field trip summary in the things they carried

The Things They Carried

By tim o'brien.

• The Things They Carried Summary

The Things They Carried is a collection of twenty-two stories, or chapters. All focus on the Alpha Company and the fate of its soldiers after they return home to America. A character named Tim O’Brien (same name as the author) narrates most of the stories.

In “The Things They Carried,” the Alpha Company is mobilized to fight in the Vietnam War. The soldiers carry goods necessary to their survival as well personal items. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carries letters and photos from a female friend named Martha , and spends most of his time mooning over her. The first casualty for the company is Ted Lavender , shot dead while relieving himself. Cross blames himself for the death because he thinks he was too busy thinking about Martha to properly take care of his troops. He burns her letters and photographs and decides to be a better leader.

In “Love,” Jimmy goes to visit the narrator, Tim O’Brien, in his home in Massachusetts after the war. Cross relates that he bumped into Martha after she got home, and that he still loves her although she doesn’t love him back. He has never forgiven himself for Lavender’s death, but pleads with O’Brien to portray him as a great leader if the writer ever writes about their experiences.

“Spin” is made up of a collection of recollections of the ordinary things soldiers do when they are at war, such as playing chess games. O’Brien compares the war to a Ping-Pong ball, saying that one can spin it in many different directions. He is now a 43-year-old writer who only writes war stories. His daughter thinks he should find a happier topic, but O’Brien keeps replaying the gruesome war scenes over and over in his mind.

In “On The Rainy River,” O’Brien describes the decision of whether or not to go to war after receiving his draft card. He had just graduated college and planned to go to Harvard for graduate school. He was split between the instinct to run, and the instinct to do what everyone expected: go to war. He took the car up to the Canadian border, and a friendly hotel owner rowed him along a river right up to Canada. In the end he couldn’t bring himself to jump out of the boat. He cried in the boat, paid Elroy for the room, and drove home. It is a hard story for O’Brien to tell, he writes, because it shows that he was a coward and that he made the wrong choice.

In “Enemies,” two members of the company, Lee Strunk and Dave Jensen , get into a fistfight over a missing penknife. Jensen wins the fight and breaks Strunk’s nose. Jensen borrows a pistol and uses it to break his own nose. Then he asks Strunk if they are “square.” Strunk says yes and laughs at his new friend -- because he was the one who had stolen Jensen’s knife in the first place. In “Friends,” Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk make a pact that if either were seriously injured or crippled, the other would find a way to kill him. In October Lee Strunk steps on a mortar and loses his leg as a result of the accident. He is terrified, because he thinks Jensen will kill him. Later the men find out that Strunk has died, which seems to relieve Jensen of a big burden.

In “How to Tell a True War Story,” Curt Lemon steps on a mortar and is killed. O’Brien has to go up into a tree to pick out his remains, and one of the other men makes a bad pun on “lemon tree,” similar to many other morbid jokes the soldiers make throughout the book After Lemon's death, Rat Kiley writes his sister a long letter to which she never responds. Rat dismisses her as a “dumb cooze.” O’Brien says this is a true story because such stories are unsentimental, seem too crazy to believe, or else never end. Another “true” story O’Brien tells is about a water buffalo the company tortured after Lemon died. It seems incomprehensible, so it must be true, he writes.

After Curt Lemon was killed, and O’Brien describes having a hard time mourning him in “The Dentist.” Lemon was a macho guy, but one day a dentist came in on a helicopter to check up on the men’s teeth. Lemon was so afraid that when it was his turn he passed out in the dentist’s chair. Then he was so ashamed that he woke up the dentist in the middle of the night, insisted that he had a toothache, and made the dentist remove a perfectly good tooth.

O’Brien retells a story that he first heard from Rat Kiley in “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong.” Before joining up with Alpha, Kiley was stationed at a medical detachment near the village of Tra Bong along with a special force called the Green Berets. A young man named Mark Fossie imported in his American girlfriend. Fossie got upset when she didn't return to their quarters one night. It turns out she wasn’t cheating on him, but was on ambush duty with the Green Berets. Later, Fossie finds her in the Green Beret encampment wearing a necklace made of human tongues. In the end, she becomes a killer and disappears into the mountains by herself.

Henry Dobbins keeps his girlfriends’ stockings wrapped around his neck for good luck, and credits them with the fact that he never gets shot. Then, in “Stockings,” his girlfriend says she wants to break up. He continues to wear the stockings around his neck all the same. In “Church,” the company sets up camp at a pagoda where a few monks still remain. The monks especially like Henry Dobbins, who talks about possibly joining the order and gives the monks some chocolate and peaches as a parting gift.

In “The Man I Killed,” Tim O’Brien surveys the man he killed, repeating the same details over and over: He has thin, arched eyebrows, like a woman; he is thin, with a concave chest, like a scholar. O’Brien imagines that the man was always afraid to go to war, was possibly in love, was possibly a scholar. Kiowa tries to get O’Brien to stop staring at the corpse, with no success.

In “Ambush” O’Brien’s nine-year-old daughter, Kathleen , asks her father if he has ever killed anyone. Of course not, O’Brien tells her; he thinks when she is a grown-up she will understand better. In “Style,” his company enters a burnt-down compound full of dead bodies, and the only living person they find is a young girl, dancing. Azar thinks she is performing some strange rite. Dobbins thinks she is dancing because she likes to dance.

In “Speaking of Courage,” Norman Bowker returns to his hometown after the war is over. His best friend is dead and his ex-girlfriend has married someone else, so he has no one to talk to about why he failed to get a Silver Star medal for courage. He imagines a conversation with his father about the subject; the reason he didn’t get the medal was that he let his comrade Kiowa die in a shit field after Kiowa was shot. Bowker stops for a burger, drives around his hometown lake, and stops to admire the sunset. In 1975, writes O’Brien in “Notes,” he received a letter from Bowker telling the story that he retells in “Speaking of Courage.” O’Brien wants to emphasize that he made up the part about Bowker failing to save Kiowa and worrying about why he didn’t get the Silver Star. The letter shook O’Brien, who had congratulated himself on adjusting so well, transitioning straight from Vietnam to Harvard. In 1978, Bowker hanged himself.

All 18 soldiers in the company search for Kiowa’s body in the shit field in “In the Field.” Bowker eventually locates Kiowa’s body. Cross mentally rehearses different letters he might write to Kiowa’s father; perhaps he will take responsibility for the death, perhaps not. Instead of writing the letter to Kiowa’s father, he decides, he’ll play golf. In “Good Form,” O’Brien, the 43-year-old writer/narrator, says that “story truth”, i.e. what happens in the story, is more important than “happening truth,” i.e. what happened in reality. A few months after writing “In the Field,” O’Brien returns to Vietnam with his daughter, Kathleen, who is ten. In “Field Trip,” she doesn’t understand what the war was about, nor why her father insists on traveling to a funny-smelling place (the shit field). O’Brien buries a pair of Kiowa’s moccasins where his friend died, and tries to say goodbye.

O’Brien blames Bobby Jorgenson , a young medic who replaced Rat Kiley with the company, for almost letting him die of shock after getting shot. In “The Ghost Soldiers,” O’Brien enlists Azar’s help to get revenge on Jorgenson. They make noises outside Jorgenson’s encampment to make him think he is being attacked. Jorgenson is terrified, but then he figures out it's just O’Brien, and the two say they are “even.” “Night Life” is the account, culled secondhand from another soldier, of how Rat Kiley went beserk and had to leave the company. The strain of the war was too much for him and he shot himself in the foot to be discharged from the army.

In “The Lives of the Dead” O’Brien writes that the purpose of stories is to save lives. He had been in love with a nine-year-old, Linda , when he was also nine. They went on a date, and then she died of a brain tumor. Afterwards, he made dates with her in his dreams, and they went ice-skating together. The purpose of stories, writes O’Brien, is to make people like Linda or the soldiers killed in Vietnam live again.

The Things They Carried Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Things They Carried is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

is this a war story, per se? if so who is the main character, and why?

This particular story is more about sexual longing than war. Mark Fossie seems to be the main character who wants to import his girlfriend.

What is it that Jimmy cross carries with him? What do they represent?

Jimmy always carries letters from Martha. His identity and hopes for the future are part of those letters.

How does Tim kill his first enemy

I think with a grenade.

Study Guide for The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried study guide contains a biography of Tim O'Brien, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Things They Carried
• Character List

Essays for The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.

• Rationalizing the Fear Within
• Physical and Psychological Burdens
• Role of Kathleen and Linda in The Things They Carried
• Let’s Communicate: It’s Not About War
• Turning Over a New Leaf: Facing the Pressures of Society

Lesson Plan for The Things They Carried

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Things They Carried
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Things They Carried Bibliography

• The Things They Carried

Tim O'Brien

• Literature Notes
• In the Field
• Book Summary
• About The Things They Carried
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• On the Rainy River
• Enemies and Friends
• How to Tell a True War Story
• The Dentist
• Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong
• The Man I Killed and Ambush
• Speaking of Courage
• The Ghost Soldiers
• The Lives of the Dead
• Character Analysis
• Tim O'Brien
• Lt. Jimmy Cross
• Norman Bowker
• Mary Anne Bell
• Henry Dobbins
• Tim O'Brien Biography
• Critical Essays
• The Things They Carried in a Historical Context
• Narrative Structure in The Things They Carried
• Style and Storytelling in The Things They Carried
• The Things They Carried and Loss of Innocence
• The Things They Carried and Questions of Genre
• Full Glossary for The Things They Carried
• Essay Questions
• Practice Projects
• Cite this Literature Note

Summary and Analysis In the Field

The morning after Kiowa's death, the platoon searches the area for his body. Lt. Cross watches his men as they search and thinks about the impact of Kiowa's death. Azar makes jokes about the style of Kiowa's death, but Bowker warns him to stop. Mitchell Sanders and Norman Bowker eventually recover Kiowa's rucksack, and they argue over who is responsible for Kiowa's death; Sanders blames Lt. Cross, but Bowker disagrees. Meanwhile, Lt. Cross rehearses a letter he might write to Kiowa's father, but his thoughts wander back to his own culpability because he chose that particular field on which to camp. Lt. Cross wades across the field to a soldier who is shaking and sobbing. The young soldier is sorry because he thinks he may have caused Kiowa's death by accidentally signaling their presence to the enemy by switching on a flashlight. The soldier is searching for a photo of his girlfriend, and Lt. Cross feels pity for him.

Norman Bowker locates the corpse, and Mitchell Sanders warns Azar not to make any more jokes or crude comments. They finally dislodge the body from the muddy bottom of the field and are saddened and relieved, but they also felt a secret joy because they are alive. Azar feels some guilt over his earlier jokes.

Lt. Cross lets himself sink into the mud and floats while he revises the letter to Kiowa's father in his mind. The upset soldier tries to confess his guilt to Lt. Cross, who does not listen, escaping the scene by remembering his life before the war.

This vignette is one of the more depressing in the book, one where O'Brien makes it impossible to think about the Vietnam War as a whole. Instead, he forces us to look at the war person by person. The entire event of searching for Kiowa's body is like a break from the political war — something that men do for their friends rather than for their country. The three centers in the story, Lt. Cross, the young, nameless soldier, and the rest of the troop searching for Kiowa's body each have their own perspective. This vignette is a compilation of their perspectives, not a story with facts and details.

Lt. Cross is laden with guilt, not only as a commander but also as someone who feels personally responsible for Kiowa's death. As a matter of protocol, he is responsible because he ordered the camp to be made, but Cross feels his responsibility and remorse more deeply than his duty dictates. Although O'Brien tells us about how Cross does not desire to command, Cross himself focuses on Kiowa's father and the letter that he must now write. To Cross, Kiowa's death personalizes his fears and his responsibility not just to care for his men, but that he must answer for them to others — like fathers, commanders, and even God.

The men searching for Kiowa's body are themselves upset and terrified. As they wade through a river of excrement, searching for a friend and soldier, they feel respect and awe. Azar's jokes about irony and death bother Bowker because of his feelings about the tragic death of his friend and comrade, but also because of a sharpened awareness of his own mortality. When they uncover the body, Azar himself feels these same forces, but he needed the reality of a corpse to drive it home. Until then, he felt more invincible. But Kiowa's death means that his luck ran out, and luck could run out for any of them at any time.

O'Brien never suggests that a soldier stayed alive because of skill or prowess, but rather because of his luck. Luck, which seems to be rationed out like food to soldiers, was a man's to use or expend, and Kiowa's had run out. This does not make Kiowa's death less tragic, but more universal. It could happen to any of them. There is no way to measure luck — it is a random element in war that they all depended upon but which none of them could control.

Finally, there is the young soldier who is not named. He has no name because he is no one in particular, just any soldier who could have made a simple mistake and caused his own or someone else's death. He is, of course, filled with guilt and sees Kiowa's death as his personal fault, just as Cross does. They both believe that "when a man died, there had to be blame." In fact, O'Brien shows us that there is no blame because there is no reason. Perhaps the flashlight signaled the enemy as to their position, but the rest of the soldiers know that it was just bad luck. The Viet Cong soldier killed by "O'Brien" was killed because his luck had run out, nothing more than wandering down the wrong path at the wrong time. The nameless soldier does not understand this, and it is so terrifying an idea that he cannot think it. Instead, he searches for the lost picture of a past girlfriend, needing something he knows and trusts. Reality, randomness, luck, and war are too much for both Cross and the boy.

MIA Missing in action. A person in the armed forces who is lost during combat and who cannot be accounted for as a known casualty.

GI Member of the U.S. armed forces; especially an enlisted soldier.

Karl (Heinrich) Marx (1818-1883) German social philosopher and economist. Marx was the founder of modern socialism.

Previous Notes

Next Good Form

The Things They Carried Notes Summary

• Norman Bowker asks O'Brien to write "Speaking of Courage," and then hangs himself three years later.
• In 1975, Bowker writes O'Brien a seventeen-page letter where he explains how he can't seem to adjust back to life in America after the war.
• He tells O'Brien that he still feels like he's back in the field with Kiowa. He suggests that O'Brien should write a story about the field, and a guy who feels like he's still stuck there, even when he's driving around his hometown.
• When O'Brien gets the letter, he feels guilty about his own easy transition from war to peace. While he doesn't think of his storytelling as therapy, it has actually been a way of navigating his memories in a healthy way.
• O'Brien tries to write the story as part of his novel Going After Cacciato . He introduces the lake, changes the scenery, changes Bowker's name (as he'd requested). He has to take out the sewage field and Kiowa's death to fit in with the rest of the novel.
• Eventually, he publishes it as a separate short story, and sends it to Norman Bowker. Norman Bowker says it's fine, but he left out Vietnam, Kiowa, and the sewage in the field.
• He hangs himself eight months later.
• Ten years later, O'Brien rewrites the story. He puts Bowker back in it, and the night in the sewage field, and the death of Kiowa. But he wants to make it very clear that in real life, it wasn't Bowker who let Kiowa go. It was O'Brien.

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W hy's T his F unny?

• The Things They Carried
• Tim O'Brien
• Literature Notes
• Book Summary
• About The Things They Carried
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• On the Rainy River
• Enemies and Friends
• How to Tell a True War Story
• The Dentist
• Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong
• The Man I Killed and Ambush
• Speaking of Courage
• In the Field
• The Ghost Soldiers
• The Lives of the Dead
• Character Analysis
• Lt. Jimmy Cross
• Norman Bowker
• Mary Anne Bell
• Henry Dobbins
• Tim O'Brien Biography
• Critical Essays
• The Things They Carried in a Historical Context
• Narrative Structure in The Things They Carried
• Style and Storytelling in The Things They Carried
• The Things They Carried and Loss of Innocence
• The Things They Carried and Questions of Genre
• Full Glossary for The Things They Carried
• Essay Questions
• Practice Projects
• Cite this Literature Note

Summary and Analysis Field Trip

O'Brien and his daughter travel to Vietnam and visit the site of Kiowa's death. O'Brien and 10-year-old Kathleen visit the tourist spots, which she enjoys, but it is clear to him that she does not understand the war that had happened 20 years earlier. She wonders "why was everybody so mad at everybody else." She thinks her father is "weird" because he cannot forget the past.

They arrive at the field where Kiowa died, and O'Brien notes how it looks like any farming field now. They walk to where the field meets the river. O'Brien unwraps a cloth bundle that holds Kiowa's old moccasins. With the moccasins, he wades in, swimming out to where Kiowa's rucksack had been recovered, and reaches in and wedges the moccasins into the river bottom. O'Brien holds the glance of an old Vietnamese farmer working nearby, whom Kathleen thinks looks angry. The man holds a shovel over his head like a flag, and O'Brien tells his daughter that the anger that the man would have felt was finished and in the past.

The point of this vignette is for O'Brien to attain some closure for the loss of Kiowa. He held an image in his mind for over 20 years of the field where Kiowa had died, but he immediately finds that the reality is nothing like the image in his mind. For example, now the land seems to be at peace, where before every hill and blade of grass made him feel fear at night — the fear of war. Neither his memory nor his field trip were truer than the other — they were simply different truths. O'Brien questions what is Vietnam: Is it a memory, is it a country, is it both, or is it neither?

Not insignificantly, O'Brien brings his daughter, Kathleen, on this trip, for he wants her to understand more about his past. Yet he finds that as attentive and interested as she is, she does not understand much, like the need to trek out into one of a thousand fields in the middle of a foreign country. When she asks about the meaning, all O'Brien can do is give an obscure answer. At first he says that there are three different perspectives, Kathleen's, his own, and those who sent him to this country. In the end, though, he simply answers, "I don't know." It is not that Vietnam has no meaning, but that he cannot understand or explain it to anyone else, even his own daughter.

Kathleen does not see the need to remember; she calls her father "weird" for his inability to forget that past. O'Brien does not see himself as weird, however, and although he never says it, he must regret his daughter's immediate desire to ignore such an important piece of his past. Perhaps this is why when they are in the field, he does not make an exhaustive effort to explain everything to her.

The scene in the field is the climax of the story, where for once the production of meaning comes from O'Brien rather than simply having meaning swarm around him. He describes the field as the locus for his emotional emptiness; he blames it for the man he has become. It is in this field, however, that he is finally able to create meaning for some part of what happened to him. Unlike the dancing girl from "Style" and the unintelligible monks from "Church," this time it is O'Brien, wading out into the marsh, touching the water, who is participating in an action that has a meaning. Conversely, Kathleen is now the observer who can merely look upon her father and not understand what he is doing. So O'Brien the writer creates a cycle where meaning and ignorance move through a generation. Now he as an ex-soldier, a friend, a father, and also a writer will tell stories and give meaning. His audience, however, may not understand him, and maybe be left only to mock his movements rather than participate and communicate with him. O'Brien's battle has shifted from a field in Vietnam to a culture, and rather than a gun or knife he now has a story, a book, and a family with which he must contend.

Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum Burial place of Ho Chi Minh, Vietnamese leader and first president of North Vietnam (1954-1969). His army was victorious in the French Indochina War (1946-1954), and he later led North Vietnam's struggle to defeat the U.S.-supported government in South Vietnam.

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The Things They Carried

Tim o’brien, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.