What is the significance of the things they carry

Cross calls in air support after a member of the platoon dies, and a village is heavily bombed. Tim kills a man who posed no real threat to him.

Mary Anne is corrupted by the war, becomes a killer, and disappears into the jungle. The war grinds on, and the men either survive or are ground up with it. They never speak of the rationale for the war, and when one of the men shoots his own foot to get sent home, they do not judge him because they know the war is pointless.

Writing about people who have died, the book implies, is the only way to conquer death. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. How does Kiowa die? What are the things the soldiers carry? First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross is a solitary, pensive platoon leader who cares about his men. He carries photos and letters from the girl he loves back home in New Jersey, who doesn't love him back. Bob "Rat" Kiley is a likeable and skilled medic who braves danger to keep his fellow soldiers alive.

Kiowa is a kind and moral soldier from Oklahoma, a Native American, a devout Baptist. He carries an illustrated New Testament, worn-out moccasins, and his grandfather's feathered hunting hatchet. Norman Bowker is a quiet boy from Central Iowa who strives to live up to his father's expectations and finds he can't relate to anyone back home after the war.

He carries a diary and a thumb cut from a Viet Cong corpse. Henry Dobbins is a large, strong, dependable, unsophisticated machine gunner. He carries extra rations and wears his girlfriend's pantyhose tied around his neck. Before Tim O'Brien was drafted into the army, he had what some would consider an all-American childhood. He was born on October 1, , in Austin, Minnesota, and raised in Worthington, a small prairie town in the southern part of the state.

His mother was an elementary school teacher, his father an insurance salesman and sailor in World War II. O'Brien played Little League, dabbled in magic tricks, and spent much of his youth in the county library daydreaming about such characters as Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. At Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, he received good grades and became student body president.

Occasionally, he'd attend peace vigils and protests against the burgeoning war in Vietnam. He graduated in with a B. Then O'Brien got his draft notice.

He once recalled in an interview that "even getting on the plane for boot camp, I couldn't believe any of it was happening to me, someone who hated Boy Scouts and bugs and rifles. O'Brien spent his tour of duty from to as a foot soldier with the 46th Infantry in Quang Ngai province.

He was sent home with a Purple Heart when he got hit with shrapnel in a grenade attack. Soon after, he took a position for a year as a national affairs reporter for The Washington Post, then turned full-time to writing books. He nearly stopped writing after his sixth book, In the Lake of the Woods , due to a battle with depression. But following a nine-month hiatus, he began work on a new novel, Tomcat in Love, published in He currently teaches creative writing at Texas State University.

Excerpts from their conversation follow. Tim O'Brien: It's a book that centers on Vietnam and a platoon of soldiers. In one sense, it's about the Vietnam War, but it's also about storytelling, how stories rule our lives, how they're told and retold as we look for an elusive truth.

And finally, it's about writing itself—writing as an effort to pin down with language the truth about a subject. JR: What is the distinction between truth and accuracy? TO: What we see accurately with our eyes can sometimes be very deceptive.

We don't see everything. No historian can fit into a textbook the thoughts of every single soldier in every single war and every single episode. Much is being selected and generalized. So in The Things They Carried, I'm trying to get at this sense of how difficult it is to pin down the truth with a capital "T.

So part of the effort is trying to display through fiction the ambiguous, blurry, complicated, grayish fog of even the most plainly historical events.

He seemed as real to me as the man sitting next to me on the train this morning. So the initial short story introduces the idea of soldiers carrying things both physical and intangible, and O'Brien carries that idea forward throughout the remainder of the book.

So the title quite properly labels the book: It's a whole piece about all the things soldiers carried. Parents Home Homeschool College Resources. Study Guide. By Tim O'Brien. How do the soldiers cope with death during wartime? How does Curt Lemon die? What happens to Mary Anne Bell? What does Norman Bowker need after he returns home?

What happens to Rat Kiley? Literary Devices Symbols.