The Things We Carry

This story was so interesting, and seemed to say a whole lot, and then a whole lot more by not saying things. The Things They Carried described both the contents of the bags of these soldiers and the contents of their hearts. They carried Uzis. They carried memories. They carried rations. They carried ghosts.

Some of the things they "carried" seemed to conflict: how do you carry love and hate, tenderness for your fellow man and the ability to scoff at his death, terror and courage? But that's what they had to do, so they learned to cope.

Much of this story seemed to be about hiding. Hiding from feelings. Hiding from grief. Hiding from the tenderest emotions. Hiding from the enemy. Hiding from their own ghosts and from whispers in the dark. One way of hiding from the invisible is to compensate with the tangible. Instead of thinking about their ghosts, they make jokes and take fingers and smoke the dead man's pot. They keep pictures and memories to keep the loneliness they carry at bay, like haunted conflicted contradictions. Their heavy, burdensome minesweeper doesn't make them feel safe, but helps them pretend they believe it. His girlfriend doesn't love him, and he knows it from the beginning, but he pretends, getting lost in her letters and a memory of a tweed-covered knee.

Getting lost in her memory leaves him distracted and inefficient, though, and when a man gets killed because of this, once again, Lt. Cross has to put down the intangible band-aid meant to ease hi invisible wounds, stop carrying all that, to pick up his men. In the end, he decides, they'll start carrying every real thing: no more cutting corners, no dropping rations and ammo to make their loads lighter. His job isn't to be loved; it's to keep him men alive.

The minesweeper and the big guns are heavy, but the heaviest burdens are the invisible ones, the lives and ghosts and responsibility of keeping the two separate.