Thesis driven argument - Essay Example

By mentioning the weight of the equipment, O’Brien shows how each character had a specific role and a specific burden to carry, whether it was being in charge of carrying a radio, being responsible for a man’s death, or being in love with a girl back home. Throughout the story O’Brien shows, from before leaving for Vietnam to unloading all of their equipment and coming home, the soldiers had a tremendously heavy physical and emotional burden to carry. The land itself and the foreign, unfamiliar terrain was a burden upon the soldiers as well.

Because of being in the jungle, they “carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds.” (14). This was not something that any of them were used to dealing with back at home. The difficulty of traveling through the terrain was a burden and difficulty as well: “They carried the land itself--Vietnam, the place, the soil--a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces” (15).

This was a burden that everybody had to deal with. The burden of being in a position of constant danger was another burden for all of the characters. They knew that at any moment they might be attacked, and they had to be prepared for the event. Each soldier had to carry various weapons: “In addition to the three standard weapons--the M-60, the M-16, and M-79.shotguns and silencers and blackjacks and bayonets and C-4 plastic explosives…they all carried fragmentation grenades” (7). Far from being a complete list of the weaponry that they carried, these weapons that they carried were constant reminders of the burden of being in such a dangerous situation to the point of needing all of those weapons.

Even more than that, the burden they carried had as much to do with destructive power of the weapons that they were carrying: “They carried all they could bear, and then some,