The Things They Carried: On the Rainy River Summary & Analysis

O'Brien says the story he is about to tell is one he has never told to anyone out of embarrassment for himself and his family. He's lived with the shame for over twenty years. He hopes that by writing it, he'll alleviate some of that shame.

O'Brien says that he's sure all of us would like to think that there's a reserve within us ready for "a moral emergency" that will allow us to be heroes. He admits he used to think that was the case in the summer of 1968.

A month after O'Brien graduated from Macalester College in June of 1968 he was drafted to fight in Vietnam. He says he hated the war, even though he was twenty-one and politically naïve. America was divided on all of the issues, and the only agreement was "moral confusion." It was, and still is, his view that "you don't make war without knowing why." There needs to be a reason when people are going to die.

The draft notice came on June 17, 1968. O'Brien read the first few lines of the letter and remembers thinking he was too good, too compassionate, to be drafted. He had a full-ride scholarship to go to Harvard for graduate school. He believed someone had made a mistake. He hated camping, blood made him nauseous, he didn't know anything about guns. He was a liberal, and wondered why they weren't drafting some right-wing country-boy, or LBJ's daughters, or General Westmoreland's family. He thought there should be a law that if you support a war, you have to sacrifice your own blood and you have to bring the whole family.

He worked that summer in a meat packing plant in his hometown of Worthington, Minnesota on an assembly line taking out blood clots from dead pigs' necks. He couldn't get dates that summer. He felt isolated. He kept the draft notice in his wallet.

At night, O'Brien would borrow his father's car and go on drives. He felt like he was paralyzed and he had run out of options. Just disagreeing with the war was not enough to be exempt from the draft. He believed there were times when a nation was justified in going to war, against figures like Hitler, and he would have gone to war willingly.

In mid-July O'Brien starts to seriously consider fleeing to Canada, only a few hundred miles north. Initially, the idea seemed like a vague prospect, but as his options ran out he could imagine doing it. He was afraid of leaving his entire life, losing his parents' respect. He was afraid of being criminally prosecuted. He was afraid of being ridiculed. His hometown was conservative and he imagined everyone talking about how he had been the one that fled. O'Brien blames his hometown for their ignorant support of the war, which is sending him to Vietnam.

Finally, O'Brien cracks—and this is the part of the story he's never told before. He leaves work one morning, drives home to his parents' empty house, and writes a short note to his parents. He can't remember what he wrote. He drives North towards Canada. He spends the first night in his car behind a closed gas station a half-mile from the border. When he wakes, he goes west along the Rainy River, which separates Canada and Minnesota.

O'Brien looks for a place to lie low for a couple of days and settles on the Tip Top Lodge. There he meets Elroy Berdahl, the owner, a man O'Brien claims is the "hero of his life." He gave O'Brien what he needed without asking questions and let him stay for six days. O'Brien says he hopes this story is a small way of saying thank you, because he never knew how to say thank you then. O'Brien was certain that Elroy knew why he was there.

For six days it was just the two of them in the entire Lodge because tourist season was over. They spent all their time together: hiking, working, playing Scrabble. O'Brien remembers Elroy's deliberate silence—he never asked questions about why O'Brien was there even though it was 1968 and young men all over the country were burning draft cards.

O'Brien admits he can't remember most of the six days that he spent at the Tip Top Lodge. He helped Elroy prepare the Lodge for winter. One morning Elroy showed him how to split firewood and they spent hours doing that in silence. During this Elroy looked as though he was close to asking O'Brien a question, but he restrained himself. O'Brien was ashamed to be at the Lodge, ashamed of his conscience, and ashamed "to be doing the right thing."

One night at dinner the subject of payment comes up. Elroy cuts down the price, but then factors in the work O'Brien did around the lodge and concludes that he actually owes O'Brien $115s. Then he tries to give O'Brien $200. O'Brien refuses the money, but in the morning the money is in an envelope tacked to O'Brien's door saying "Emergency Fund."

On O'Brien's last and sixth day with Elroy they go out fishing on the Rainy River. Elroy turns the boat directly north and they cross into Canadian waters. O'Brien felt a tightness in his chest when he could see the shore. Canada had become real. Elroy turned off the engine and didn't say a word and started fishing. O'Brien thought then that Elroy must have planned this, though he can't ever know for sure.

They were floating twenty yards from Canadian land. O'Brien could have jumped and swam for his life. But he felt a "terrible squeezing pressure" in his chest, and he writes that he wants the reader to feel it too, and asks the reader, what would you have done? O'Brien is ashamed of this event in his life because he began to cry, but also because he experienced a "moral freeze."

O'Brien realizes that Canada has always been a "pitiful fantasy." With the land in sight, he knew that he was going to do what he should. He would not swim to shore. O'Brien sees his life history flash before his eyes and sees, in a kind of hallucination, people he knew and would know in the future, like his family, Linda, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, his wife, his unborn daughter, his two sons, and the young man he killed outside My Khe. O'Brien tries to jump into the water, but can't. In his vision he can hear people calling him a traitor. He says it wasn't morals that kept him in the boat, it was just embarrassment. It was then he knew he was going to war, where he would kill and potentially die, because he was too embarrassed not to. Elroy comments that the fish aren't biting, and turns the boat around.

O'Brien can't recall telling Elroy goodbye. O'Brien told Elroy he would be leaving, and Elroy nodded like he knew. Later in the morning, Elroy disappeared. O'Brien went inside to wait, but he felt certain that Elroy wouldn't come back. O'Brien left the envelope of money on the counter, got in his car, and drove home. O'Brien remembers that the day he drove home it was cloudy. He recognized the names of towns he passed through, then it was forests and prairie and then Vietnam, where he was a soldier. Then he was home. He says though he survived "it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war."