The Things They Carried: Field Trip Summary & Analysis

A few months after Tim O'Brien finished writing "In the Field" he brings his daughter, Kathleen, with him to Vietnam to visit the field where Kiowa died. He's looking for "forgiveness or personal grace or whatever else the land might offer."

The field is not as O'Brien remembers it: smaller, not as scary, and mostly dry. He thinks the place is peaceful now. He sees two farmers along the river repairing the same dike Kiowa's body had rested on after five men pulled him out of the muck. A farmer looks up at O'Brien, but then goes back to work. O'Brien feels amazed by the fact that twenty years have passed.

Kathleen is in a jeep with a government interpreter. O'Brien doesn't think either knows why he insisted on making the two-hour journey from Quang Ngai City in the August heat to that particular field. Kathleen gets out of the car and tells O'Brien she thinks the field smells terrible. O'Brien agrees. She asks if they can leave, and he promises they will soon.

O'Brien conceived of the trip as a birthday present for Kathleen, who had just turned ten. He wanted to show her the world and some of his history. One morning Kathleen asked O'Brien what the purpose of the war had been, and why everyone had been so angry. O'Brien says people weren't mad, "some people wanted one thing, other people wanted another thing." Kathleen asks what O'Brien wanted and he says, "To stay alive." She continues by asking why O'Brien was in Vietnam, and he says he didn't have a choice. She still questions why, and he resolved, "it's a mystery." Kathleen was quiet the rest of the day, but that night she approached O'Brien and accused him of being weird—how some "dumb thing happens a long time ago and you can't ever forget it." O'Brien asks if that's a bad thing, and she says it isn't—it's just weird.

O'Brien wonders, as he looks out over the field, whether they made a mistake and went to the wrong place because it seems too calm and quiet. He tries to remember Kiowa's face. He thought of how the field had swallowed Kiowa as well as O'Brien's pride, his ability to believe in himself as a courageous, dignified man. Even though he thought of the field that way, O'Brien couldn't find emotion to accompany it, and blamed his inability to feel on the conditions of the night Kiowa died. O'Brien thinks of how he's struggled to show empathy and passion throughout his life and how he has blamed the field and what happened there for this emotional block.

O'Brien wanders along the river and watches the two farmers' work, takes more photos, and waves. Kathleen asks if they can leave, and he promises they will soon. O'Brien retrieves a bundle from the back of the car that he'd brought from home. Kathleen asks what it is, but he doesn't say—so she follows him out of the jeep while he walks back to the field. O'Brien walks to a point where the field merges into shallow water. O'Brien tells Kathleen he's going for a swim. She watches O'Brien unwrap the bundle, and Kiowa's old moccasins are inside.

O'Brien strips down to his underwear and wades in. Kathleen says what O'Brien is doing is stupid. O'Brien got to where the water reached his knees and decided that was where Mitchell Sanders found Kiowa's rucksack. O'Brien sits into the muck and then wedges the moccasins into the bottom of the marsh. He tries to think of something to say, but can't. He eventually says, "Well…There it is." He wanted to confess to Kiowa how great of a friend he'd been.

O'Brien thinks that maybe he went under with Kiowa, and after twenty years he's getting closer to emerging. One of the old farmers is watching O'Brien, and O'Brien stares back. O'Brien "felt something go shut in [his] heart while something else swung open." He wondered whether the old farmer would come over to exchange war stories, but he goes back to work after saying something to the other working farmer. He lifts his shovel up over his head "grimly, like a flag." O'Brien gets out of the water.

Kathleen says her father looks like a mess, and threatens to tell O'Brien's wife. O'Brien agrees, and says Kathleen shouldn't tell her mother what he did. Kathleen looks back over the field when they get to the car. She asks if the old farmer is mad at O'Brien. O'Brien says he hopes not. Kathleen says the old farmer looks mad, but O'Brien assures her he's not. "All that's finished."