To carry something was to hump it, as when Lieutenant Jimmy Cross humped
his love for Martha up the hills and through the swamps. In its intransitive
form, to hump meant to walk, or to march, but it implied burdens far beyond the
intransitive.
The love that Cross carried for
Martha weighed him down, he could not concentrate on the war and his duties
because she clouded his thoughts. Cross believed that “Ted Lavender was dead
because he loved (Martha) so much and could not stop thinking about her.” We
later learn in Love, that Cross said “he’d
never forgiven himself for Lavender’s death. It was something that would never go
away, he said quietly, and I nodded and told him I felt the same about certain
things… forget the coffee and switch to gin.” In these lines, it is implied
that both Cross and O’Brien have PTSD. Certain memories of the war cannot
escape them and they turn to alcohol to self-medicate. Similarly, in The Things They Carried, O’Brien talks
of the soldiers as actors, “when someone died, it wasn’t quite dying, because in a curious way
it seemed scripted, and because they had their lines mostly memorized, irony
mixed with tragedy.” Soldiers need to find ways to escape and distance themselves
from the reality of war in order to go on with their lives. Many elements of
these stories align with O’Brien’s outlines of writing a true war story;
it is obscene and embarrassing at points. For instance, Norman Bowker carrying
thumb that was given to him as a gift, and Ted Lavender being shot in the head “on
his way back from peeing.” Although the reader cannot be certain whether these
were true events, if we take O’Brien’s guidelines as fact, then they may well
be true stories.
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