Everything and Nothing

If reading Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried with only a superficial eye you may find his continuous contradictions to be frustrating and awkward. You may think the admission that most of the content in his stories is not factual to be downright unnecessary. Unfortunately, reading this culmination of stories at that level will cost the reader an experience from which they could gain much insight and knowledge about a time in history and a swarm of veterans that our generation knows little about and lacks even the tiniest understanding of. This novel is as much about the general nature of being at war as it is about fear, love, bravery, and the psyche of the mind.

Fear's Weight

In the first story, The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien describes all of the objects his platoon carries with them each day. Some of these items were specific to their role for the platoon and others were of a more personal nature. They don’t just carry the weight of these material objects though. They carry fear and the weight of the unknown: the weight of their lives, their fellow soldiers’ lives, and the lives of the innocent people living in the villes they attack in the name of war.

Each soldier carried their fear differently. Henry Dobbins carried extra food rations and his girlfriend’s pantyhose around his neck. Dave Jensen was devoted to hygiene and carried soap, dental floss and toothbrush, perhaps trying to control the one thing he could: the health of his teeth. But Ted Lavendar carried something completely different; he carried tranquilizers and “six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity.”

On page 18 we read, “For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity. Now and then, however, there were times of panic, when they squealed or wanted to squeal but couldn’t, when they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons blindly and cringed and sobbed and begged for the noise to stop and went wild and made stupid promises to themselves and to God and to their mothers and fathers, hoping not to die.” After the shooting stopped the men would start to gather themselves emotionally “first in private, then in groups, becoming soldiers again.” Every moment of every day these men feared for their lives and the lives of their fellow soldiers.

Thinking about the fear and undying will to survive the war reminded me of a song by 3 Doors Down, It’s Not My Time. Some lyrics of this song seem to have a very literal fit to the idea of the soldiers being scared and wanting to believe it was not their time to die each time they encountered their enemy or the mines they left behind. It you think of the war as the current in the song and the infinite amount of fear  a soldier carries with them you can feel the strangulation of it.

But now the current's only pulling me down
It’s getting harder too breath
It won’t be too long and I will be going under
Can you save me from this?

Cause it’s not my time I'm not going
There's a fear in me it’s not showing
This could be the end of me
And everything I know

“This could be the end of me, and everything I know” paraphrases what I would imagine was on the mind of every soldier every day. 

 

More of the Same

 If you take a deeper look at this story you can see the monotony of their lives as soldiers. “If you weren’t humping, you were waiting. I remember the monotony. Digging foxholes. Slapping mosquitos. The sun and the heat and the endless paddies. Even in the deep bush, where you could die any number of ways, the war was nakedly and aggressively boring.”

Each day had a certain rhythm to it. They woke up, when on patrol or out on an ambush that had been ordered. Later in the evening they would settle in at designated coordinates radioed to them by a higher ranking official, pull out their letters and pictures of loved ones and stand guard in their foxholes. Sometimes the days and nights included the death of a fellow soldier but all of their days were basically the same. As an illustration of this idea that everything is the same even though it’s different I chose the song Blue on Black by Kenny Wayne Shepherd.

I chose this song for a couple of reasons. If you listen to the rhythm of the guitar you notice a methodic riff that simply repeats throughout the song. The simplicity of the music may call most listeners to focus on the lyrics but in this context the lyrics have less to do with the meaning and relationship to the idea of monotony at war.

The other reason I chose this song is because I believe the lyrics of the chorus actually do reflect the idea that no matter what you do on a given day each day is the same as the one before and will be the same as the one after it. “Whisper on a scream doesn’t change a thing.” I wonder how many soldiers have whispered their final words over the screams of battle.

“Hey, blue on black, tears on a river
Push on a shove it don't mean much
Joker on jack, match on a fire
Cold on ice a dead man's touch
Whisper on a scream doesn't change a thing
Don't bring you back
Blue on black oh yeah, blue on black”

Broken Soldier

Another idea to consider throughout these stories is the reality of how soldiers, who are thought to be tough and fearless, reach a point when they’ve seen too much blood, too much death and personal loss that they experience a psychological mental break. This break is not positive like a breakthrough; this break changes a solder’s psychological well being and can make them a danger to themselves and to others.

In Night Life, we read about Kat Riley and how the war had changed him. He “sank inside himself, not saying a word, but then later on, after five or six days, it flipped the other way. He couldn’t stop talking. Wacky talk, too.” Kat Riley had served as a medic for his platoon and seen a lot of death and dismemberment. On page 210 we read that “Rat developed some peculiar habits. Constantly scratching himself. Clawing at the bug bites. He couldn’t quit digging at his skin, making big scabs and then ripping off the scabs and scratching the open sores.”

One night Rat Kiley went to Mitchell Sanders and said, “It’s not right. These pictures in my head, they won’t quit. I’ll see a guy’s liver. The actual fucking liver. And the thing is, it doesn’t scare me, it doesn’t even give me the willies. More like curiosity. The way a doctor feels when he looks at a patient, sort of mechanical, not seeing the real person, just a ruptured appendix or a clogged-up artery. Anyway, the day’s aren’t so bad, but at night the pictures get to be a bitch. I start seeing my own body. Chunks of myself. My own heart, my own kidneys.” He goes on like that for quite a while further revealing the severity of his psychological breakdown.  The next morning he shot himself in the foot. “I swear, it’s too much. I can’t keep seeing myself dead”, he’d said.

I believe When the Levee Breaks by Led Zepplin represents the idea that the body and the mind can only process and cope with a particular threshold of raw emotion, fear and stress before it comes crashing down. In a way the title and some of the lines in the song are representative of a psychological “levee” breaking but the music with this song is what I think captures the feeling of how this type of breakdown occurs. The lead in to the lyrics is long and drawn out, reminiscent of someone trying to keep some sense of whatever has happened to bring them to “the edge” in hopes it will save them from falling off the side. The music builds in intensity as it continues through with the lyrics, representing the very moment when a person loses their disconnected grasp on reality and folds under the pressures of their mind altering experiences.

In Love with Love

When Ted Lavendar was shot and killed Lieutenant Jimmy Cross had been lost in thoughts and daydreams of Martha. As described on page 11, his love for her was a “dense, crushing love.” He had been looking at her pictures, sucking on the pebble she had collected from the beach and sent him and daydreaming of a life with her. He pondered what kind of love she meant when she signed her letters “Love, Martha”, knowing it probably wasn’t the love he wished it to be. He also spent a great deal of time contemplating whether or not she was a virgin and who took one of the pictures she sent him. He was obsessed with this idea of a life with her, an idea of a love that didn’t actually exist. 

It goes on to say “…his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered. He wanted her to be a virgin and not a virgin, all at once. He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes?” Later we read, “He was just a kid at war, in love. He was twenty-four years old. He couldn’t help it.” What he was afraid to admit, although he knew it was true, was that this “love” was not real love. It was not reciprocated and in realizing that he wished he knew her “intimate secrets” he reveals that he didn’t really know Martha well enough to be in love with her, further proving that he was merely in love with the idea of her; the idea of love and a life with her.

While lost in these thoughts something terrible happened and the day went completely off course, leaving Lieutenant Jimmy Cross to question whether or not things would have been different if he had not been so wrapped up in a fictional love story with Martha.  I think the song Runaway Train by Soul Asylum is a great depiction of how being so focused on one thing can cause other aspects of life to spin out of control. For this particular selection it’s the lyrics that really drive home this idea of being on a destructive path and having to mentally regroup and get focused on the job in front of you.

“Can you help me remember how to smile?
Make it somehow all seem worthwhile
How on earth did I get so jaded?
Life's mystery seems so faded

I can go where no one else can go
I know what no one else knows
Here I am just a-drownin' in the rain
With a ticket for a runaway train

And everything seems cut and dried,
Day and night, earth and sky,
Somehow I just don't believe it

Runaway train, never going back
Wrong way on a one-way track”
Seems like I should be getting somewhere
Somehow I'm neither here nor there