Authors all across the world have published countless novels about war and love. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is one of the many war novels that involves love, but unlike the others, love in The Things They Carried is not the average perfect utopian dream. His short stories, “The Things They Carried” and “The Lives of the Dead”, illustrate how the idea of using imagination as a distraction, specifically the power of love, can help soldiers escape the reality of war in either a positive or negative way. In “The Things They Carried”, Jimmy Cross’s obsessive love with Martha is described as dangerous and shameful because it demonstrates how reliving fantasies led him to sacrifice his love with his soldiers. On the other hand, in “The Lives of the Dead”, Tim O’Brien’s love is portrayed in a positive light because it allows him to honor Linda as well as his friends by capturing their lives in words. Despite these stories’ contrasting results, finding a way to remember what was back home allowed both soldiers to mentally and physically become stronger.
In “The Things They Carried”, Lieutenant Cross’s disillusionment displays how love can serve as a distraction because he started prioritizing his fantasies over reality. When Cross is assigned to search a tunnel complex in Than Khe, instead of concentrating on his duties in the war, he instead dreams about, “the stresses and fractures, the quick collapse, the two of them buried alive under all that weight. Dense, crushing love… his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood” (11). Cross’s use of the words “stresses”, “fractures”, “crushing”, and “collapse” to describe his love for Martha is ironic because it conflicts with the common fairytale love. He wants “the two of them buried alive” together. Being buried alive is many people’s greatest fears, yet for Cross he wishes and hopes for it, showing how altered his mindset became when thinking about her. He tried to concentrate on reality, “but his love was too much for him.” A common Biblical idea is that with love, you can conquer all hate/death. This is an example of how love did overcome his violent thoughts about the war, but instead of it being a good thing, it eventually ends up causing more violence and forces him to sacrifice the love he has for Ted Lavender. Jimmy Cross loved her so much that he wanted to “sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood.” Martha is a symbol of hope and memory for what was back home. However, Cross was unable to separate his fantasies and realities to the point that it consumed him and he wanted to become one with Martha. After Lavender’s death, Cross took his men back into Than Khe to dig. He used his shovel “like an ax, slashing, feeling both love and hate… he sat at the bottom of his foxhole and wept… he was grieving for Ted Lavender, but mostly it was for Martha... because she belonged to another world” (16). He used his shovel “like an ax.” Axes usually symbolize death and in this case, he is trying to kill Vietnam because of the pain it has caused him and how it led him to compromise his priorities/morals for love. The words “love” and “hate” are used in the same phrase, which is another example of how while love and hate contradict each other, they can also relate to each other and connect. While he is thinking about Martha, he is digging which represents how he is mindlessly digging himself into a bigger hole by thinking about Martha until he reaches “the bottom of his foxhole”. When he reaches the end of his digging, he finally realizes that Martha “belonged to another world” and that she isn’t anything more than a fantasy.
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Throughout the “Lives of the Dead”, Tim O’Brien writes stories to relive memories of his childhood love but unlike Cross, he uses his imagination to revive Linda through words because it allows him to release his emotions and find comfort in the stories. As O’Brien retells the story of his love with Linda, he describes how he can capture her life. He claims that, through stories, he can ‘steal her soul. [he] can revive, at least briefly, that which is absolute and unchanging. In a story, miracles can happen. Linda can smile and sit up. She can reach out, touch my wrist, and say, “Timmy, stop crying.”’ (224). The use of the words “absolute and unchanging” is an example of the common motif of loops/circles. Linda might be dead, but her soul is forever for O’Brien. His use of the words “revive”, “miracles” and “smile” contrast with the words that Cross used to describe his love. This shows how O’Brien can find relief through honoring Linda. In his ideal story, Linda can ‘reach out, touch [his] wrist, and say, “Timmy, stop crying.”’ The use of his childhood name, “Timmy”, signifies how O’Brien changed with his name as he grew up, yet he still has memories of his childhood love. As he describes her, he explains, “She was dead. I understood that. After all, I’d seen her body. And yet as a nine-year-old, I had begun to practice the magic of stories. Some I just dreamed up. Others I wrote down- the scenes and dialogue. And at nighttime I’d slide into sleep knowing that Linda would be there for me.” (231). From just nine years old, he started understanding “the magic of stories.” Stories aren’t real but he finds them magical because he can recreate life in such a way that it subjectively feels like the truth to him. In his dreams, Linda is waiting for him. O’Brien uses the memory of his love to escape the horrors of real life through dreams as well as stories.
Even though in these stories love had very different effects, it allowed both soldiers to escape the cruelty and horrors of war and provided both of them hope. This is shown after Lavender’s death when Cross decides that “he would dispense with love... he would simply tighten his lips and arrange his shoulders in the correct command postures. He might give a curt little nod. Or he might not” (25). The repetitive use of the words “might” and “would” gives his action a mysterious nature and causes the reader to ask what the real truth is. The strict choice of the words “tighten”, “arrange”, “command”, “form”, “and “simply” contrast his former self, demonstrating that he is mentally stronger and tougher. He is no longer distracted and even though his experience with subjective truth and imagination ultimately ended up being “bad”, he can learn from it and stay focused. Similarly, O’Brien changes for the better after his experience with death, saying how “stories can save us... I keep dreaming of Linda alive. And Ted Lavender, too, and Kiowa, and Curt Lemon, and a slim young man I killed, and an old man sprawled beside a pigpen, and several others whose bodies I once lifted and dumped into a truck. They’re all dead. But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world” (213). Writing stories is a form of comfort for O’Brien because it helps him to remember the people he loves and honor their lives. The use of the word “can” implies possibility, meaning that the truth of whether Linda is “alive” or not is subjective based off of his perspective. When describing all of the people he killed, he starts very specific going from the people most important to him and transitions into describing them more vaguely. His ability to remember everybody that he killed, even though he didn’t kill them directly, shows how traumatic the war was for him and how significant it is to have a coping mechanism. Through stories, he says that the “dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.” This is an example of the literary present because it shows how every time somebody reads, the dead become alive again through the writing. The loop effect that the literary present creates emphasizes the never-ending idea of life and death through imagination and stories.
Overall, Lieutenant Cross and Tim O’Brien have very conflicting perspectives on love because of their different experiences with imagination. Their contrasting views are an example of how a true war story is postmodern and subjective. Tim O’Brien’s short story, “How to Tell a True War Story” shows how in a “true” war story, the real truth is manipulated into an emotional truth where all of the facts might not necessarily be real. He writes, “A true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river” (81). This quote proves that what happened is insignificant, but the small details and memories are what makes a war story true.
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