The Burden of Men of War is not War

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The Burden of Men of War is not War
‘The things they carried' by Tim O'Brien, an American author born in 1946 in Minnesota, is a collection of stories regarding experiences of American soldiers during the Vietnam War. The author uses this collection of short stories to articulate profoundly the truths regarding mental and physical difficulties that these men endured during and after the way from a personalized point of view. O'Brien (77) maintains, “To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace”. His style of writing surpasses the genre of other war literature and themes to touch on sensitive matters of emotions and traumas those American soldiers had to endure, while still maintaining a theme relevant today, despite the book being set in the 1960s. Truth be told, the burdens caused by war go beyond the actual battles, they involve feelings of hopelessness, fear, guilt, emotional insecurity and even love, to mention but a few.
This unique piece of literature is not a book about war, as argued by O'Gorman and O'Brien himself (O'Gorman, 1). As far as combat and battle are concerned, the men of war are trained to sufficiently make good upon objectives set on them by their government and relevant authorities of the motherland. Still, Tim O'Brien's ‘The things they carried' offers an unusual comprehension that war involves sides of experience that are completely aside from thoughts of actual battle. He indicates the day-to-day routines of American soldiers during the Vietnam War as inflicting some serious emotional burdens on the soldiers under question. He shares his views from a strong emotional and moving background. O'Brien is categorical to note that soldiers carried with them a range of things in their daily endeavors that added to their burdens. The book indicates that regardless of the role played by an individual soldier, they normally carried physical objects like cigarettes, Kool-Aid, dog tags and C-rations. Still, different soldiers carried different specific weapons (like the M-16 assault rifle, M-60 machine gun or M-79 grenade or rocket launchers) which weighed up to over 20 pounds. The radio operator for his platoon “Mitchell Sanders carried the PRC-25 radio, a killer, 26 pounds with its battery” (O'Brien 5). He lets his readers understand that the soldiers bore notable challenges of moving around with arms and equipments as physical burdens necessary for their mission and survival.
However, the author is more concerned with the emotional burdens, which formed the true ‘weights' for these soldiers. They were mostly weighed down with the effects of the war on their mental wellbeing both at group and at personal level. Still, for purposes of establishing that ‘The things they Carried' is not about war, the author depicts that the soldie...