Symbolism In The Objects They Carried

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried heavy equipment across the Vietnam terrain, but he also carried tokens of his previous life, which perhaps weighed more heavily on his person in an emotional sense. He has “love letters” and pictures from a girl named Martha. This is a girl he can not stop thinking about. He will vaguely order his men about, then continue daydreaming about Martha, the poetic, mysterious girl he was so in love with. This girl, however, does not return his passionate affection. Did really “love” her? Probably not. His love for her was an escape for him, a way to leave the war-torn country, the hideous sights that he had to encounter. She sent him a pebble that she found on the Jersey shore line, “precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated” (O’Brien 1039). This separate-but-together quality disturbed him slightly, because he questioned what this meant. He carried that emotional weight around with him, and often kept the pebble in his mouth, sucking on it’s saltiness. This was the case one when he was resting while one of his men was searching the inside of a tunnel. He was happily imagining both of them together, and he was imagining the pebble in his mouth was her tongue. “Vaguely, he was aware of how quiet the day was, the sullen paddies, yet he could not bring himself to worry about matters of security” (O’Brien 1041). If he wasn’t busy daydreaming, if he had been more alert, he would’ve been aware that something was wrong. He could’ve told his men to be cautious, to take cover. Instead, he allowed his men to talk and laugh loudly, for Ted Lavender to leave to urinate. As Lavender was returning, he was shot by sniper fire. This made him heavy with guilt, and he thought that “he had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war” (O’Brien 1044). He burned Martha’s letters and pictures and planned to dispose of the pebble, so no longer was he literally carrying mementos of her, but he also planned to dispose of the emotional mementos. He swore he was done with daydreaming, that he “would dispense with love” (O’Brien 1048). He intended to embrace the life of a lieutenant completely. Thus, by getting rid of the emotional and physical baggage of his previous life that he had carried, he absorbed only war, focused only on the war. This sacrifice he made to protect the lives of his men, to prevent carrying around more pain and regret.
Ted Lavender carried tranquilizers and dope around with him in addition to his standard equipment. He said repeatedly in the story that he did this because he was scared. It is interesting that the only character that died in this story is the man that carried around dope, was high all the time, and was so frightened. This could be O’Brien suggesting that Lavender, since he wasn’t carrying around a memento of his old life, instead carrying around a method to block out everything, was dead already. The men who carried around their past with them, they were holding on to something. They were remembering something other than the horrors of warfare. Lavender chose to forget it all. Perhaps this is why he was the character that was chosen to die, to symbolize that Lavender himself had, in a way, chosen death.
Kiowa carried two extra significant things from his life before the war: his illustrated New Testament, and his grandfather’s hunting hatchet. Though he carried around a bible, it seemed that he loved the smell of it more than the actual Scripture or Christianity. For example, when Lavender died, he wished he could feel remorse like Cross, but instead felt only relief that that he was alive, that he “liked the smell of the New Testament under his cheek, the leather and ink and paper and glue, whatever the chemicals were” (O’Brien 1045). This emphasis on the physical aspects of the bible, suggested that he didn’t really feel the spiritual aspect of the Scripture. He carried the hunting hatchet as a reminder of his people’s struggle against white people. This could be parallel with the Vietnamese struggle with the white people, that Kiowa was forced to be apart of.