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Jennifer Nance Professor Minor English 113 23 March 2013 Love Hurts Tim OBrien and The Things They Carried The Things They Carried, a winner of the French Prix du Meeilleur Livre Etranger and a Pulitzer Prize Finalist (The Boston Globe). Tim OBrien is an American Novelist well known for writing about the Vietnam War and the impact on the American Soldiers who fought there. The collection of short stories about a US platoon in Vietnam takes readers on a fictional but realistic examination of how the soldiers confront battlefield (The Boston Globe). Irene Muniz from The Boston Globe points out that they carry rifles, letters, and radios. They carry one another from time to time; they carry the war itself. Everything is heavy, but OBrien believes the physical load becomes heavier when emotions like fear, guilt, and love follow each other: The letters weighed ten ounces. They were signed Love, Martha, but Lieutenant Cross understood the Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretend it meant. (427) That burden is magnified by the emotional things youre carrying through war or through life, said OBrien is a former soldier whose combat experience in Vietnam is the foundation of the book. The word Love means-a strong affection or liking for someone or something. Because Lieutenant Cross will never stop loving Martha, but Martha expresses her love only in a signature.

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In 1968, Tim OBrien, newly graduated from Macalester College in his home state of Minnesota and accepted for graduate school at Harvard, went to war reluctantly. (The Washington Times). Twenty years later, in 1990, he published the book (The Washington Times). Some people say that Mr. OBrien work is not fiction, because so much of it is based on his real-life experiences in Vietnam forty years ago (The Washington Times). In the title story, Mr. OBrien juxtaposes the mundane and the deadly items that soldiers carry into battle. (New York Time). Among the necessities or near necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wrist watches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packet of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water (427). Lt. Cross carried letters from Martha, unfortunately not love letters, two pictures of her, and a pebble that Martha found on the shoreline. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there (427). The strong affection he has for Martha is just the mere love he wants her to have for him. The meaning of Love is confessing to Cross because he would like for the meaning in her letters to mean she loves him. But, Tim OBrien suspects that the Love with which she signs her letters is merely a figure of speech. Lieutenant Cross carried two photographs of Martha; to carry something was to hump it, as when Lieutenant Cross humped his love for Martha up the hills and through the swamps (428). The translation of to hump meant to walk, or to march, but it implied burdens far beyond the intransitive (428). When one photograph is a Kodachrome snapshot that was signed Love, but Lieutenant Cross knew better (428). The second photograph had been clipped from

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1968 Mount Sebastian yearbook (428). Lt. Cross would think about who took the pictures and was worried that she had a boyfriend. Because he loved Martha so much, and because he can see the shadow of the picture taker spreading out against the brick wall (428). He thinks about being real and tangible with her. But, the memory of the experience of touching that knee is not a happy ending. A dark theater, he remembered, and the movie was Bonnie and Clyde, and Martha wore a tweed skirt, and during the final scene, when he touch her knee, she turned and looked at him in a sad, sober way that made him pull his hand back, but he would always remember the feel of the tweed skirt and the knee beneath it and the sound of gunfire that killed Bonnie and Clyde, how embarrassing it was, how slow and oppressive (428). He was very adamant because he had another opportunity to show her. He was going to prove he how much he loves her. He remembered kissing her good night at the dorm door (428). Martha did not receive the kiss. Right then, he thought he should have carried her up the stairs to her room and tied her to the bed and touched that left knee all night long (428). Lieutenant Cross was a romantic side and a little pebble from Martha reminds him of the true feelings he has for her. In the accompanying letter, Martha wrote that she had found the pebble on the Jersey shoreline, precisely where the land touched water at hide tide, where things came together but also separated (430). Lt. Cross would think how Martha picked-up the pebble and imagine her body on the shoreline. He was jealousy of the way she said where things came together but also separated but he could not help himself, he loved her so much. He was thinking about the Jersey shore and them walking barefoot, carrying nothing (430). Cross still has the deep desire to know her; he is walking in the hot sun with the pebble tasting the sea salt and the moisture from it. Even in the mist battle of war all Cross could do was pretend, daydream, and concentrate on was Martha. His love for her was too much. They all

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carried something. Kiowa always took along his New Testament and a pair of moccasins for silence (430). Dave Jensen carried night-sight vitamins high in carotene (430). Henry Dobbins carried his girlfriends pantyhose wrapped around his neck as a comforter (430). But, when Lt. Cross drew the number seventeen, he strip of everything accept his .45 caliber pistol and a flashlight, he was thinking of Martha. He wanted to know her (430). He wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered (430). He was just a kid at war, in love (430). Lt. Cross was blaming himself for the death of Ted Lavender because he love Martha more the men in his troop. As Ted Lavender was dead, he could not stop thinking of Martha. He pictured Marthas smooth young face (429). OBrien leaves the nature of the secret ambiguous as we assume the lingering guilt over Lavenders death. He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war (433). In part, he was grieving for Ted Lavender, but mostly it was Martha, and for himself, because she belonged to another world, which was not quite real, and because she was a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey, a poet and a virgin and uninvolved, and because he realized she did not love him and never would (433). Lt. Cross was grieving over Lavenders death that he thought the burning of her letters and her two photographs could make him burn the blame he was feeling over the lost of Lavender. But, it was not going away, the letters were in his head and the photographs; he could still see her on the Volleyball court in her white shorts and yellow t-shirt. In those burned letters, Martha had never mentioned the war except to say, Jimmy take care of yourself (436). She was not involved with Jimmy or the war. She signed the letters

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Love, but it wasnt love, and all the fine lines and technicalities did not matter (436). The hardness was from the part It was war, after all (436). No more fantasies, he told himself (437). He could see her gazing eyes looking back at him and he almost nodded but didnt. He understood (437). In front of the soldiers, he was not meant to be loved but a leader.

Works Cited

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Greenya, John- The Things They Carried. The Washington Times. Web. 2 April 2010