O'Brien's Themes

In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a running theme of roles that people play appear throughout the stories. For example, O’Brien speaks at length about how the soldiers are terrified of being shamed. Since so many of the men had no control over being drafted and sent to war, they resist showing fear out of desperation to regain some control of their situations. O’Brien himself faces a harsh internal battle between safety and pride in “On the Rainy River.” When he gets drafted, the news is enough to terrify him into driving to the Canadian border so as to escape. When he gets there, he begins to have excruciating second thoughts. He begins to think of all of the people who will notice his absence, and deride him as being a coward for it. O’Brien imagines “all those eyes on me – the town, the whole universe – and I couldn’t risk the embarrassment… Even in my imagination, the shore just twenty yards away, I couldn't make myself be brave. It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that's all it was.” He ultimately decides to go to war, playing a role to escape the judgment of others.

Roles are also prevalent in “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong.” A soldier named Mark Fossie has his girlfriend Mary Ann flown into Vietnam, but things take a turn for the unexpected. Mary Ann, a cheerleader back at home and the spitting image of a virginal girly-girl, is morbidly fascinated with the war, the land, and the destruction. None of the men in the unit expected such a reaction from her. As Rat Kiley puts it, “What's so impossible about that? She was a girl, that's all… You got these blinders on about women. How gentle and peaceful they are.” While at home, Mary Ann seemed to be conforming to the role expected of women. She was meek and mild and peaceful, just like women were expected to be. However, once in Vietnam, she is allowed to let her true colors show. She was in love with the place because it allowed her to be free from her role, and become “caught up in the Nam shit” like her male counterparts.