The Things They Carried

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1990

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Summary

Background

Story Summaries & Analyses

Stories 1-3

Stories 4-6

Stories 7-9

Stories 10-13

Stories 14-16

Stories 17-19

Stories 20-22

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Vocabulary

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Stories 17-19Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Story 17 Summary: “In the Field”

The morning after Kiowa dies, the soldiers wade through the muck in the falling rain, searching for his body. As they search for the body, Azar makes crude comments about Kiowa’s death, and Norman Bowker tells him to be quiet. Mitchell Sanders finds Kiowa’s rucksack. They decide not to tell the lieutenant, Jimmy Cross.

Jimmy stands far away composing a letter in his head to Kiowa’s father. He reflects on how he should’ve camped on higher ground. He imagines apologizing to Kiowa’s father for the mistake: “My own fault, he would say” (162). He moves across the field to a young soldier, who is bent at the waist and feeling along the bottom of the field. The young soldier thinks of how he and Kiowa had been talking the night before and how the young soldier used a flashlight to show Kiowa a picture of his girlfriend, “and then the field exploded all around them” (163). The young soldier tried to crawl toward the screaming, but instead went under the muck. When he came back up again, there were no more screams:

He remembered grabbing the boot. He remembered pulling hard, but how the field seemed to pull back, like a tug-of-war he couldn’t win, and how finally he had to whisper his friend’s name and let go and watch the boot slide away (164).

The young soldier shoves his hands in the water and keeps saying, “right here” (164). He is looking for the photo of his girlfriend. Jimmy Cross continues writing the letter to Kiowa’s father in his mind.

Norman Bowker finds Kiowa’s body “under two feet of water. Nothing showed except the heel of a boot” (166). The men pull at Kiowa’s boots but there is little give. Two more men join in, and the body still does not come loose; they take out their tools and begin to dig loose the body. The narrator describes that “[t]he corpse was angled steeply into the muck, upside down, like a diver who had plunged headfirst off a high tower” (167). They eventually get him loose and call in a helicopter. Jimmy stands apart in the field and continues writing his letter to Kiowa’s father. The young soldier keeps looking for his girlfriend’s picture. He wants to confess to Jimmy that it was his fault Kiowa died.

Story 18 Summary: “Good Form”

The narrator claims that he is 43 and that a long time ago he walked through a Vietnamese province as a foot soldier: “Almost everything else is invented” (171). He says he did not kill the man on the trail near My Khe; however, “I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt enough” (171). He blames himself for the death but says even that story is made up. Stories are sometimes truer than what actually happens because they can make things present. When his daughter asks whether he has ever killed anyone he can honestly say no, “[o]r I can say, honestly, ‘Yes’” (172).

Story 19 Summary: “Field Trip”

After completing “In the Field,” the narrator flies with his 10-year-old daughter, Kathleen, to the same field where Kiowa died: “I looked for signs of forgiveness or personal grace or whatever else the land might offer” (173). The field is smaller than he remembers. Two old farmers work alongside the water. The narrator takes a few photos of the field and Kathleen joins him. As he looks out at the field, he wonders whether it has been a mistake to bring her along since “[e]verything was too ordinary” (176). The narrator has a hard time feeling any emotion. The night Kiowa died a coldness that never quite leaves spread over him. The field had once embodied everything that Vietnam had been to him, and now it was plain and “unremarkable” (176-77).

Kathleen asks to leave. The narrator takes a small bundle from the back of the jeep; he and Kathleen walk to the river and the narrator takes off his shoes and socks. He unwraps the bundle, which contains Kiowa’s moccasins, and wades into the shallow river. When he reaches the place where Kiowa’s rucksack was found, he wedges the moccasins into the bottom of the river. An old farmer watches from along the dike. The narrator puts on his shoes and walks with Kathleen back toward the jeep.

Stories 17-19 Analysis

Many threads from various parts of the story collection reemerge during “In the Field,” focusing on the theme of Survivor’s Guilt. Jimmy Cross, who blamed himself for Ted Lavender’s death at the beginning of the book, blames himself once more for Kiowa’s death in this story. In the first story, Jimmy was obsessed with his photos of Martha, but now, it is a “boy” obsessed with finding a photo of his ex-girlfriend. While the rest of the company searches for Kiowa’s body, the boy remains fixated on finding his lost photo. This is similar to the way that Jimmy fixated on his memories of Martha the day Lavender died and suggests that such rumination is common to all generations of soldiers.

“Good Form” highlights the theme of Factual and Emotional Truth, which grows in importance in the collection’s final stories. The narrator insists that he both has and hasn’t ever killed anyone, which is seemingly impossible. He elaborates that the stories he writes about the war’s events aren’t factually true: The only fact is that he was present as a foot soldier in Vietnam. Specifically referencing the story “Ambush,” he admits that the events he describes in such intimate detail are invented: He has witnessed death and felt responsibility, but even the events he describes as a witness are invented. This story bridges “In the Field” and “Field Trip,” which both center on Kiowa’s death, and its discussion of fact versus fiction sets the reader up to question the historical reality of the events surrounding Kiowa’s death, which has featured so centrally in the collection so far. If the events in “Ambush” are invented, are the events in “In the Field,” and by extension, most of the other stories in the collection, invented as well?

The narrator tries to confront his past in “Field Trip” and finds that he is unable to conjure up any significant emotion; instead, what he finds is merely the present. That is, instead of finding the past and his memories still alive in the field where Kiowa died, he finds the field simply the way it is in the present. Two farmers work nearby and “[s]oft heat waves shimmied up out of the earth” (179). Finding the past gone, the narrator tells his daughter, “All that’s finished” (179).

“Field Trip” seems to resolve the question raised in “Good Form” and throughout the collection about the line between truth and fiction. The narrator and his daughter go to a specific place, which implies that Kiowa did die there. The narrator’s focus on the mundane present-day activity of the farmers adds to the implication that, though Kiowa and many others died in that field, time and history have moved on. The narrator’s lack of an emotional reaction to what is supposedly the location of a traumatic event in his past implies that he no longer feels the depths of guilt and grief that he did at the time.

It is significant that “Field Trip” is not the collection’s final story. Were it the final story, the line “All that’s finished” (179) would imply that the narrator has achieved closure. Even though he does not have a strong emotional reaction to the location of Kiowa’s death, he still has more to say about his experiences in the war, proving that Talking as a Way of Processing Trauma is a long and complex process.