The Burdens of Lt. Jimmy Cross in Tim O'Brien's Story The Things They Carried

Martha is the first women we meet in the book. She is pretty much the typical stay at home war girl. She writes letters to Lt. Jimmy Cross, they met at a college in New Jersey but nothing sparked between them besides a friendship. There isn't any hope of them ever being together but Jimmy Cross still thinks about her constantly everyday. In one particular letter she sends him a good-luck-pebble. "Martha wrote that she had found the pebble on the Jersey shoreline and carried it in her breast pocket for several days" (8). Jimmy Cross reads the letter spends hours wondering who she was at the beach with, if she was with a man, if they were a couple. When the women sent letters home, it really helped keep the morale of the soldier's. Although Martha continues to kind of mislead Jimmy when she signs the letters "love." "Ted Lavender was shot in the head on his way back from peeing. He lay with his mouth open" (12).

In the story Lieutenant Cross makes both of the changes after the death of Lavender. He changes his values by acknowledging that Martha was not in love with him and now he would not be in love with her and he also burnt the pictures and letters so he was not looking at them anymore. The guilt that they all felt altered how they acted. Some of the men made jokes about tense situations that were not funny because joking made them feel better. The situation grew lighter by laughter, even though the men knew nothing was funny about their situation, and this knowledge made them feel guilty about their insensitive acts because it violated their values. The way the men dealt with their guilt was by passing the blame or trying not to think about how wrong it was, even though they knew. These kinds of strange reactions to normally tense or tragic situations are a way to ease the fear of death.

When reading the first chapter of The Things They Carried, it is quickly understood that the soldiers mentioned are burdened to carry a great deal of baggage. This baggage does not only consist of guns, ammunition, protection gear, survival materials, and personal items—this baggage also includes the numerous emotions of grief, longing, guilt, shame, and fear of dying. In complete, soldiers from Vietnam were constrained to carry material baggage as well as mental baggage that varied from each individual. The outcome of this constraint seems to play a huge role in being a soldier, however, not each soldier may handle this constraint the same way. Some soldiers may drive their vehicle around aimlessly, like Norman Bowker, trying to forget the war. Others may decide the burden is too tough to carry and hang themselves, like Bowker eventually did (p.154).

Love is a powerful force, and Lieutenant Cross sometimes gets lost in his musings while thinking of Martha. O’Brien writes: “His mind wandered. He had difficulty keeping his attention on the war. On occasion he would yell at his men to spread out the column, to keep their eyes open, but then he would slip away into daydreams, just pretending, walking barefoot along the Jersey shore, with Martha, carrying nothing.” Like any sane person in his situation, Lieutenant Cross wants to escape – to anywhere else but the war. The war brings terrible experiences – fear, death, hunger, and pain beyond imagination. The only way that Lieutenant Cross can endure these things is by escaping to an imaginary life with Martha. Although to her, he is little more than a friend, to Lieutenant Cross, Martha represents innocence, perfection, and a world free from war.

Most authors who write about war stories write vividly; this is the same with Tim O’Brien as he describes the lives of the soldiers by using his own experiences as knowledge. In his short story “The Things They Carried” he skillfully reveals realistic scenes that portray psychological, physical and mental burdens carried by every soldier. He illustrates these burdens by discussing the weights that the soldiers carry, their psychological stress and the mental stress they have to undergo as each of them endure the harshness and ambiguity of the Vietnam War. One question we have to ask ourselves is if the three kinds of burdens carried by the soldier’s are equal in size? “As if in slow motion, frame by frame, the world would take on the old

This is the crucial turning point for Lt. Cross. He reaches the crossroad where he must choose between his men or continue the drug us of Martha and be transported to fantasy land. “But didn’t” (358) tells us exactly which path he chose. He burns the letters and photos of Martha, symbolizing his desire to forget about that life, and moves forward with contemplating how to dispose of the pebble. “Everything seemed part of everything else, the fog and Martha” (357) comparing Martha to the fog. Fog is gray, dense and prevents one to see clearly, and that was Martha. When he was high on Martha, he couldn’t see clearly and he couldn’t think clearly. “…deepening rain. It was a war, after all… Lt. Jimmy Cross took out his maps… shook his head hard, as if to clear it…” (357), it is the symbolism of the rain that clears out his thinking, and washing away the distraction. This is the first time we see the leader in Lt. Cross emerge. He takes out his “map to plan the day’s march… and they would head west… country green and inviting” (358). This passage allows us to get a glimpse of the new Lt. Cross who is putting his men first, planning out the day’s travel, with plans to leave the darkness behind and head towards life and

Because the romantic relationship between Martha and himself is not real, it lives within his own fantasy world. This fantasy world seems to be the preferred mode of survival for him and it was his necessary symbolic item for him to remember his purpose in surviving the war, and therefore he needed them just as much as anyone would need the ammunition for a gun, food to eat, or clothing on their backs, until he believed his lack awareness of reality caused the death of a fellow man. After the death of one of his men Cross decided to let Martha go, because “she belonged to another world, which was not quite real,… because she never loved him and never would” (O’ Brien

O'Brien makes it known that it is the love of Martha that Cross believes impedes his duty to protect and ensure the well being of his soldiers. Cross believes that his love for Martha interfered with his responsibilities and his ability to keep his soldiers' safe, and "as a consequence Lavender was now dead" (107). An innocent love, something so natural in life, becomes warped and manipulated by war to the point that love is seen just as dangerous as the enemy. Love is seen as an enemy of duty and responsibility. If there is time to love, then not enough time is being put into ensuring the safety of the soldiers.

We can feel the same thing he feels as he washes his hands free of dirt, anticipating the moment he can touch the letter that she sealed with her tounge and finger tips. The vivid language used here shows us the horrible constraint of war opposing with the theme of hope that these soldiers find with the small things they carry that remind them of a distant memory. For Cross, the letters keep his Martha fantasy living. Although the love may not be shared both ways, he can imagine it the way he would like it to be. O'Brien's use of description in every line gives the reader a terribly great sense of the emotional tension throught the

In Tim O'brien's, The Things They Carried, it describes the violent and emotional journey a group of men had to endure as they were trying to survive the Vietnam War. This was no easy task as war has some very rough conditions for people to live with. The group of men, led by First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, face some challenging situations but in every situation Lieutenant Cross finds himself involved in some way. The things Lieutenant Cross endured would have been hard for any man.

He feels that it's his fault that Lavender died; he should've have been thinking about his soldiers instead of thinking about Martha. This is very unlike the speaker in the poem, as he is glad to be carrying the heart of the one he loves. He says, "i fear no fate" and "i want no world" because he has their heart with him. Cross no longer wants to carry Martha's heart. This is why he burns her letters and the pictures he has of her; he wants to forget her so that he can become more focused on the war. This isn't possible, however, because he's already carrying her in his mind, not just physically. Where the speaker of the poem rejoices in carrying his love's heart, saying that it is "the wonder that's keeping the stars apart", Jimmy Cross isn't happy to not be able to forget Martha. He still sees her in the rain looking at him, understanding that he won't stop loving her, no matter how much he wants to. He still decides to let go everything he has of her, planning to swallow the pebble, or drop it on the trail, or use it with Lee Strunk's slingshot. He promises to himself that he will no longer be distracted, that he will be stricter and distance himself. Even if he no longer carries her physically or in his thoughts, he still carries her in his own heart. No matter how hard he might try not to, he will always carry Martha’s heart with him;

Lieutenant Jimmy Cross hated himself, feeling the guilt and shame for thinking of Martha instead of his men. He sat in the foxhole he had dug and cried. It is there, in the morning that he decided to burn Martha’s letters and photographs in an attempt to free himself of the weight of her. Still he realized its pointlessness as he can still see the picture of her even without the photograph, the letters he kept in his head, showing that even if the tangible objects are gone, they still remain within you, a part of you, adding to the weight of who you

Martha was the lady that Lieutenant Jimmy Cross loved. He carried letters and two pictures along with his love for her around at all times. All of the letters from her were signed Love, Martha and he knew that that was the only a way of signing a letter but he still hoped that she loved him back. He was constantly thinking about her. He thought about her so much that when he was supposed to be destroying the tunnels his friend, Ted Lavender, was shot and killed. He blamed himself for the death of his friend, but even then all he could think about was being away from Martha. “He pictured Martha’s smooth young face, thinking he loved her more than anything, more than his men, and now Ted Lavender was dead because he loved her so much and could not stop thinking about her” (O’Brien 6.) The story of Martha and Jimmy shows the trials and tribulations of love during a war. He was responsible for the entire Alpha Company, for everything that they did and yet all he could think about was one women who was all the way across the world, safe at her home.

Obviously, in the story, Cross hides his fantasy ‘’Martha’’ and does not talk about his girl with any fellow soldiers. However, he spends much time to determine whether Martha is virgin or not. Furthermore, he tries to make it clear about whether Martha loves him or not. Because of this kind of uncertainty, ‘’his mind wanders’’ and ‘’he had difficulty keeping his attention on the war’’ (473). However, at that moment, he still does not show his uncertainty to his fellow soldiers. He thinks about ‘’Martha’’ and his uncertain love so many times that ‘’he does not care about his men’’ (477). As a consequence, his platoon moves as ‘’mules’’ (477) and easily gets exhausted. He does not think about the nervous war situation and talk about his plans of war to his fellow soldiers. Due to lack of communication, Cross does not organize the platoon regularly and frequently and make a specific plan of war. His leadership is gradually worse during the war. Lastly, his fellow soldier Lavender dies early and

At the end of the story he brings himself to let go of her, physically with the letters signed with “love” as well as just letting the dream of her go him to face the realities of the fact that he is at war and she will probably never be in love with him and the fact that she is a deadly distraction. The idea of her and all of the possibilities associated with Martha are one of the many things that Cross carries with him through the