doesn’t matter because I know exactly who I am.

“You’re serious?” Kiowa said. Dobbins shrugged his shoulders. “What’s serious? I was a kid. The thing is, I believed in God and all that, but it wasn’t the religious part that interested me. Just being nice to people, that’s all. Being decent.”

“Nobody’s fault,” he said. “Everybody’s.”

Twenty years. A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.

“Easy does it,” he told me, “just a side wound, no problem unless you’re pregnant.” He ripped off the compress, applied a fresh one, and told me to clamp it in place with my fingers. “Press hard,” he said. “Don’t worry about the baby.”

“An old one. It’s up on a library shelf, so you’re safe and everything, but the book hasn’t been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody’ll pick it up and start reading.”