Consumption of the Mind

     In the short story titled "The Thing's They Carried," the most prevalent component in it was the constant listing of things that the soldiers carried. The most remarkable things that O'Brien included in these lists were the figurative things that the soldiers carried. The things the soldiers carried were not only physical burdens, like a M-60 that was 23 pounds, but they were also mental and figurative, like infections or guilt.
     O'Brien listed off items and their immense weight that the men carried to emphasize the extreme physical weight that the soldiers had to bear. Perhaps, the physical weight did not consume the soldiers in the Vietnam war as much as their own minds did. During the war, the soldiers were completely isolated from everything that was familiar to themselves. One of the main characters, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, was a victim of his own imagination and guilt. He spent most of the short story fantasizing about a woman named Martha whom he had been in love with, although she clearly never reciprocated his feelings for her. Instead of paying attention to the well-being of his men, his imagination distracted himself from the reality of Vietnam by taking him into the photograph he had saved of Martha playing volleyball. The biggest weight Cross carried was his love for Martha. It completely consumed him, more than any other physical object he carried. The main difference between the physical weight the men carried and their own minds was that they could not escape their own thoughts, but could the literal things they carried. Cross destroyed all of the physical reminders he had of Martha by burning letters from her and the photograph of her, but he could still not escape his own thoughts about Martha. Martha crept into his head because his love for her devoured him.