War in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Louise Erdich’s Red Convertible
In essence, each soldier “carried ghosts” (O’Brien 1107), while painstakingly walking through the elephant grass of Vietnam, to sitting in the chair watching television at home. As both stories eloquently illustrate, each young man will never be the same. Each carries emotional baggage.
In “The Things They Carried” the reader becomes aware of the emotional strain and weight a soldier endures during the war. Rather than taking place after the war like “The Red Convertible,” the strongest part of the plot is within the boundaries of war. Being in combat so young completely changes the soldiers. The man in command, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, is only 22 years old. “As first lieutenant and platoon leader, Jimmy Cross carried a compass, maps, codebooks, binoculars, and a .45 caliber pistol that weighed 2.9 pounds fully loaded.
He carried a strobe light and the responsibility of his men” (1104). Cross also has to keep reminding himself of where he is and what his job is. “Lieutenant Cross reminded himself that his obligation was not to be loved but to lead” (1115). The descriptions of what each man carries points out just how young, inexperienced and unprepared these boys really are. “Mitchell Sanders carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Riley carried comic booksâÂ?¦Kiowa also carried his grandmother’s distrust of the white man and his grandfather’s old hunting hatchet” (1103). Most importantly, they carried their emotions, which were hard to leave behind.”
They carried all they could bear, and then some; including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried” (1106). The power they carried was not just for their weapons, the most spectacular of the time, but also for the power of the soldiers’ emotions. One of the biggest moments of change comes when the men experience the death of Ted Lavender. A bullet hits Lavender in the head as he returns from the bathroom. This experience is not something the young soldiers have been a part of before. The soldiers take responsibility for the death, but are unable to admit it to themselves. For these men, what they are in the midst of is far from real:
They were actors and the war came to them in 3-D. When someone died, it was not quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had their lines mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and because they called it by other names, as if to assist and destroy the reality of death itself. (1112)
These young men are not ready to deal with war and not ready to deal with death. In lives so young, death is a topic that goes untouched. The idea of looking death into the eye and saying, “I accept you” is not in a young soldier’s vernacular. They are aware that they might die but will never accept it at face value. The soldiers are too scared. “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing-these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight” (1113).
The emotional time period in” The Red Convertible” is in stark contrast to “The Things They Carried.” Erdrich, in the beginning, describes a close-knit relationship between two young brothers, Henry and Lyman. She looks at two chapters in the lives of these boys. Rather than focusing on the impact of the war during the war in regards to the soldiers as O’Brien does, Erdrich looks at the effects of coming home after Vietnam. The effects of war not only affect the soldier, but also cause a ripple effect on families and loved ones. The brothers share a love for each other and a joint purchase of a red convertible. “We went places in that car, me and Henry. We took off driving one whole summer…Some people hang onto details when they travel, but we didn’t let them bother us and just lived our everyday lives from here to there”(Erdrich 476).
The pivotal transition is when Henry comes home from Vietnam after three years in combat. Lyman says, “By then I guess the whole war was solved in the government’s mind, but for him it would keep on going” (478). The emotional baggage that O’Brien’s soldiers carry while in Vietnam, Henry brings home. Henry gives the reader more insight into the psychological trauma of war. He will never be fully right emotionally. The most vivid image given by Lyman is about the color television he had bought. Lyman was sorry he had purchased it because “[the images]âÂ?¦with black and white the pictures seem older and much farther away” (478). At one point, Henry is watching television, and he bites through his lip and blood starts pouring out. “âÂ?¦every time he took a bit of his bread his blood fell onto it until he was eating his own blood mixed in with the food”(479).
Unlike in “The Things They Carried” the reader of Erdrich’s story gets a detailed look at how the lives of a soldier’s family members are affected. Lyman at one point takes a hammer to the red convertible they had loved. This, he feels, is his only hope at getting his brother back into reality. Henry is restored when the car is restored. At least that is what Lyman believed.
The effect on Lyman is seen when Henry finally finishes restoring the car and goes on a road trip with Lyman and his younger sister, Bonita. Their younger sister takes a picture of the two young men. In the picture, Henry has on the same clothes he had worn home from the war. The images of the war never really left him. Lyman then brings the story back to the present, saying that he cannot look at the picture anymore. The image brings back the pain and memory of his brother. Lyman feels that he could have saved his brother:
All I know is that I could not stay in the room with that picture. I was shaking. I got up, closed the door and went into the kitchen. A little later, my friend Ray came over and we both went back into that room. We put the picture in a brown bag, folded the bag repeatedly, and then put it back in a closet. (480)
Just as the soldiers in “The Things They Carried” have to mask their fears to hold up their “reputations,” Lyman has to shove the ugly memories away. He can only let those memories back in when it is safe.
In Tim O’Brien’s short story, “The Things They Carried” the reader gets an intimate look at the psychological impact of war. O’Brien, a Vietnam veteran, gives introspective on what goes on emotionally for each soldier. He paints a picture of the boys, just narrowly men, forced into combat. Similarly, in Louise Erdrich’s “The Red Convertible,” the reader experiences the trauma of war on a family.
Erdich looks at the trauma of a soldier returning home from war and how their family must cope with emotional change. In most cases, the family member they send off is not family the member who returns. They are forever changed psychologically. War-torn and battle-scarred, the characters in “The Things They Carried” and “The Red Convertible” will forever carry the trauma of their experiences in their backpacks of life.
Works Cited
Erdrich, Louise. “The Red Convertible.” The Story and It’s Writer: An Introduction to
Short Fiction. Sixth Ed. Ann Charters. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s,2003. 475-482.
O’Brien, Tim. “The Things They Carried.” The Story and It’s Writer: An Introduction to
Short Fiction. Sixth Ed. Ann Charters. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s,2003. 1102- 1115.
