The Things They Carried

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1990

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Story Summaries & Analyses

Stories 1-3

Stories 4-6

Stories 7-9

Stories 10-13

Stories 14-16

Stories 17-19

Stories 20-22

Character Analysis

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Stories 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Story 1 Summary: “The Things They Carried”

The book opens with First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross “humping” letters from a girl named Martha across Vietnam (a “hump” is a forced march or hike in which soldiers carry whatever gear is needed for their current mission). Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey, does not seem to love Jimmy; nevertheless, Jimmy obsesses over the letters, taking them out and reading them every night. He imagines taking camping trips with her and wonders if she is still a virgin. For the most part, “[t]he things they carried were largely determined by necessity,” such as “P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellant, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes” (2), and other practical items, which could weigh up to 18 pounds. Henry Dobbins enjoys peaches and cake. Dave Jensen carries a toothbrush and dental floss. Ted Lavender carries tranquilizers and “premium dope” (3). Kiowa carries an illustrated version of the New Testament.

Each man carries a flak jacket, which weighs “6.7 pounds, but which on hot days seemed much heavier” (3). Most men carry photographs, like Jimmy, who carries two photos of Martha. In one, she stands against a brick wall; in another, she plays volleyball. The photos remind Jimmy of a date with Martha during which he touched her knee while watching Bonnie and Clyde at a movie theater. After the date, he kissed her goodnight outside her dorm door; he later wished he had “carried her up the stairs to her room and tied her to the bed and touched that left knee all night long. He should’ve risked it” (4).

The men carry different items based on rank and field specialty. All the items have different weights. Jimmy Cross carries a compass and maps. Mitchell Sanders carries a 26-pound radio. Rat Kiley carries medical supplies, morphine, surgical tape, comic books, and M&Ms, which weigh 18 pounds in total. Ted Lavender carried extra ammunition when he was shot and killed and “went down under an exceptional burden” (6). Another of the men, Kiowa, emphasizes over and over how Ted did not flop or twitch when he fell, but instead, “it was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or something—just boom, then down” (6).

The week after Ted Lavender dies, Jimmy receives a pebble from Martha. He sometimes carries the pebble in his mouth and thinks about whether she found the pebble on the beach while walking with another man. He feels pangs of jealousy and love for her.

In April, the mission is to “search out and destroy the elaborate tunnel complexes in the Than Khe area south of Chu Lai” (9). Before blowing up the tunnels, the men are ordered to search them—a difficult and terrifying task. To decide who searches a tunnel, they draw numbers. On April 16, Lee Strunk draws the unlucky number and goes into the tunnel. Ted Lavender takes a tranquilizer and walks off to pee. Jimmy goes to the entrance to the tunnel and daydreams about Martha. Lee Strunk emerges from the tunnel and the men begin to joke, “and right then, when Strunk made that high happy moaning sound, when he went Ahhooooo, right then Ted was shot in the head on his way back from peeing” (12).

A helicopter arrives and takes Ted’s body away. Jimmy leads his men into the village of Than Khe, where they burn “everything” (15), and shoot the chickens and dogs. That evening, Jimmy digs a foxhole in which to sleep and weeps, blaming himself and his love for Martha for Ted’s death. He weeps also because he realizes that Martha “did not love him and never would” (16).

The next morning, “First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross crouched at the bottom of his foxhole and burned Martha’s letters” (22). He burns the two photographs of her, simultaneously feeling love and hate for her. He feels a “new hardness in his stomach” and tells himself, “no more fantasies” (23). He is “determined to perform his duties firmly and without negligence” (24) and envisions imposing discipline on his men and showing strength. He envisions moving out “toward the villages west of Than Khe” (25).

Story 2 Summary: “Love”

Many years after the war, Jimmy Cross visits the narrator at his home in Massachusetts. They drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, and look at photographs on the kitchen table. Looking at a photograph of Ted Lavender, Jimmy says he’s never forgiven himself for Lavender’s death. They switch from coffee to gin and laugh “about some of the craziness that used to go on” (27). The narrator asks about Jimmy’s old love interest, Martha. Jimmy retrieves a photograph of Martha playing volleyball; the narrator says he thought that the photo was burned. Smiling, Jimmy says, “Well, I did—I burned it. After Lavender died, I couldn’t…This is a new one. Martha gave it to me herself” (27).

Jimmy ran into Martha at a college reunion in 1979. They spent most of the reunion together, catching up. Martha became a Lutheran missionary and nurse and never married. Jimmy realized “that there were things about her he would never know” (27). He later took her hand and said there was “no pressure in return” (28). He walked her to her dormitory and told her how he had once “almost done something very brave” (28) back in college. He told her how he had almost tied her to her bed and touched her knee all night. She said she’s glad he hadn’t done it, as “[s]he didn’t understand how men could do those things” (28). The next morning, she gave him the photo of her playing volleyball and apologized for saying that she didn’t understand.

Back in present-day Massachusetts, Jimmy says, “I love her” (28). As the narrator walks Jimmy to his car at the end of the night, he says he’d like to write a story about Jimmy’s love for Martha. Jimmy considers it and smiles, “Why not? Maybe she’ll read it and come begging. There’s always hope, right?” (28). Jimmy asks the narrator to make him look good in the story, then hesitates before saying, “Don’t mention anything about—” (29). The narrator replies, “I won’t” (29).

Story 3 Summary: “Spin”

The narrator reflects that “war wasn’t all terror and violence. Sometimes things could almost get sweet” (30). The narrator remembers a little boy with a plastic leg who hopped up to a soldier named Azar and asked for a chocolate bar and thinks, “[o]n occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put a fancy spin on it, you could make it dance” (31). The narrator remembers two soldiers who played checkers every night, giving the narrator a sense of comfort and reassurance. Many bad things happened during the war, “but the war wasn’t all that way” (31). Ted Lavender sometimes took too many tranquilizers. At one point the men “enlisted an old poppa-san to guide us through the mine fields out on the Batangan Peninsula” (32). The men bond with the old man, who cries when the men leave.

The narrator expresses that the war was often boring. He expresses guilt for being 43 and still writing war stories. He tells “a quick peace story” (34): A man willingly returns to the war after falling in love with a Red Cross nurse in Danang. His friends ask why he returned and he replies, “All that peace, man, it felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back” (34). The narrator remembers Norman Bowker lying on his back one night, wishing that his father didn’t hope so badly that Bowker would win many war medals. One night Kiowa teaches Rat Kiley and Dave Jensen a rain dance. He remembers “the damp, fungal scent of an empty body bag” (35), elephant grass being blown by the wind of a helicopter, a red clay trail, and a dead man. He muses, “[f]orty-three years old, and the war occurred half a life-time ago, and yet the remembering makes it now” (36).

Stories 1-3 Analysis

In the first story, “The Things They Carried,” the narrator introduces the men of Alpha Company. He provides brief portraits of each character by describing the items that they carried with them during the war. These items varied from man to man based not only on their roles but also on their personalities. In this way, the men are described on two levels. They are both soldiers with jobs and duties to perform in the war, and they are individuals with personal histories and backgrounds. This sets up a dichotomy to be explored throughout the rest of the collection. Often, there is a tension between the men’s duties as soldiers and their private, psychological lives.

This theme resonates in “The Things They Carried” in the character of Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, the commander of the Alpha Company. Jimmy’s obsession with Martha intertwines with and interrupts his official duties as a commander. For example, the short story opens not with a description of a war scene or a soldier in action but rather describes in detail Jimmy Cross’s memories and thoughts about Martha. This establishes that Jimmy is a human being—with quirks and idiosyncrasies—rather than a hardened, professional war veteran. The day Ted Lavender dies, Jimmy remains lost in thoughts about Martha: “Lieutenant Cross gazed at the tunnel. But he was not there. He was buried with Martha under the white sand at the Jersey shore” (11). Later, he blames his obsession with Martha for Lavender’s death: “He hated himself. He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead” (16). It is in this way that the narrator establishes a tension between who Jimmy is at heart and the role he filled in the war. By the end of the story, however, his duty as a lieutenant wins, and Jimmy burns his photos of Martha, resolving to be a better, tougher captain. This is symbolic of Jimmy’s burning away his older self and adopting the new responsibilities of the war.

This same internal tension is established with the rest of the men of Alpha Company through the descriptions of the literal items they carry. These literal items become a figurative weight for the men as they carry their psychological baggage through the war.

The next two stories offer meditations on the natures of storytelling and memory, or Factual and Emotional Truth. These are themes to which the narrator often returns throughout the collection. In “Love,” the narrator takes up an intimate first-person narration, creating the sense that the stories are “true” or perhaps nonfiction. In “Spin,” he retains this intimate, confessional tone and reflects on the nature of war stories. He switches between general observations about memory—“The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over” (31)—and short anecdotes, such as the way Lavender “would give a soft, spacey smile and say, ‘Mellow, man. We got ourselves a nice mellow war today’” (32). This mixture of anecdote and reflection allows the narrator to switch between past and present, personal and general, in complicated ways that reflect the fragmented nature of memory, storytelling, war, and writing itself.