The title of the book really has a double meaning. When you think of what soldiers carry during war, you think of food, water, guns, ammunition, and maybe even tobacco and cigarettes. That is the side of things carried you can touch. There is a whole other side, the emotional side. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross is very emotionally attached to a girl he went to college with, Martha. You may infer that Jimmy may not have many real attachments in his life considering he is overwhelmed with this thought of he and Martha having a relationship. He is engulfed in his thoughts that it inadvertently causes the death of one of the men in his company. Ted Lavender, whom was a very tense individual carrying marijuana and tranquilizers, is the one who is killed on his way back from using the restroom. Cross blames himself for Ted's death because he could only think about Martha before during and after Ted is shot. O'Brien describes Cross' thoughts after Lavender's death: "Lieutenant Cross kept to himself. He pictured Martha's smooth face, thinking he loved her more than anything, more than his men, and now Ted Lavender was dead because he loved her so much and could not stop thinking about her"(6). You can tell this is when it actually sank in that Ted was dead.One more point on Ted, if he was nervous enough to be on marijuana and tranquilizers, he should be on real medication. This shows how much men in the military carry on their minds during and after war.
Moving back to focus on Cross, we do not receive enough background information to come to the conclusion of what the real reason Cross has this obsession with Martha. It's not like they were husband and wife. They went on one date. This may be a mental tactic Cross created for himself to give himself a real reason to keep fighting and survive in the war. As I was saying earlier, Cross must not have a very strong relationship with anyone back home or that would be who he thinks about, and his reason to keep fighting and make it back home. Cross not having someone to look forward to seeing when he gets home that also wants to see him is weighing more on his mind than if he had someone to think about that was also thinking about him.
-Brice Lucas
Cross does seem like a lonely guy considering all he talks about is Martha, but I feel Martha is stressing him out and distracting him more than she is helping him cope through the war. Even though she has no control over his thoughts, and she isn't doing anything wrong, Cross gets easily distracted when he thinks about her which could ultimately get him injured or killed. On page 8 O'Brien said, "His mind wandered. He had difficulty keeping his attention on the war. On occasion he would yell at his men to spread out the column, to keep their eyes open, but then he would slip away and today dreams, just pretending, walking barefoot along the Jersey shore, with Martha, carrying nothing." His daydreaming isn't something a soldier in war should be doing. -Sydney Derrow
ReplyDeleteYou raised a good point when you said that Lavender really should've been on medication, instead of just tranquilizers. I think that fact can be used to show how the draft was taking in a lot men who might not have been suitable for fighting, and it highlights the difference between the U.S. military of the Vietnam War era, and of the military now. Nowadays, a person like Ted Lavender, who clearly isn't psychologically capable of serving in a war, would never have been assigned to combat.
ReplyDelete-Ethan Cantrell