The ironic truth about most of the wars in which the United States has been involved is that they have not been about promoting freedom, as much as they have been about extending American hegemony, political or economic. American involvement in the two World Wars may be said to be the exception: both of those conflicts featured enemies that sought world conquest, and the horrible plans that Adolf Hitler had for those who were not of Aryan descent, and particularly those of Jewish descent, made a military attempt to stop those plans a moral imperative for the rest of the world. The Mexican War is often seen as a conflict similar to the current Iraq war, because of President Polk’s naked desire to increase American power – in terms of territory then, much like the critics say that the American government is pursuing economic power in Iraq. The Spanish-American War is often seen as America’s opportunistic jump into colonialism. The Korean conflict and the Vietnam War had hazy motivations at best: an abstract worry about a governmental change in countries on the other side of the planet, summed up by the American leadership as the “domino theory” – the idea that if one country became Communist, so would the next, and the next, until the whole world (except the United States) was run by what Americans saw as the oppression of socialism.

Their arguments were not without merit. The idealism of Trotsky and Lenin, in the Soviet Union, was quickly replaced by the brutality of Joseph Stalin, who may have killed more of his own citizens in cruel, repressive purges, than Hitler killed through the ravages of the Holocaust. Communism came quickly to represent not just uniformity of social station, but also uniformity of thought, and the nightmarish versions of such a world that appeared in dystopian novels like Orwell’s 1984 were not so far removed from the realities of the Soviet Union and Communist China as many people thought. And so the free people of South Korea, and later of South Vietnam, in the minds of the American leadership, needed the protection of the last free superpower, the United States, to stay out from under the thumb of Communist totalitarianism. This hypothetical enemy, however, was not anything close to the kamikaze bombers who destroyed U.S. naval ships during the Second World War, nor the cold, goose-stepping Nazis who threatened Western Europe and, possibly, the Western Hemisphere. The sacrifice that the American government was asking its soldiers to take in Vietnam and Korea was the same ultimate one that their predecessors had eagerly embraced in the Second World War; however, the enemy was much less clearly defined. The American military was not fighting a people; it was fighting a political system, or an idea. It was not defending its own soil, or retaliating to an attack on its own military vessels; it was giving a foreign people a government that the foreign people themselves may not have even wanted. It never gave its soldiers a lucid and valid rationale for making the ultimate sacrifice, and the civilians at home ultimately found the war to be repugnant. Because the Vietnam War lacked a clear moral rationale, the American civilian population failed to support it, and its military personnel lacked the mental strength to fight an enemy that had a clear rationale of its own: defense of its own soil.

The Vietnam War has often been the subject of writing and filmmaking. One collection of stories that emerged from this war is The Things They Carried. The author, Tim O’Brien, was a Vietnam veteran. While these stories are mostly fictional, they are based on events that happened to O’Brien while he was fighting in the war. His belief “that stories are born from real events, and therefore are forever linked to them” (Bookrags) informs much of his writing. Growing up, O’Brien admired John F. Kennedy, particularly his idealistic calls for public service. Therefore, when his draft notice came, he went to fight, even though he had earlier protested the conflict: he felt ashamed to dodge the draft. According to O’Brien, even though he did receive military decorations, he never felt particularly heroic: the deeds that he received honors for were ones that he had carefully considered, and only adopted because there was not any significant risk, in his own mind, that he would be hurt doing so (Bookrags). While he was in Vietnam, he promised himself that, upon his return home, he would write books about why the war was immoral. He described the war in this way:

It was like trying to pin the tail on the Asian donkey, but there was no tail and no donkey. In a year I only saw the living enemy once. All I saw were flashes from the foliage and the results, the bodies. In books or films it is desirable to have a climactic battle scene, but the world does not operate in those gross dramatic terms. In Vietnam there was a general aimlessness, not just in the physical sense, but beyond that in the moral and ethical sense (Bookrags).

Whether or not this moral aimlessness has pervaded American policy since the Second World War is not within the scope of this paper; whether the use of the ultimate weapon in Japan took whatever morality remained in war and replaced it with an unending game of chicken is not relevant to this thesis; however, the works in print and on screen regarding the Vietnam conflict feature this moral aimlessness in close detail.

“The Things They Carried” is the first story in O’Brien’s collection. It features a group of American soldiers who have significant physical and figurative burdens placed upon them as they fight in the Vietnam conflict. First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carries letters (and later a pebble) sent to him from a girl back home named Martha. He loves her and hopes that she will come to love him, even though she does not yet. In fact, the pebble that he receives from her is, at best, an ambivalent statement of her feelings about him. This love that he feels for her becomes such a burden, in fact, that he neglects the care of his soldiers, at times, because he is busy thinking about her. His platoon members also carry significant burdens. Ted Lavender carried tranquilizers, that he would constantly take to assuage his fears about the war; in fact, he takes them up until the point that he is shot and killed. Dave Jensen believes that poor hygiene will lead to disease, and so he carries a toothbrush and soap around with him. Mitchell Sanders carries condoms, but Kiowa carries a Bible, because his beliefs are fervently Baptist. Norman Bowker carries a diary, and Rat Kiley carries comic books. These are in addition to the burdens common to all: heavy helmets, boots, ponchos, bandages, and photographs. In addition to these literal burdens are the fears and dreads that they have in their minds about the war.

At this point, this writing could be about any war. Soldiers in any conflict face the prospect of sudden death, and carrying certain objects as talismans would be nothing new. However, the fact that these objects become an obsession for at least some of these soldiers, rather than a simple diversion from thoughts of war, is telling. In the story, Lee Strunk is assigned to search a tunnel one morning – a commonplace event. His platoon leader, Jimmy Cross, is so busy wishing that he could be down in the tunnel with Martha, that he is surprised by Lee’s triumphant return – and even more shocked by the sudden shooting of Ted Lavender. His lack of focus did not prepare him for a surprise attack, even though such attacks commonly occurred around tunnel searches. After Lavender dies, Cross goes so far as to burn all of the letters and pictures that Martha has sent him, so deep is his shame about being distracted at that crucial moment. This event makes him become more and more distant from his emotions, and more and more focused on the job at hand: the war. Another object that Norman Bowker carries is a thumb that had been cut from a dead Vietnamese teenage soldier. Bowker originally received it from Mitchell Sanders, who told him that the thumb was the moral of the whole conflict. (Bookrags). Taken together, these are just one of many signs that the Vietnam conflict, at least in the minds of the American soldiers, lacked the moral urgency necessary to justify the immense sacrifice of death. There are other signs that the soldiers lacked a clear sense of purpose in the war. The narrator writes that “[b]y daylight they [take] sniper fire, at night they [are] mortared, but it [is] not battle, it [is] just the endless march, village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost (O’Brien, p. 15). Had there been a clearer sense of why the American military was even in Vietnam at all, one suspects that the soldiers would not have been as easily distracted from the task at hand. MORE…