Free Essay About The Things They Carried

War is evil. It makes people do and see things that make it difficult for them to live with themselves. Spin shows how soldiers deal with the gruesome realities they were made to face. The soldiers make light of a little boy with one leg and of traversing a mine-riddled field. Not because they are bad people with no feelings, but because seeing humor or beauty in tragedy helps them cope. They remember and share war stories. Not because they want to relive the horror but because they want to relieve the horror. They search for normality in the unimaginable and turn the memory into something bearable.
The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong tells the story of how a medic named Mark Fossie brings his grammar school sweetheart, Mary Anne Bell, to Vietnam. She comes to Vietnam as a sweet, innocent girl wearing a pink sweater and culottes. She ends up becoming fascinated by the war and changes because of it. At the end, she is still described in her pink sweater and culottes but she is barefoot and wearing a necklace of human tongues. Unlike Fossie, Mary Anne is curios about Vietnam and soaks up the culture and adventure it offers. She ends up becoming part of the land and is lost forever –perhaps symbolizing how people lose a part of themselves to the savagery of war and are forever affected by it. Mary Anne just happened to be a more extreme example of this happening.
Speaking of Courage and Notes tells the story of what happens after the war, and the feeling of displacement soldiers encounter when they come back to their “normal” lives. Norman Bowker comes back and finds everything being normal and feels weird about it. It is as if the war never happened, but it did. While the soldiers were dying in a literal field of human waste, people were going about their normal lives –no one can relate to what the soldiers have gone through and for some, the displacement becomes unbearable.