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.