Things I Carry

This writing prompt reminds me of a novel by Tim O'Brien. He wrote The Things They Carried. It's a collection of short stories he wrote about his service in Vietnam. I haven't thought about this novel in years, but it's so good. A few of my favorite lines read, "The things they carried ended up carrying them." That was in the first chapter that was just a literal list of things they carried--boots, ammunition, clothes, guns, helmets, navigation equipment, letters from loved ones, half composed letters to loved ones, dog tags, knives, grenades... etc.

Not to belittle O'Brien's experience, I carry keys, hair ties, iPod, clothes, shoes, credit cards, book bag, red little journal half written with prose and poetry, loose papers, pens, pencils, bottle of ibuprofen, jump drive, loose change, memories, scars, memories of scars, emotional scars, sandals, two tubes of chap stick, necklace, and bracelet... Only a few of those things carry me anywhere. Another line from O'Brien: "The dumb cooze didn't get it." He writes that when he would lecture about Vietnam he included a fictional story about the soldiers finding a baby water buffalo. Masochists from the war, they shot the buffalo to pieces bit by bit. At no point did the animal try to run or escape. He just stood there and let them kill him. At that point it was the most god awful thing I think I'd ever read. I was crying and had to skip those pages. O'Brien claims that every time he tells that story someone comes up to him to express sympathy for the animal. He tells them he made that story up, and the listener gets pretty angry. What I love about this is story is that he always calls the angry listener a "dumb cooze" for not getting it. It goes back to the war veterans who can't stop telling and retelling war stories. It's not that they don't know they've already told the story it's that they don't know how to tell the story in a way that makes the listener feel the way the incident made them feel. So they keep retelling it trying to make people understand. O'Brien's water buffalo story, the feeling of killing off the animal piece by piece represents how they felt as soldiers; horrified that they had to kill, terrified yet simultaneously resigned to being killed. Complex emotions indeed.