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Live. Laugh. Love. The classic wall decoration that over half of suburban mothers hang up somewhere in their house in hopes that their 16-year-old daughter will stop texting her friends and spend some time with the family. This horribly cliché sign is not just indicative of the poor taste of the masses, it also points to a solution to a problem that is a staple of life for everyone ever, stress. Stress is an inevitability in life, and along with it comes the need to deal with said stress. Some use simple signs like the aforementioned one. Other people use quotes from inspiring celebrities like Bruce Lee Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one. Everyone needs a way to deal with whatever stressors they encounter in their life. But not everyones stress is equal. Some people have to overcome the stress of war. Tim OBrien explores the ways men worked to overcome this stress in the Vietnam War in his short story The Things They Carried, a story about a unit of soldiers and their lives in Vietnam. The story explores this theme in depth, aided by the fact that OBrien was a foot soldier in Vietnam himself. In The Things They Carried, OBrien argues that coping mechanisms are necessary to survive the extreme stress of war. He emphasizes that due to the unyielding weight of this specific kind of stress, everyones methods of managing the stress may be otherwise immoral or abnormal in other situations.
War is not a normal experience in any way. Everyday life may pose challenges; however, these challenges pale in comparison to the trials of war. Normal challenges may strain a person physically, emotionally, or mentally. In war, ones physical, emotional, and mental health are all strained to the absolute limit. This is in no small part due to the higher probability of death daily. Tim OBrien highlights this when he says that the soldiers carried their own lives. The pressures were enormous. If this pressure is not enough, some men, like Lieutenant Cross, carried the lives of his men (OBrien. 490). To carry a life, day in, and day out, is an enormous weight that is beyond the scope of those who have not experienced it. Very few people, if any, have to bear the burden of a life every day. People may be responsible for the well-being, entertainment, or financial security of others, but these soldiers are in a unique position to consistently be responsible for keeping themselves alive while someone else is actively trying to kill them. On top of this, they are never quite sure when this will happen. Most of their time is spent marching or waiting, not in action. But there is still the ever-present threat that a Viet Cong soldier will be hiding in a hidden tunnel, waiting to ambush an unfocused American walking through the jungle. The pressure of war is immeasurable. OBrien is supported by accounts of Vietnam veterans. For example, Mark Black, a soldier who avidly wrote to his family throughout the war told his family that they just cant imagine what the war is like over here. It is hell at times ( Mark Ryan Black Collection& ). The amount of stress that soldiers had to endure in Vietnam is extraordinary, and as a result, the way that they cope with this stress must be equally remarkable. Understanding this is essential to understanding The Things They Carried and OBriens message about coping because the characters circumstances foster a need for unique methods of surviving the strain that war puts on a person. The horrors of war may not justify the actions some take while fighting, but they certainly support the idea that those who fight need, not simply want, to cope in any way they can.
Each person is different, so each person manages extreme stress differently; however, war forces all participants to share in one method of survival, dehumanization. Dehumanizing the enemy is necessary because no sane individual can look another person in the eye, think about their enemys family, friends, and life outside of the war, and still be able to pull the trigger. The method of dehumanization is best exemplified by Norman Bowker who is described as a very gentle person. Bowker carries a thumb that had been presented to him as a gift by Mitchell Sanders&It had been cut from a VC corpse, a boy of fifteen or sixteen (OBrien. 489). Carrying the severed thumb of a dead boy is not indicative of a gentle person. OBrien intentionally uses this contrast to highlight his point. The trauma of war is too much to handle normally. The pressure is so great that even a benign man like Norman Bowker must cope with the harsh reality of war by making his enemy inhuman. Bowker goes so far as to turn his enemy into a literal object, a token that he carries around with him. The body part of a boy becomes no more than memorabilia. Although cutting off thumbs may not have been a universal experience in Vietnam or war in general, dehumanization is commonplace. Michael Terry, a Vietnam veteran who witnessed the My Lai massacre, a mass killing of a village without mercy or reasoning, recounted that when in Vietnam a lot of guys feel that they (the South Vietnamese civilians) aren’t human beings… we just treated them like animals’ (Miraldi). An atrocity like My Lai is never permissible; however, it is not the result of a group of wicked men going to war seeking blood. Long before the men in C Platoon, the platoon that committed the crimes at My Lai, ever reached My Lai, they had to kill many other human beings. To cope with this, as Terry says, the men had to consider the other side as less than human. Like Bowker, many men reduced the other side to no more than objects, or in this case animals. This coping method may have clear downsides, but the morality of dehumanization is different in war.
Another method that is used to cope with the horrors of war is to escape and return home inside of ones head. This practice was commonplace among troops in Vietnam. As Vietnam veteran and writer Martin Naparsteck puts it, leaving Vietnam was like returning to the World we often referred to as the United States (Naparsteck). This means that many believed Vietnam was not a place on this planet, but rather a place outside of reality. Men would separate their lives into different parts, and only home was reality. This method is exemplified by Lieutenant Jimmy Cross. Cross is in love with a girl named Martha, whom he had been on one date with before being deployed to Vietnam, and sends him letters on occasion. At night, Cross spends the last hour of light pretending while reading Marthas letters. He imagines romantic camping trips and wonders if Martha [is] a virgin (OBrien. 484). For Lt. Cross, Martha is an escape from war. He admits to spending a large portion of his time thinking or dreaming about her, at least once every night before he sleeps. This is not abnormal; except he only went on one date with her and openly admits that the letters she writes are not love letters (OBrien. 484). Cross obsesses over a girl he has a very thin connection to, not because he is a psychotic stalker, but to escape from the reality he has been thrown into. When Cross thinks about Martha, he is no longer an officer in Vietnam; he is just a guy falling in love with a girl, plain and simple. It becomes even more apparent that Martha is an escape that Cross uses to cope when Lee Strunk, his subordinate, is sent down into a tunnel to check if any Vietcong is inside. When Strunk some time passes and Strunk still hasnt come back out, Cross without willing it, starts thinking about Martha (OBrien. 488). This highlights the fact that Martha is a coping strategy because when a major stressor arises, Cross mind immediately and unintentionally drifts to Martha. His friend, whom he is responsible for as an officer, may be in danger, but Cross can only think about a woman half a world away with no evident romantic interest in him. Is this because Cross is an uncaring, disloyal superior to his men? No, he simply needs to flee from the hell he is living in. Cross himself recognizes the fact that he is using Martha to manage the stress of war, but not before it costs the life of one of his men. After Ted Lavender is killed, Lt. Cross burns the letters from Martha, and thinks to himself that Vietnam is not Mount Sebastian, it [is] another world&a place where men died because of carelessness and gross stupidity (OBrien. 494). Cross puts the weight of Lavenders death on his shoulders, and in doing so, acknowledges that Vietnam is a hellscape. In addition, Cross recognizes that when thinking about Martha, he leaves his current world and travels back home. He copes with the daily hardships by simply going to his happy place.
A common, but frowned upon, method of coping in normal life is to escape through drugs. There is a plethora of choices, from the less-scorned alcohol to hard drugs like heroin and methamphetamines. Ted Lavender is one such person. OBrien describes what Lavender carries, including six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity (OBrien. 485). Lavenders drug use is a clear hindrance to his job. Drugs, barring those that are specifically designed to, dull the senses and negatively impact reaction time. A soldier typically must be on high alert, able to detect and react to trouble within a split second. Lavenders drug use slows down this process; however, none of his fellow soldiers criticize or report him for the misconduct. Lavenders comrades understand that the drugs are how he needs to cope. He is not dismissing his job or his life, instead, to survive mentally, drugs are mandatory. OBrien recognizes the severity of the need, going so far as to call his drugs a necessity. Lavenders coping mechanism is a necessity, a fact that is highlighted by statistics of the Vietnam War. According to a study taken by the Department of Defense, 51 percent of soldiers in Vietnam had smoked marijuana, 31 percent had taken psychedelics, and 28 percent had taken hard drugs. There is inevitably some overlap in this data; however, it shows that drugs were commonly used in the Vietnam War. If this evidence is not convincing enough to argue that most soldiers used drugs to cope, a study published in the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse found that 95% of those who were addicted to narcotics in Vietnam have not become readdicted (M Duncan). Soldiers drug use ended once they returned home, to a safer, less extreme environment, those who got clean, stayed clean. War is what fostered their addiction because it forced them to deal with things well beyond the average persons emotional range. They may have acknowledged the questionable morality of putting harmful drugs in their body, but their circumstances forced their hand. Once their circumstances changed and their stress was greatly reduced, they had a different perspective on what was previously a normal part of their life.
War is horrible, degrading, traumatizing, and boring. Nothing else in the world is like it. The emotions experienced in this unique situation are uniquely strong, amplified by the chaos ensuing around each man. Stress is no exception. The mental, emotional, and physical turmoil of war cannot be compared to the stress of any other situation. Despite this, stress, no matter how significant, is still stress, and it is not something that can be ignored. Stress demands to be addressed but neglects to say how it should be addressed. As a result, it is up to the individual to deal with it in their way. This can be in the form of stress eating, lashing out, meditation, or any number of methods. These methods are normal, and they work for normal stress. The stress in war is not normal. Consequently, the strategies men use to cope with stress in war must be equally as abnormal as their circumstances. From completely separating oneself from the war to making the enemy into a lesser animal to using drugs, coping mechanisms in war are extreme. But as Tim OBrien argues in The Things They Carried, the monstrous stress of war forces people who may otherwise be moral and normal to adopt coping methods that are considered abnormal or immoral in the eyes of the world.
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