#The things they carried full#

Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April.īy necessity, and because it was SOP, they all carried steel helmets that weighed five pounds including the liner and camouflage cover. Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-sized bars of soap he’d stolen on R&R in Sydney, Australia. Henry Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations he was especially fond of canned peaches in heavy syrup over pound cake. Together, these items weighed between fifteen and twenty pounds, depending upon a man’s habits or rate of metabolism. Among the necessities or near-necessities were 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. The things they carried were largely determined by necessity.

#The things they carried full#

Slowly, a bit distracted, he would get up and move among his men, checking the perimeter, then at full dark he would return to his hole and watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin. At dusk, he would carefully return the letters to his rucksack.

They were signed “Love, Martha,” but Lieutenant Cross understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant. She often quoted lines of poetry she never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. She was an English major at Mount Sebastian, and she wrote beautifully about her professors and roommates and midterm exams, about her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for Virginia Woolf. 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. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there. He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. 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. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. You can find every Esquire story ever published at Esquire Classic.įirst Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. This passage originally appeared in the August 1986 issue of the magazine.

A collection of linked short stories told from the ground in Vietnam, Esquire would publish five of the vignettes. This is the first chapter of what would become Tim O’Brien's award-winning book The Things They Carried.