The Things They Carried: The Lives of the Dead Summary & Analysis

O'Brien says stories can save us. As a forty-three year old writer, he continues to dream about people who have died as still being alive, like: Linda, Ted Lavender, Kiowa, Curt Lemon, the young man he killed, an old man beside a pigpen, and other bodies he lifted into a truck. While they're dead in reality, in a story the dead can return to the world for a while.

O'Brien starts with a nameless body. In 1969 the platoon came under fire and Lieutenant Jimmy Cross radioed in an air strike, and the platoon watched the village burn to the ground. The village was deserted except for one dead, old man lying near a pigpen. Dave Jensen shook the dead man's hand. The other soldiers followed suit. It was O'Brien's fourth day in the war. He felt sick. Jensen urged O'Brien to go shake the dead man's hand, but O'Brien kept refusing. He felt sick for the rest of the day, not so much from seeing the body but the "act of greeting the dead." He recalls how the men propped the man up against a fence, crossed his legs, and talked to him. In the afternoon, Kiowa approached O'Brien and told O'Brien he did a good thing by not shaking the dead man's hand: "it took guts." O'Brien said it had nothing to do with courage he was just scared, but Kiowa says they're the same thing. Kiowa says that was probably O'Brien's first time seeing a dead body. O'Brien shakes his head, because he'd spent the day thinking of Linda.

O'Brien and Linda were both nine and they loved each other. As O'Brien looks back it can be tempting to try to dismiss it as childish, but he thinks it was true, mature love. In the spring of 1956, O'Brien took her out on the first date of his life. O'Brien's father drove them. She was wearing a new red cap, a stocking cap, which seemed stylish and sophisticated to O'Brien. It had a white tassel at the too-long tip. O'Brien wanted to compliment her and said something nice about her cap. Linda smiled, but O'Brien's mother turned to him from the front passenger seat and gave him a troubling look. They got to the movie theater and started looking at the concessions. They avoided eye contact, which O'Brien says is how they knew they were in love—"it was pure knowing," though neither would have thought to use the word love.

Ted Lavender took around five tranquilizers every morning, and it made his eyes peaceful. Even when they were in stressful situations, the drugs would give Lavender a dreamy expression. Someone would ask him how the war was going that day, and Lavender would smile and say it was, "Mellow—a nice smooth war today." In April, he died after being shot in the head. O'Brien, Kiowa, and others were responsible for preparing Lavender's body for the chopper. After collecting his personal effects and attaching them to him in a bag, Mitchell Sanders asked Lavender how the war was today. Someone said, "Mellow." Sanders kept egging the conversation on, and O'Brien said they could almost hear Lavender talking back. He says that's the function of a story: the bodies are alive and the dead speak again.

O'Brien can still see Linda's silhouette in the theater. They saw The Man Who Never Was, whose protagonist was a corpse. It was a WWII film where the Allies dress up a body as an officer to fool the Nazis and it works. O'Brien remembers looking at Linda and thinking it was too grotesque for her, but she seemed to be smiling and O'Brien couldn't understand why. O'Brien had to cover his eyes a few times, and he hated to think of the heavy thump of the body hitting the water. He was relieved when the film was over.

In the next few weeks, Linda wore her new cap to school every day, never taking it off. She started to get teased by a boy named Nick Veenhof. He kept trying to sneak up to her and yank off her cap on the playground. O'Brien wanted to do something but it wasn't possible: "I had my reputation to think about. I had my pride." And Nick Veenhof was a problem. So O'Brien watched Linda deal with Veenhof and hold her cap close to her head. She smiled in Veenhof's direction "as if none of it really mattered."

It mattered to O'Brien then and it still does, though. He regrets not intervening, and doesn't think he had any excuse not to. These decisions don't get easier as you age, and he reckons it would have been helpful to have displayed some bravery as a kid when he was faced with even harder choices in Vietnam.

One afternoon in the spring the class was taking a spelling test and halfway through Veenhof raised his hand to use the pencil sharpener. The teacher allowed him to get up, but told him to be quick. As he returned to his seat, he didn't go the straightforward way, but headed for Linda's desk. When he was passing her desk, he grabbed the tassel and took off her cap. Linda didn't move and O'Brien thinks someone must have laughed. He remembers how she wasn't completely bald, there was a big bandage at the back of her head covering stitches, and then gauze taped to her left ear. Veenhof stepped back, still smiling, but "the smile was doing strange things." Linda kept staring ahead wordlessly, until she turned and looked at O'Brien for a moment. He felt that they had an entire conversation in the moment: "Well? she was saying, and I was saying, "Sure, okay." Later, Linda cried and the teacher helped her put her cap on again. After school, O'Brien and Veenhof walked Linda home.

O'Brien says it's 1990 as he writes this and he's forty-three. Looking at photographs of himself in 1956 he sees the ways he hasn't changed: then Timmy, now Tim. He doesn't let his clothes fool him, he knows the eyes are the same and behind them is something unchanging about himself because "the human life is all one thing:" a kid, a soldier, a writer. As a writer, now, O'Brien wants to save Linda's life, not her body.

Linda died when she was nine years old from a brain tumor. In a story, though, O'Brien can have her soul and bring the parts of her back that are permanent. O'Brien notes that he knew she was ill and perhaps even dying, but because he loved her so much he couldn't believe it. On a September afternoon on the playground Nick Veenhof approached O'Brien and told him he just learned that Linda had died. O'Brien walked home from school without telling anyone.

He lay down on the sofa and tried to imagine what it was like to be dead. He whispered her name over and over, and eventually he "willed her alive." He could see her walking down Main Street wearing a pink dress and she had grown back all of her hair. Then O'Brien started to cry and Linda approached him, sitting on the curb on Main Street, and asked why he was upset. He told her she was dead. Linda nodded and smiled in a secretive way, like she knew things no one else could, and she touched O'Brien's wrist and said, "Timmy, stop crying. It doesn't matter."

In Vietnam there were ways the soldiers had of making the dead not seem so dead, like shaking their hands. By acting and joking they could pretend that it wasn't as grave and final as it was. Linguistically, the dead were transformed into waste. When someone was killed, it wasn't a body but waste. The words make a big difference in coping with death. If you take away the human element, it doesn't matter as much. VC nurse fried by napalm: crispy critter. Vietnamese baby: roasted peanut.

The day after Linda died in September, O'Brien asked his father to take him to the funeral home so he could see her. Once they parked, his father told him if O'Brien was upset at all they could leave as fast as he wanted. When O'Brien saw her he thought there had been a mistake because the girl in the casket wasn't Linda. She resembled Linda in a way, but the body was bloated while Linda had always been thin. O'Brien wondered if someone had made a mistake in preparing her body. He looked at his father, hoping Linda would jump out from behind a curtain and say it was all a big joke. He pretended she was sleeping, though she didn't look like she was—"She looked dead."

After Ted Lavender died there were more bodies. When Curt Lemon died O'Brien climbed a tree and retrieved the parts of him that were left. O'Brien saw Kiowa sink into the shit-field. In July O'Brien was assigned to a policing detail where he dealt with twenty-seven bodies altogether in one day. For three hours he and five other men carried the bodies down a mountain to a clearing next to a dirt road. A truck came and they loaded it up with bodies in two man teams. Mitchell Sanders took feet and O'Brien took arms. All of the dead had expired for more than a day, they were bloated, smelly, and made burping sounds when they hit the truck bed. Mitchell Sanders said he just realized that "death sucks."

While O'Brien lay in bed at night as a kid, he would make up stories to bring Linda back while he was sleeping. He would picture a birthday party and cake, and then he would be asleep and Linda would show up and they wouldn't talk much in the dream because they were shy. Then O'Brien would walk her home and they would sit on the front steps. She said things like: "Once you're alive…you can't ever be dead." "Do I look dead?" O'Brien thinks it was a product of willpower and faith, which is how stories are created.

As a kid, though, O'Brien thought it was a miracle to be able to see Linda whenever he willed it, and he thought they had a way to secretly meet up. He started going to sleep really early, to the point that it concerned his mother. He didn't tell her what he was doing, because he was embarrassed but also because he thought it would make Linda go away. He knew she was dead, but he was using the magic of stories to keep her alive. In one dream they went ice-skating and he asked her what it was like being dead, and she said, "Do I look dead?" O'Brien said she didn't. She was quiet, but then said at that moment she wasn't dead, but when she was it was like being in a book no one was reading. She said it wasn't that bad: "when you're dead, you just have to be yourself."

It's 1990 and O'Brien is forty-three and he still dreams of Linda the same way he did when he was nine. She has a new identity now. He feels as though he can still see her as if through an opaque ice, like glancing into another world where there aren't brain tumors, funeral homes, or bodies. He can see Kiowa, Ted Lavender, and Curt Lemon. Every once in a while he can see himself ice skating with Linda. He's Timmy, and he's happy, young, and immortal. He slides over the surface of his history. When he leaps, he lands thirty years later "as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story."