The weight of Feelings

The Weight of Feelings
In The Things They Carried Tim O’Brien describes the world of the grunt. The story starts out with a fairly technical list of military equipment, rattling out weights of guns and ammunition. The descriptions give us a sense of the weight a soldier bears to war. However, as the story progresses O’Brien begins to draw attention to the weightless burdens of the soldiers. The soldiers have on their backs and shoulders memories from home, of love, or in LT Cross’s case, the lack of love. They carried Vietnam itself, the air, the smells, the dirt, even the sky around them weighed down on their minds. In the end, we see that what weighs the grunt down is not the 20 clips of 7.62 ammunition, or the 30 pound radio, but the burdens that cannot be measured on a scale. The most painful of these burdens, we are told, were the fears, feelings of cowardice, embarrassment, and terror. As O’Brien describes it, the reason these young men went to war was not because t...