Even though they already eve hundreds of pounds of equipment to carry, they still choose to carry these things. This is very justifiable however, because most of these items are something from home, something to remind them of what they have back home, and gives them hope that they will someday return there. Hope is a present theme in The Things They Carried, and is always necessary with men at war, because without hope they would have nothing to fight for and their morale would be gone.
The most burdensome of things carried by the men, is the emotional sewage. Throughout the novel, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carries the emotion of love. This weighs on him an enormously throughout the war because he can never get his mind off of Martha, even though she does not love him back. This causes emotional detachment from the war and from commanding his troops. When Ted Lavender dies, Cross blames himself for not being as focused as he should be because of Martha, and burns her pictures and letters.
Even though he no longer physically carries these things, he still notionally carries them throughout the book because he can never get them out of his mind. Kiowa is another example of one of the soldiers who carries an emotional burden with the tremendous weight of ‘his grandmother’s distrust for the white man” (3). This could propose a difficulty to trust his fellow soldiers. All the men carry with them the memories of their fallen friends and fellow soldiers. They find different ways to grieve over the fallen soldiers, but never do forget them.
Like O’Brien says, “The thing about numbering, is that you don’t forget. ” (33). These young men fighting for their country in Vietnam are extremely brave. War is a really hard thing for non-soldiers to comprehend when you start to talk about the stories of what happened when they are just marching around the jungle. But the theme of emotional and physical things carried is heavily shown throughout the book and presents reasoning for why these men did and felt the things they did.
