In the stories in Tim O‘Brien‘s The Things They Carried, we see characters faced with situation the typical character wouldn‘t normally have to deal with. These American soldiers in Vietnam are constantly being forced to be wary of enemy soldiers, and a moment’s lapse in attention can be disastrous. The episode where Lavender was killed was one such instance. The Squad leader, Jimmy Cross, who is characterized as a person who was perhaps not ready to leady his unit as the story begins finds himself day dreaming about a girl he is in love with back home. During this time, Lavender gets killed by an enemy soldier.
It’s hard to think of these characters as enemies though. If it were not for the war, which soldiers on either side of the conflict were not personally responsible for, there would be no reason for these people to consider each other enemies. It was the leaders of each respective side who decided upon the actions that put the soldiers in conflict with each other, and it is difficult to initially blame them for what happens, even if they do terrible things. After Lavender dies, Jimmy Cross takes his soldiers to the nearest village and takes retribution on the villagers: “Jimmy Cross led his men into the village of Than Khe. They burned everything. They shot chickens and dogs, they trashed the village well, they called in artillery and watched the wreckage” (16). The story discusses how these soldiers were not prepared to be put in these situations, and when one of them dies, in one sense you can see how they would react poorly and destroy the village of Than Khe. However, the ability to understand why they would do what they did does is not the same thing as justifying their actions. We can see that it was wrong and see why they did it at the same time.
Personally, as a pacifist, I am less likely to agree with the view that they were at war and these kinds of things simply happen in war. As mentioned, soldiers on both sides wouldn’t ever have met each other if not for the war, and it was only because of the war that they were in conflict at all with each other. However, many people decided to refrain from participating in the war because of this very reason. The conflict in Vietnam posed no direct threat to America in any way; it took place simply because of the international conflict of America and communism in general. Later in the book, the narrator/Tim O’Brien character decides that he doesn’t want to be viewed as a coward for not going to war, even though he on principle did not agree with the war. I feel that the more cowardly thing to have done was to bend on his principles due to the opinions of others. People were ridiculed and sent to jail for being conscientious objectors, but these people stuck by their principles regardless of the consequences. And they were never in a position where they had to make a choice to take another person’s life in order to not be killed themselves.
Regardless of the actions of the characters after the death, nothing could change the simple fact: “ Lavender was dead. You couldn’t burn the blame” (23). These soldiers were in a bad position, true, but that does not in any way excuse what happened to the village of Than Khe. There was not anything that could be done about Lavender’s death, and the burning of Than Khe most certainly did not even the score in regards to his death. The only thing that happened was that more people needlessly died. These soldiers still had a choice, and they made the wrong choices, regardless of what happened to their own soldiers. I can’t find any excuse for what they did.
Works Cited
O’Brien, Tim, The Things They Carried. New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1990.