Essay about The Things They Carried: Emotions Are Not A Sign Of Weakness

“He hated her... love, too, but it was a hard, hating kind of love.”(24) Cross is willing to sacrifice his love for Martha for the lives of his men. The memory of the death of Ted Lavender will forever be a hindrance for Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, something that he will always have to live with, but instead of running away from reality he is embracing it, and accepting his actions. An emotional burden that Tim O’Brien has is when he ignorantly throws a grenade and kills a young man. Because they are in a war, Azar tells O’Brien that it is perfectly normal for situations like these to happen on a daily basis. O’Brien is still vexing over the young man and he tries to cope with the situation in any way he could possibly think of. One of the ways that he does this is by imagining the young man’s life before death. He pictures the young man loving mathematics, books, and being a scholar, and dreading to contribute to the war whatsoever. “He would have been taught that to defend the land was a man’s highest duty and highest privilege. He had accepted this... Secretly, though, it also frightened him.”(125) Although, the young man would rather die than be a disgrace to his family, to his town, to his people, and to be a disgrace to himself, he went against his own judgment and eventually he join the war. O’Brien feels terrible for taking this young man’s life and future. “It was a difficult moment, but I did what seemed right, which was to say,