Speaking of Courage

O'Brien examines courage and its opposite frequently in the novel. Many of the seemingly heroic actions taken in the story were not courageous, however. When the character O'Brien makes the decision to go to war, he claims it was the cowardly thing to do. This caused me to think of courage in a new way because I always thought it took a great deal of courage to go into battle. But it was cowardly to O'Brien because of his motives; he wasn't motivated by a desire to serve his country or be a part of something greater, he went because he didn't want to shame himself or his family. He saw this as cowardly because he gave into the pressures surrounding him instead of doing what he felt was best for him. Most all of the soldiers are the same way, doing brave things not because they are brave but because they are afraid of the shame that comes with not being brave. While speculating about the man he killed, he wrote about how that man, too, was only in the war because he felt he had to be, showing a commonality between different people, and how cowardice is universally a stronger impetus than courage. In the chapter entitled "Speaking of Courage," Norman Bowker believes his many medals of recognition were not for anything special, but just for getting through the everyday. That courage was not found in the big gestures and grand actions, but in doing the undesirable everyday necessities to make it to another one.

Impressions of The Things They Carried

There are some pretty universal absolutes in life which I have never thought to question. I have always valued absolute honesty and morality. I have always been fairly certain of the right and wrong thing to do in most situations, and that the only thing to do is the right thing to do. That is why I found many of O'Brien's points in this novel to be so mind boggling; he exposed the actual ambiguity surrounding things I previously accepted to be absolutes.
Truth, morality, right and wrong, he proposed, are contradictory and uncertain. Something as wrong as war is filled with beautiful things, like the strongest of brotherhoods only able to be forged in the most extreme of situations. He passes off fictitious stories as truer than truth, and I don't disagree with him, but I don't understand why either. This novel was incredibly thought provoking in the way it dealt with ideas that I was so sure of as flexible and blurred.

There’s Your Moral

“There’s your moral,” a soldier declares, gesturing at an absolutely meaningless object.
 The soldiers have found, as O’Brien conveys in his novel, that there is no moral to war, no concrete meaning, or lesson, or right or wrong. A common theme across more than one of the war poems we studied is that war is not a natural thing; it is not something that humans can understand, it is too extreme. This can be applied to an analysis of this novel to support the point that there is no moral to be found in war.
In the chapter entitled “how to tell a true war story,” O’Brien writes of the contradictions of a war. War is pain, but it is also beauty. War is death, but in it the soldiers have never felt more alive. There is an ambiguity to war which O’Brien likens to a thick and all consuming fog, blurring the once crystal clear boundaries between right and wrong. Not during the war and not even decades after can O’Brien tease out a meaning, a purpose, a lesson from the war in which he fought. The only moral, he has found, is that there is no moral to be found.