Lieutenant Cross attempts to redistribute the weight he carries, prioritizing the weight of responsibility for his men over the weight of his fantasy love for Martha, the girl back home. But can he, the soldiers or anyone put the intangibles down? Can you lighten the load or merely replace one intangible for another like Freud’s screen memory? The “messiness of these events” are contained and carried in packs on backs, in feet on humps, in minds, hearts and guts and turned into O’Brien’s narrative of the Vietnam War. A catalog of things the soldiers carried turns out to carry a lot of emotional weight.
Note: "The Things They Carried" is a short story within a book called The Things They Carried. I read a comment written by a vet on one of the sites I surfed who said O'Brien's book was a precious gift to Vietnam vets. The other comments by vets on various sites indicated a similar, shared affection for O'Brien and his book. Also, there is a beautiful message from father to son in that video I posted.
Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Things_They_Carried
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_O%27Brien_(author)
http://www.rajuabju.com/literature/thingstheycarried.htm
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/133518.The_Things_They_Carried
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125128156
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127133594
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/02/136503834/returned-combat-veteran-anxiety-trumps-logic
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2010/04/wednesday-on-the-newshour-writer-tim-obrien.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnNMUYJ9fm8 (Youtube has the entire story as an "audio book" from PRI in seven parts.)
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