Things They Carried - Personal Reflection

While reading The Things They Carried, I felt a lot of different emotions. One of the emotions I felt was eagerness. I felt eager to read the entire book. I was pulled in by Tim O’Brian’s words; it is actually one of my favorite books.

I felt nervous when I read the part about Nick Veenhof and Linda. Linda wore a cap on her first date with Tim. While in the car Tim told Linda he liked her cap. The next week at school Nick Veenhof pulled off her cap. I sensed something was going to happen when Tim started to describe what Nick had done to take off the cap. I felt because I didn’t want Linda to be embarrassed.

In the book Tim and the other soldiers step over dead bodies all the time. While walking Rat Kiley stepped over Vietnamese baby and called it a crunchy munchy. This made me feel disturbed and sick, thinking of a poor Vietnamese baby as nothing more than a roasted peanut. This was Rat’s way of coping with the death.

I was awestruck when Tim described the man he killed. The man Tim described made me feel awestruck because I was surprised to read such gory details. “His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman’s, his nose was undamaged, there was a slight tear at the lobe of one ear…..: (O’Brian 118)

I related to the scene where Linda laid dead in the casket. This scene reminded me of my mom’s funeral. Her funeral never seemed to end. I can still remember what she looked like in that wooden box. She seemed so blue and the room seemed so cold, so cold it was haunting. Here in this scene I related to Tim. Like Linda my mom, didn’t look peaceful as much as she looked just plain dead. I knew my mom was dead and I didn’t want to believe it, so I walked out of the room, lightheaded.

The resolution of the book to me was not very satisfying because I wanted to know how he told his wife about