The Storyline and Themes

Tim O Brien has written the most invigorating and enduring stories of the Vietnam war. These stories are in between the lines of being mundane and believable. Rat Kiley tends to exaggerate his stories. He tells his first assignment in the mountains of Chu Lai. He talks about how he was in an isolated area where he used to run an aid station with eight other men. They used to situate near the river named Song Tra Bong (Farrell, 2019).  This story was about Mary Anne and how she came into the country of Vietnam and blended with the people of the land.

In this story, the author shows a very poetic and theatrical version of Vietnam and shows the country to be affecting the foreigners and Americans who come to stay there. He shows a huge difference between the ancient and native world of the country and the practical world of Americans. Mary Anne Bell is completely enamored by the culture of Vietnam while her fiancé Mark ignores it. The main difference between the experiences and outlooks of the characters creates a world where the two different cultures are completely opposed to each other and are not compatible with each other. The author does not say that both the cultures can mingle together, he suggests that the characters have to choose only one cultural identity.

This story also shows a multidimensional aspect when it comes to women. Fossil thinks that if he brings Mary Anne to the camp, he and the other men will feel warmth and comfort from all the war and she will be oblivious to the surroundings. This absurd thought is immediately wiped away when Mary Anne is curious about the environment around her and she partakes in the works of the camp. She even fights in the ambushes. She is curious about the language, culture, and lifestyle of the people of Vietnam (Farrell, 2019). She finally becomes curious about the nature of war in the country. Even though he brought her comfort from the scenario of the war, she becomes a part of the war and the culture of the country.

Mary Anne becomes the entity of the culture of Vietnam. She enters the natural, ancient, and wild environment of the country and becomes mesmerized by the world which is completely different than her world. Her journey is similar to Kurtz’s in The Heart of Darkness. She too falls in love with the culture and traditions of Vietnam. She embraces the culture while the soldiers abhor it (Buchanan, 2019).

Mental and Physical Transformations due to War

The impact of war and the doomed war brings has been shown in this story. It is seen through the transformation of Mary Anne. She was originally a person who was kind, innocent, enthusiastic, and happy. After she entered the scenario of war, she changed into a person who was aggressive, compulsive, and brutal. The main theme of this story is the physical and mental transformations that happen due to war (Farrell and Tim O’Brien, 1946). 

This brutality of war and the dehumanization of people that happens in the warzone was seen through the dehumanizing of Mary Anne. She was graceful and poised before she came into the warzone. Her posture and demeanor started to change after she came into the country of Vietnam. She was ready to strike down her enemy. She did think back to the life she desired previously which had her married with children of her own.

This story shows the impact of the war which is shown through the life of the soldiers and of the woman named Mary Anne. She transforms from being innocent and kind to becoming harsh and aggressive. She starts talking about the war in a positive sense and she says that she feels free when she is fighting in the war. Even so, the author writes about Mary Anne’s appreciation of war as an addiction to drugs. It is as if she has been hypnotized by the addiction to violence just like people are addicted to drugs.

This story clearly shows how inhuman people can get due to the wars. How they can forget their priorities and get addicted to killing. This is the main theme of the story which is shown in a very theatrical manner. Several literary devices make this essence of dehumanization of people more apparent. The literary essence is seen through how the fictional narrator describes Mary Anne. For example, the character describes her as “she was dangerous. . . she was ready for the kill”. Even though the author has used many characters to describe her as a strong-willed woman and a good soldier, he also makes it clear that she is vocal and strong as well (O’brien and Cranston, 1990). The author also gives Mary Anne a very strong dialogue in the climax of the story where she says you’re in a place. . . where you don’t belong” (O’brien and Cranston, 1990).  the dialogues and the description of the ritualistic aspect shown at the end of the story describe how Mary Anne got addicted to the culture of Vietnam and she also transformed because of war. the war made her turn into a killing machine and made her inhuman which she appreciated. She was in a trance like a drug addict and she was drawn to violence (Owen, 2021). Everything, compassionate, kind, and selfless about her was drawn out due to the war. 

Dehumanization and the Impact of War

Therefore, war dehumanizes people and makes them do inhuman actions. The description of the ritual with human skulls and human body parts that Mary Anne took part in, showed how she was engulfed in the ancient culture of Vietnam. It also showed how she was drowned in the violence of war and brainwashed into appreciating war and death which was detrimental in the end. The only purpose of the army recruits was to become killing soldiers without any heart and soul so that they did not hesitate before they were killed. This inhuman training was a very devastating scenario for the whole human race. One war was changing the face of how humans reacted to each other. 

This picture is named war propaganda Leaflet 414 by Frances Baker. These propagandas were the ones that were followed by the army and the trainers. These were the brainwashing and the inhuman training which were given to the army recruits so that they did not think twice before killing someone. This aspect of making humans into inhuman robots was the main criterion in the Vietnam war (Reed-Wood, 2021).

This picture is a part of the OWI leaflets of the pacific war. These soldiers depicted in the picture are Japanese soldiers. In Japan, the knowledge of the unique cultural language and phrases of the Showa emperor had an extremely well thought out campaign. These leaflets were printed in a very short time so that the word could be given out about the Showa emperor accepting the surrender of Japan to Allied forces (Farrell and  O’Brien 1946). 

 This picture is the depiction of how the army in Vietnam was being trained. Asa the engagement of America started to grow in Vietnam, the number of deaths and casualties started to grow. The training of the new soldiers started to be induced with racism and hatred against the enemy who was known as Charlie (Smith,  2020). All Asians started to be known as “gooks” in the military camps and even in training sessions. Advanced training included the dehumanizing of the enemy which was the fulcrum of American military training. killing another human being is not accepted or executed by people from birth. It has to be taught. The instructors of the army and the marines were the ones who prepared the men to kill at a brutal level so that they could protect themselves. The dehumanization and the brutality of the individual were important traits for overcoming the instinct to not kill. These aspects were applied as soon as the recruited person started training (Jovi?, 2021).

Literary Devices Used in The Things They Carried

The above picture depicts the dehumanization of the army recruits who started as citizens and civilians with a heart. This picture shows the first person to be a farmer carrying a child. This proves that human was not born to be a killer and had a family, they loved nurturing. The next individual is an army recruit who is slowly being brainwashed into becoming a killer. The person is losing their humanity and their kindness (Jovi?, 2021). Their instinct for nurturing is slowly diminishing. Therefore, the second man is only a flesh and blood skeleton of a human being. The third picture shows a robotic man standing with a gun in hand rather than the baby he had before. This is the complete dehumanization and transformation of the person into a killing machine. This person now is depicted as a robot without anything human about him and he is just an instrument of the war.

The boot camp of the military during the Vietnam war was the hardest part of the training. Boot camp was designed to eradicate all aspects of civilian life. Sailors, soldiers, and marines were made to wear uniforms and were made to look the same, sound the same and look the same. Every second of the life of a trainee was predetermined and controlled. Physical and mental health was the least of the concerns for the officials. The whole purpose of the training was to transform the human into a military machine and a robot.

The enemy was considered an animal and they were to be eliminated. The idea of dehumanization has enabled the members of the privileged groups to morally disengage the disadvantaged group to suffer. This proves the intergroup aggression such as racism and colonization as well as genocide. This dehumanization was only done by the topmost people looking down on the others. The disadvantaged groups also dehumanize those who dominate them. Both the lesser privileged group and the privileged groups were dehumanized and only knew how to eliminate the enemy. Humans always had moral obligations and prohibitions against harming other people. At the same time, history has shown that humans have a very unique tendency to commit violence especially if it is related to group boundaries. Violence is the first thing that is sought after when it comes to training army recruits. This picture is the perfect depiction of that training. This picture shows how a human with sensitivity can be transformed into an inhuman robot and kill without mercy.

There are huge dangers of dehumanizing army recruits in the war. Militaries have always wanted to develop programs to enhance the performance of all their soldiers. There is concentration on the development of soldiers in terms of strength and manpower with complete deletion of mental stability. They are being trained like cattle and robots who will only listen to what they are commanded. The military regime and rules are injected like drugs into the minds of the soldiers to make them inhumane. They only remain human from the outside but not the inside.

This dehumanizing is continuing in terms of training army recruits for war. Even in the modern world, dehumanization goes hand in hand (Farrell,  2019).  War expects people to be inhuman and it does not care about life. The personnel who train the soldiers just want them to become instruments of destruction. War and dehumanization are the most accepted combination to the trainers of the soldiers because then the most amount of deaths will take place in terms of the enemy and the war will be “won”. The dehumanization of people and civilians due to war has continued to this present day. The war which is characterized by an immoral amount of death and violence as well as large-scale suffering is the very instrument of dehumanization. This dehumanization propagates and increases among the soldiers because it is the human tendency to respond to the feeling of being dehumanized by demining others.

References

Buchanan, D., 2019. Reporting Is Not a Holy Word: Tim O’Brien’s Edits in If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home and The Things They Carried. MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 65(4), pp.618-642.

Farrell, S., 2019. How to Revise a True War Story: Tim O’Brien’s Process of Textual Production.

Farrell, S., 2022. 25 Tim O’Brien (1946–). Handbook of the American Short Story, 15, p.477.

Jovi?, V., 2021. Refugees, torture, and dehumanization. Oxford Textbook of Migrant Psychiatry, p.351.

O’Brien, T., and Cranston, B., 1990. The things they carried (p. 233). London: Flamingo.

Owen, L., 2021. ‘A terrible war of defense’: examining the role of dehumanization in genocidal mobilization (Doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford).

Reed-Wood, L., 2021. “Makers of loyalty”: recruiting propaganda in the Civil War North. American Nineteenth Century History, 22(1), pp.1-25.

Smith, D.L., 2020. On inhumanity: Dehumanization and how to resist it. Oxford University Press.