Beyond His Reach

“They’d found him at the bottom of an irrigation ditch, badly burned, flies in his mouth and eyes. The boy wore black shorts and sandals. At the time of his death he had been carrying a pouch of rice, rifle, and three magazines of ammunition.” (O’Brien 363)

Lieutenant Jimmy Cross in “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien is a platoon leader in the Vietnam War; a man who carries the lives of his men. This responsibility, this weight is upon him along with the weight of everything else they carry. The physical weights; the weapons, food, clothing, bug-repellent, medication, water and everything else mean nearly nothing to them compared to the emotional weights of fear, responsibility, guilt, violence, death and loss.

For Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, the war and his powerlessness against the things that weigh so heavily upon his soul, cause him to flee into a phantom love, which offers freedom and hope. His true responsibilities as their platoon leader are compromised; ultimately leading to Ted Lavender’s death. Cross blames himself for Lavender’s death and sheds off the humanity he sought in his pretend love, to protect the lives of his men.

The escapism Cross chooses is understandable when the extreme conditions are considered. In his choosing to accept the responsibility for the physical lives of his men as more important than his own hope and humanity, Cross essentially chooses to react in a way that could cost him his own emotional life.

War brings with it many drastic and psychologically twisting truths. These truths are not experienced by most people perpetually; Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and his men live these truths intimately; death and fear. Death is a very real possibility for these men, so real that they speak about it in ways “as if to encyst and destroy the reality of death itself.” (O’Brien 368) They joke about death, calling it by different names and eventually becoming numb to the idea. At one point a Vietcong child-soldier is dead in a ditch; one of...