of premium dope,’’ set him apart. Carrying drugs would certainly not make Ted Lavender exceptional in Vietnam, but his dependence upon the drugs makes his fear visible and that is what distances him from the others. All of them ‘‘carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide.’’ Ted Lavender makes his own fear, and therefore everyone's fear, visible. The most poignant example is Lt. Cross himself, whose love for Martha pulls him away from Vietnam on imaginative flights: ''Kneeling, watching the hole, he tried to concentrate on Lee Strunk and the war, all the dangers, but his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered.’’ After Lt. Cross blames himself for Lavender's death and burns the letters and photographs from Martha, he realizes ‘‘you couldn't burn the blame.’’ His alienation from the group now derives from his understanding that ‘‘you could die of carelessness and gross stupidity,’’ and that he is responsible for the others. He experiences this choice between Martha and his duty as a loss: ''It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.’’ In other words, the things they carry on their bodies creates the illusion of unity and collaboration, but the fragile collective is always compromised by the things they carry inside and by the meanings and emotions attached to the smallest and most private of artifacts.

One of the most effective techniques O'Brien uses in ‘‘The Things They Carried’’ is to juxtapose the physical and the metaphysical burdens, the real and imaginative experiences of the men of Alpha Company. Vietnam literature has sought to move away from the heroic, or romanticizing, war narratives of the past. This has resulted in a literature that privileges gritty realism and attempts to describe the intimate details of the material and bodily conditions of the soldier's lives. Since the very nature of their efforts seem to have no objective and no meaning, they defy conventional narrative. The men of Alpha Company are engaged in ''an endless march, village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost. They marched for the sake of the march.’’ The soldier's experience in O'Brien's fiction is intensely physical, often reducing the men to mere bodies. For them, ‘‘the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility.’’ Paradoxically, however, the intense physicality of the soldier's existence engenders the dream-like states that Lt. Cross is susceptible to and that characterize the story as a whole.

By describing the things the soldiers carried as a mixture of the mundane and the metaphorical, O'Brien creates a dizzying sense of unreality: ‘‘They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections.’’ After O'Brien lists some of the ordinary items that the soldiers carried, ‘‘chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries,’’ he wrenches the reader beyond the tangible world: ''They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.'' In what Myers describes as ''the feel of the worst dream becoming real,’’ the soldiers' world has become inverted and the sky rests on their shoulders and even gravity needs help.

When the weight of their burdens, both concrete and psychic, become too much for them, Lt. Cross and the other men take off on imaginative flights. Because real escape is impossible, the only alternative is imagination, and in this story they dream of ‘‘freedom birds,’’ of becoming the thing carried instead the grunt. Literally, freedom birds are the planes that take a soldier out of the country, either at the end of his one year tour of duty or to the temporary relief of the hospital or some rest and relaxation. But like the things the men carry, the bird itself is both real and unreal: ''it was more than a plane, it was a real bird, a big sleek silver bird with feathers and talons and high screeching.’’ The soldiers dream of having ''nothing to bear,'' of inhabiting ''the vast, silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything weighed exactly nothing.’’ O'Brien's language specifically invokes the image of putting aside burdens, of weightlessness: ‘‘at night, not quite dreaming, they gave themselves over to lightness, they were carried, they were purely borne.'' Of course, O'Brien also means to suggest that the men dream of being ''born'' as well, of being delivered and returned to innocence.

In the end, Lt. Cross is not carried away to a world without gravity; he still has the burden of his responsibility to his men as well as the weight of grief and shame from Lavender's death. He decides to do the only thing that he can: repack and shift the weight so that it will be more bearable. After he burns Martha's letters and photographs he vows ‘‘to do what they had always done,’’ but this time with ‘‘no more fantasies.’’ In the same way that they often discarded in the field what they no longer needed, Lt. Cross swears to ‘‘dispense with love,’’ to put it aside as an unnecessary burden.

Source: Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton, ''An Overview of 'The Things They Carried',’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 1999.

Tim O'Brien first emerged on the literary scene with his starkly moving portrayals of men involved in the Vietnam War. When his award-winning novel Going After Cacciato was published, John Updike wrote that O'Brien was ‘‘reaching for a masterpiece.’’ The Things They Carried, an intense, heartfelt, moving experience of the war, published almost a decade later, may well be that masterpiece. At first critics did not know how to view The Things They Carried—as a collection of short stories or a novel? Neither, says O'Brien, who prefers to look at it simply as a work of fiction. In truth, it stands as a unified narrative, made up of chapters that can work on their own, but which, together, provide a deeper meaning and look into the lives and battles of the soldiers. The Things They Carried relates the stories of the men in Alpha Company. It features a narrator, called Tim O'Brien, who has many commonalties with the author Tim, but O'Brien maintains that the story is ‘‘all made up.’’

Along with several other stories that would be incorporated into the book, ‘‘The Things They Carried'' first appeared as a short story in Esquire. As the opening piece for The Things They Carried, it sets the stage for the narratives that will follow. It does more than introduce the reader to many of the soldiers of Alpha Company and establish their unity, however; it also introduces the reader to the completely unimagined world that is war. In this world anything can get turned around. A gentle man can carry a thumb of an enemy boy-soldier as a talisman, or a man can get shot to death in clear sight of all his fellow company.

''The Things They Carried'' presents dual narratives: numerous lists of the things, both tangible and intangible, that the soldiers carry with them on their march, intermingled with the guilt felt by Alpha Company's commanding officer, Jimmy Cross, over the death of the soldier Ted Lavender. In many ways, the lists form a framework on which the rest of the narrative hinges, but the two story lines are inextricably linked. Jimmy feels that he has put his love for a college girl back home ahead of his men; as atonement and as prevention, Jimmy must burn her letters and photographs, physical symbols of his destructive love.

Through the burdens carried by Jimmy Cross and the rest of the men, ''The Things They Carried'' successfully juxtaposes the soldiers' physical reality against their emotional reality. So the things they carry are not limited to the tools of war, such as weapons, jungle boots, and mine detectors, but also to what each man finds to be a personal necessity— dental floss for one man, comic books for another. O'Brien's deliberate prose, here sounding like parts of it could have been lifted from a military report, emphasizes the physical load of the soldier—‘‘P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water.'' It also puts emphasis on the sheer weight of the soldier's load: the M-16 gas-operated assault rifle that ‘‘weighed 7.5 pounds unloaded, 8.2 pounds with its full 20-round magazine’’; Mitchell Sanders's PRC-25 radio was ‘‘a killer, 26 pounds with its battery’’; and Henry Dobbins, a big man and the machine gunner ''carried the M-60, which weighed 23 pounds unloaded, but which was almost always loaded.’’ As Steven Kaplan points out, the way in which O'Brien ‘‘catalogues the weapons the soldiers carried, down to their weight [makes] them seem important and their protective power real.’’ This is simply an illusion; Lavender, killed by sniper fire, ''carried 34 pounds when he was shot,'' 9 more than the typical load carried by most of the soldiers, as well as more than 20 rounds of ammunition.

At times the men choose to ‘‘discard things along the route of the march.’’ The text states that they do this "purely for comfort,’’ knowing that a resupply chopper would arrive by nightfall, but this action functions symbolically as well. Only by stripping themselves of the physical gear of the war can they achieve a feeling of freedom, however momentary it might be, and catapult themselves out of Vietnam. Truly, the men recognize the delusional nature of their fantasy, for they know that ‘‘they would never be at a loss for things to carry.’’ The implication that they will be carrying their experiences once they return also appears here, in the narrator's evocation of ‘‘the great American war chest,’’ which includes Fourth of July sparklers, Easter eggs, and the forests of Minnesota.

The weight under which the men struggle cannot be lightened by the discarding of war equipment, for it extends far beyond the physical reminders; hardest of all, they carry ‘‘all the emotional baggage of men who might die’’ and ‘‘shameful memories'' and the ''common secret of cowardice barely restrained.’’ These they carry on the inside. On the outside they are hardened men, tough, able to joke about Lavender's death. ''A pisser, you know?'' says Kiowa. ‘‘Still zipping himself up. Zapped while zipping.'' They bitterly deride men who leave the war by shooting off their own toes or fingers, but ‘‘even so the image played itself out behind their eyes.’’ Only in their sleep can they truly let down their guard. This night-time fantasy includes what they called a ''freedom bird,'' a big bird that carries them away from Vietnam. Then ‘‘the weights fell off; there was nothing to bear''; they no longer carry their weapons or each other, instead ‘‘they were carried, they were purely borne.’’ Only in these fantasies can they free themselves of their many burdens; instead of carrying the weight of the war, they are now carried by a creature that is larger, more powerful, and more mystical than themselves.

Because this is only fantasy and the men cannot escape the realities of war, they are forced to carry with them their ideals of home. In Kiowa's case, this comes in the form of an illustrated New Testament. Jimmy Cross's ideals of home, fantasies of a girl back home, simply serve as deadly distractions. He carries a ‘‘compass, maps, code books, binoculars, and a .45-caliber pistol that weighed 2.9 pounds fully loaded ... a strobe light and the responsibility for the lives of his men.’’ Yet, most important to Jimmy Cross are the letters he carries from a college girl named Martha. For Jimmy, Martha represents the world of peace; she is unsullied by the war experience—‘‘she never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy take care of yourself’’—and unmoved by it—''She wasn't involved’’ (either in the war itself, Jimmy's experience of it, or the relationship between she and Jimmy). Despite her position outside of Vietnam, Martha plays an important role in Cross's perception of the progression of events played out in the story. After Lavender is shot ''on his way back from peeing,’’ Jimmy Cross decides that he is at fault. For just as Lavender was about to be shot, Lieutenant Cross ''was not there. He was buried with Martha under the white sand at the Jersey shore.’’ In response to Lavender's death, Jimmy Cross burns Martha's letters and resolves to be a better leader. This resolve is less for the men, who will resent this stricter line of command, than for himself; Cross knows that ''Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war.’’ Cross will become a real solider; that is the only way to carry the weight of his guilt.

Jimmy Cross concludes that his imagined world has put the lives of his men at risk. ''Imagination was a killer,'' states the text, and here the imagined world and the world of battle are starkly differentiated. Cross's self-perceived negligence and his guilt provide what Lorrie Smith calls an ‘‘inexorable equation: imagination = women = distraction = danger = death.’’ Smith suggests that Cross's dramatic resolution at the end of story is his recovery of masculine power achieved only through the suppression of the femininity within himself. Because the emotion of love becomes a feminine characteristic in times of war, Cross's rejection of it requires his embrace of the ultra-masculine. Thus after Lavender's body has been taken away, ‘‘Lieutenant Jimmy Cross led his men into the village of Than Khe. They burned everything.’’ This wanton act of destruction, itself reminiscent of the actual My Lai massacre, exemplifies not the violence of the war but what can happen when the soldiers stray from the masculine sphere and allow themselves to feel.

The reader may disagree with Cross's conclusion that his fantasies about Martha leads to Lavender's death. The text merely says that at the time that Lavender was shot, ''Lieutenant Cross nodded and closed his eyes'' while the other men cracked jokes. The crucial issue here, however, is not the physical realities of the circumstances surrounding one soldier's death but its emotional implications. Cross sees the events in stark, black-and-white terms: Martha or his men. There is no room for compromise in the world he now inhabits. Only 24 years old and not a risk-taker, as demonstrated by his chaste relationship with Martha, Cross has the safety of his men in his hands, and he cannot juggle two priorities; as the text states, ''He was just a kid at war, in love.’’ Cross's method of symbolic reasoning finds further emphasis in his digging of a foxhole that night and crawling inside, thus repeating the fantasy playing out in his head in the moments before Lavender's death. There he comes to the realization that Martha ''did not love him and never would,'' a fact obvious to the story's readers.

With his love for Martha forbidden to him—or at the least, transformed into a ''hard, hating kind of love''—Jimmy Cross turns to what can substitute as its closest opposite. He decides to initiate a new start for Alpha Company. Determined to mold both himself and his men into ideal soldiers, he will demand more discipline of them. He will no longer let them ‘‘abandon equipment along the route of march'' although he acknowledges that ''there would be grumbling ... because their days would seem longer and their loads heavier.'' Cross's recognition that the men have lost their soldierly comportment comes at the same time as his recognition that it is his world, not Martha's world, that is real. Cross has allowed his men to carry too much of the world of peace with them, where feelings and emotions do not carry with them the power of death. ''Lieutenant Jimmy Cross reminded himself that his obligation was not to be loved but to lead. He would dispense with love; it was not now a factor.''

When asked in an interview to choose his favorite story from The Things They Carried, O'Brien said that ''on most days, or three days out of seven in a week’’ he would choose ‘‘The Things They Carried.’’ O'Brien likes ‘‘the cadences of the story, the sounds and rhythms ... the physical items that form the story's structural backbone ... the absence of much of a plot in the thing.'' In many ways, ''The Things They Carried’’ is a pure war-story. It has camaraderie, despair, violence and death, duty, longing and desire. ‘‘It was very sad,’’ Jimmy Cross thinks, ''The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.’’ In the world of Vietnam and the world of ''The Things They Carried,’’ there is little room for anything else.

Source: Rena Korb, ''The Weight of War,’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 1999.

In both the opening and closing stories of The Things They Carried, imagination is linked to an idealized, unattainable woman—Martha, a girlfriend at home, and Linda, a childhood sweetheart who died at nine. The first story plays one of the many variations on the imagination-reality motif and picks up where O'Brien's earlier novel, Going after Cacciato, left off, with Paul Berlin imagining himself pleading for peace at the Paris Peace Talks but admitting: ''Even in imagination we must be true to our obligations, for, even in imagination, obligation cannot be outrun. Imagination, like reality, has its limits." "The Things They Carried’’ goes further to limit the imagination, asserting that in battle, ‘‘Imagination was a killer.’’ What this means, on one level, is that the nerve-wracking tension in the field could lead soldiers to imagine the worst or make a fatal mistake. But the story also establishes an inexorable equation: imagination=women=distraction=danger=death. The story's dramatic resolution turns on recovering masculine power by suppressing femininity in both female and male characters. Survival itself depends on excluding women from the masculine bond. In this first story, the renunciation of femininity is a sad but necessary cost of war, admitted only after real emotional struggle. It establishes a pattern, however, for the rest of the book.

‘‘The Things They Carried’’ introduces the cast of Alpha Company and establishes their identity as a cohesive group, each manfully carrying his own weight but also sharing the burden of war. The story features Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, the platoon's 24-year-old C.O., who fell into the war via ROTC. He is presented as a man of integrity, honesty, and deep compassion for his men, a cautious, somewhat stiff and unseasoned commander with no inherent lust for death and destruction. The story is fundamentally an initiation narrative whose tension lies in Jimmy Cross's need to deal with guilt and harden himself to battle realities, which are here distinctly differentiated from the realm of imagination. Jimmy Cross's story alternates with lyrical passages cataloguing all the ''things'' men of war carry, including ''all the emotional baggage of men who might die.’’ These passages, echoing O'Brien's earlier constraints of "obligation," insistently repeat the idea that ‘‘the things they carried were largely determined by necessity ... Necessity dictated.’’

Lieutenant Jimmy Cross's survival and his coming of age as an effective soldier depend on letting go of all that is not necessary and immediate—here equated completely with the feminine, the romantic, the imaginary. Becoming a warrior entails a pattern of desire, guilt, and renunciation in relation to a woman. The story opens by describing in detail Jimmy Cross's most precious cargo:

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there. More than anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her but the letters were mostly chatty, elusive on the matter of love. She was a virgin, he was almost sure.

Martha's writing—and, implicitly, her reading of his war experience—are sexualized through association: her inability to respond to his love and his longing suggest the blank page of virginity in patriarchal discourse. Though Jimmy Cross tries to realize a connection with Martha through his sacramental/sexual ritual, she is represented as aloof and untouchable, a poet with ‘‘grey, neutral’’ eyes inhabiting ''another world, which was not quite real.'' Martha's words are never presented directly, but are paraphrased by the narrator, who reminds us twice that she never mentions the war in her letters. Like other women in the book, she represents all those back home who will never understand the warrior's trauma. In addition to the letters, Jimmy Cross carries two pictures of Martha and a good luck charm—a stone Martha sent from the Jersey Shore, which he sometimes carries in his mouth; he also ‘‘humped his love for Martha up the hills and through the swamps.’’ As the story progresses, Martha—rather these metonymic objects signifying Martha—becomes a distraction from the immediate work of war and caring for his men. His mind wanders, usually into the realm of sexual fantasy: ‘‘Slowly, a bit distracted, he would return to his hole and watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin.'' Memory and desire intertwine in a fantasy that fuses courage and virility and, by extension, fighting and writing upon her blank virgin page. In one of the book's several retrospective ‘‘should haves,’’ Jimmy Cross remembers a date with Martha and thinks ‘‘he should've done something brave. He should've carried her up the stairs to her room and tied her to the bed and touched that left knee all night long. He should've risked it. Whenever he looked at the photographs, the thought of new things he should've done.’’ We are meant to see the move from chivalry to sado-masochistic erotica as natural and understandable, because ''He was just a kid at war, in love,’’ after all. That Jimmy Cross's sexual ''bravery'' might have been earned through violation and coercion is not considered in the story. The focus is on the male's empowering fantasy.

Jimmy Cross's distraction climaxes with the sniper shooting of Ted Lavender ''on his way back from peeing.’’ Just before this incident, the company had waited tensely for Lee Strunk to emerge from clearing out a Vietcong tunnel. The language of sexual desire and union, coming just before Lee Strunk's ‘‘rising from the dead’’ and Lavender's death, link Jimmy's imagination of Martha—his merging with the feminine—with annihilation of the self. As he gazes suggestively down into the dark tunnel, he leaves the war and succumbs to a fantasy of perfect union between masculine and feminine, death and desire:

And then suddenly, without willing it, he was thinking about Martha. The stresses and fractures, the quick collapse, the two of them buried alive under all that weight. Dense, crushing love. Kneeling, watching the hole, he tried to concentrate on Lee Strunk and the war, all the dangers, but his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered. He wanted his to be a virgin and not a virgin, all at once. He wanted to know her.

Such unraveling of gender duality, however, is dangerous, such paradoxes unsustainable. At the moment of Jimmy's imagined dissolution, Ted Lavender is shot, as if to punish himself for daydreaming and forgetting ‘‘about matters of security’’—but more deeply for abandoning his men in the desire to know the feminine—Jimmy Cross goes to the extreme of rejecting desire for Martha altogether. He reacts to the trauma of Lavender's death in two significant ways. The first is one of the book's parallel scenes of My Lai-like retribution, here bluntly told but not shown: ‘‘Lieutenant Jimmy Cross led his men into the village of Than Khe. They burned everything.’’ The second is guilt, entangled with anger that his love for Martha is unrequited. He reverts to a familiar binary choice— either Martha or his men: ''He felt shame. He hated himself. He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry, like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war’’—his good luck charm transformed to the weight of guilt. That night he cries ''for Ted Lavender'' but also for the realization, or perhaps rationalization, that ''Martha did not love him and never would.’’ Jimmy Cross regains a ''mask of composure'' necessary to survive war's horror, burns Martha's letters and photographs in a purgative ritual reversing the opening blessing, and wills himself to renounce Martha and all she signifies: ''He hated her. Yes, he did. He hated her. Love, too, but it was a hard, hating kind of love.’’ With this rejection and a newly hardened, terse idiom, Jimmy Cross completes his transformation: ‘‘He was a soldier, after all ... He was realistic about it ... He would be a man about it ... No more fantasies ... from this point on he would comport himself as an officer ... he would dispense with love; it was not now a factor.’’ His survival as a soldier and a leader depends upon absolute separation from the feminine world and rejection of his own femininity: ''Henceforth, when he thought about Martha, it would be only to think that she belonged elsewhere. He would shut down the daydreams. This was not Mount Sebastian, it was another world, where there were no pretty poems or mid-term exams, a place where men died because of carelessness and gross stupidity.’’

How are we meant to read this rejection? O'Brien is not blaming Martha for male suffering, for of course, the story isn't about Martha at all, though she introduces the book's prototypical figure of the woman incapable of understanding war. Rather, he uses her to define "necessary" codes of male behavior in war and to establish Jimmy's ''proper'' bond with his men. We are given no rationale for why Jimmy perceives his choice in such absolute terms, nor are we invited to critique Jimmy for this rigidity, though we do pity him and recognize his naivete. Jimmy Cross's rejection of the feminine is portrayed as one of the burdensome but self-evident "necessities" of war, and O'Brien grants Jimmy this recognition: ''It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.’’ Most sad and ironic of all, Jimmy ends up suffering alone because of his status as an officer: ''He would show strength, distancing himself.’’ Jimmy Cross's allegorical initials even encourage us to read his youthful renunciation in Christian terms.

At the very end, however, masculine bonds prevail and compensate for Jimmy's losses. O'Brien places the men of Alpha Company in a larger cultural landscape of men without women by alluding to cowboy movies and Huckleberry Finn: ''He might just shrug and say, carry on, then they would saddle up and form into a column and move out toward villages west of Than Khe.’’ The narrative voice here is very carefully distinguished from the characters, and it is hard to know how to take the conditional "might" and the self-conscious diction: as parody? as straight allusion? as Jimmy Cross's self-deluding macho fantasy? One possibility is that O'Brien means to expose and critique the social construction of masculinity, suggesting that soldiers' behavior in Vietnam is conditioned by years of John Wayne movies, as indeed numerous veterans' memoirs attest is true. Likewise, the story unmasks the soldiers' macho ‘‘stage presence,’’ "pose," and ‘‘hard vocabulary’’: ‘‘Men killed and died, because they were embarrassed not to’’; they do what they ‘‘felt they had to do.’’ But these constructions are inevitably converted into behavior that seems natural and inevitable—"necessary"— within the urstory underlying all war stories: the tragic destruction of male innocence. O'Brien's depth as a writer allows him to reveal the socialized nature of soldiering and to show compassion for the vulnerable men behind the pose. But he stops short of undoing and revising these constructions. In the end, men are how they act, just as they are their stories and culture is its myths. The story rescues the humanity of men at war and consigns femininity to the margins, thus assuring the seamless continuity and endless repetition of masculine war stories.

Because Tim O'Brien's characters live so fully for him he is impelled to follow up the story of Jimmy Cross and Martha with a vignette, "Love." Like George Willard, the lonely but ever-receptive narrator of Winesburg, Ohio, O'Brien portrays himself as the burdened repository of other people's stories. Here Jimmy Cross comes to visit character-narrator Tim O'Brien ‘‘many years after the war’’ to talk about ‘‘all the things we still carried through our lives.’’ One thing that Jimmy Cross still carries is a torch for Martha, and he shows the narrator a copy of the same photograph he had burned after Ted Lavender's death. The story embedded in the story concerns his meeting with Martha at a college reunion. Now a Lutheran missionary nurse serving in Third World countries, she responds to Jimmy with the same friendly but aloof demeanor that marked her letters during the war. She gives him another copy of the photo to gaze at and reveals ‘‘she had never married ... and probably never would. She didn't know why. But as she said this, her eyes seemed to slide sideways, and it occurred to him that there were things about her he would never know.’’ Despite her continuing inscrutability and distance, Jimmy risks telling Martha that ‘‘he'd almost done something brave'' back in college, and he describes his knee-stroking fantasy. Martha's ambivalent reaction widens the gulf between men and women and hints, with Hemingway-like ellipses, that she is either repressed, fearful, uninterested, or a lesbian; in any case, she is unreceptive to Jimmy's advances, which absolves him from any failings or flaws as a masculine sexual being:

Martha shut her eyes. She crossed her arms at her chest, as if suddenly cold, rocking slightly, then after a time she looked at him and said she was glad he hadn't tried it. She didn't understand how men could do those things. What things? he asked, and Martha said, the things men do. Then he nodded. It began to form. Oh, he said, those things. At breakfast the next morning she told him she was sorry. She explained that there was nothing she could do about it, and he said he understood, and then she laughed and gave him the picture and told him not to burn this one up.

What are ‘‘the things men do?’’ In the context of this pair of stories, these things are both sexual and violent. Jimmy passes this story on the narrator, joking that ‘‘maybe she'll read it and come begging.’’ But he leaves more concerned about the reader's response than Martha's, with a plea that Tim depict him positively, as if he still hadn't exorcised his guilt over Lavender's death. '‘‘Make me out to be a good guy, okay? Brave and handsome, all that stuff. Best platoon leader ever.' He hesitated for a second. 'And do me a favor, don't mention anything about—' 'No,' I said, I won't.'’’ O'Brien teases us with an indeterminate ending; if he is true to his word, then he hasn't revealed ‘‘anything about—" Jimmy's secret, and we are left wondering. If the writer has, in fact, betrayed Jimmy in the course of the retelling, we cannot be sure what it is we were not meant to know and why Jimmy wants to suppress it. In either case, the men wordlessly understand each other, and the reader is an outsider. Like Jake Barnes hungering impotently after Lady Brett, Jimmy continues to suffer from Martha's unattainability. As in the previous story, we are allowed to glimpse the gap between the mask and the face, the wounded man behind the masculine pose. But Martha is barely more than a plot device signifying Jimmy's life of virility and innocence destroyed by the war.

Source: Lorrie N. Smith, ‘‘‘The Things Men Do': The Gendered Subtext in Tim O'Brien's Esquire Stories,’’ in Critique, Vol. XXXVI, No. 1, Fall, 1994, pp. 17-40.