Dave Jensen, a man obsessed with hygiene, fills his pack with toothbrushes and floss. A third character the reader is clued into is Tim Lavendar. Because he posses such a nervous character, he fills his pack with marijuana and other sedatives. This shows how uneasy he is on the Vietnam battlefield, and O"Brien uses him as a tool to show the way that most of the young men feel in this time. Another character, Kiowa, shows his religious beliefs by carrying the New Testament. The main character, Jimmy Cross, not only carries the necessities of his position as platoon leader of compasses and other tools, but he also chooses to bring along letters and a pebble to remind him of his love Martha. By carrying these items that remind him of Martha, O"Brien hints into the true thoughts running oppressing his mind. The visions of Martha consume his brain, making him somewhat oblivious to the war acts going on around him. The other kind of physical burdens that the soldiers bear are those of the nature surrounding them. The difficulty of what they carried was best described as" The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity" (O"Brien 713). Through .
Oppliger 3.
historical works, readers have been given a portrayal of exactly how strenuous war is. War is always physically draining, Vietnam being described as one of the most .
miserable. These burdens could have only made the experience on these characters even more difficult. The blunt descriptions by O"Brien of the physical burdens of the soldiers not only give the reader a true feeling of the experience, but also help characterize the main soldiers.
Even though the physical burdens cause great pain in the soldiers, the true burdens they carry are emotional. O"Brien portrays the importance of these burdens by using a more descriptive tone. He gives feeling and breath to the description of the emotional items, which in turns brings out more sentiment by the reader.