Second First Blog Post. We're Carrying Things Now.

Firstly, I like this book way better than the first one. TSAR was awful, and The Things They Carried actually has a point. At the beginning, O'Brien lists the thing which were literally carried by soldiers in Vietnam such as "a compass, maps, code books, binoculars, and a .45-caliber pistol that weighed 2.9 pounds fully loaded" (page 5). O'Brien continues to list these literal burdens and then moves to emotional ones. At the end of the chapter, it seemed to me that the weights of the literal items connected somehow to the "weights" of the emotional ones. They seem to be a kind of indirect metaphor. "20 pounds of ammunition" (6) is equal to the emotional weight of a dead comrade or a girlfriend back home. It isn't said directly, but the heaviest equipment seems to correlate with the biggest emotional issues.