Field of Feces, Fatality, and Fault

Clint Kadera

Mrs. Hurlbert

Juniors Honors English

November 22, 2010

Field of Feces, Fatality, and Fault

Looking for Kiowa’s body, searching for Billie’s picture, and seeking for the narrator’s memories are just three events that Tim O’Brien explains the “…story-truth…” of In The Things They Carried, chapters In the Field and Field Trip.  The first chapter, In the Field, describes the horrendous task of finding a cadaver masked by mud amongst the thigh-deep shit fields of the Song Tra Bong River.   The deceased man, Kiowa, was a “…fine soldier and a fine human being, a devout Baptist.” Taking full responsibility of his death, Lieutenant Cross would not permit “…such a good man…” to be lost under the muck.  By attempting to take all blame, being the leader, learning everyone as individuals, and having the last name of Cross, the author makes clear Lieutenant Cross is the Christ figure.  As the loosely ranked platoon of eighteen searched the field, one young boy stood alone in knee-deep water, reaching down.  In Hebrew, the word for alive, (chai), has a numerical value of 18, which is the same amount of soldiers still in the patrol. 

The night before, the same night Kiowa suffocated under muck, the young boy had been with him, huddled together under ponchos, displaying his picture of his girlfriend to Kiowa with a flashlight.  Within the young boy’s mind, the shooting on their camp from the Vietcong started as a result of his flashlight, acting like a target in the night.  Through the boy’s interpretation, Kiowa’s death had been his fault.  Like Jimmy Cross, as he searched he was “…explaining things to an absent judge,” not attempting to push guilt aside, but to know where he stood on matters.  Surprisingly, he had not been looking for Kiowa within the slime but the picture of his girlfriend, Billie, he had misplaced.  The boy saw the picture as closure.  If he could find the picture, then Kiowa’s death might not seem so painful, that he hadn’t died to see a careless photo.  In an obsessive compulsive, hoarding-like manner, to emphasize the importance of the picture would hopefully weaken the guilt of indirectly killing Kiowa.  Who was this laconic young boy?  Was it Tim O’Brien?  Where is the character now?  Did he ever find the picture?  Would it have mattered? 

When the troop finds Kiowa, the author describes his body as being “…angled steeply into the mud, upside down, like a diver who had plunged headfirst off a high tower.”  The pool in the simile, like most bodies of water in literature, represents the cleansing and rebirth of Azar and Lieutenant Cross.  With every death, Cross grows more and more into a Christ figure.  Azar’s patent, childish affectation was ferreted from the situation, no longer hiding behind jokes and now embracing death for the event it is.

Later on in the book, chapter Field Trip explains of Tim O’Brien and his ten-year-old daughter journeying back to the swampy area.  Though the field was still there, it had not been as he remembered it.  The field was smaller, less menacing, and filled with bright sun.  O’Brien described the situation as “like waking from a summer nap, feeling lazy and sluggish.”  After stripping to his underwear, O’Brien waded in a small stream, near where the corpse was found 20 years ago, placing Kiowa’s moccasins deep underneath the mud forever. 

He later returned to the jeep, meeting eyes and exchanging respect with a farmer fifteen meters up the field, who raised his shovel in the air, “…like a flag…”, metaphorically meaning the closure  and peace of mind the narrator now has after visiting river, feeling something in his heart go shut “…while something else swung open.”  By burying the moccasins, the narrator has buried his guilt.  The muddy water O’Brien waded in symbolized a rebirth, a cleansing time.  The very last line said by O’Brien, “All that’s finished,” not only signifies the end of the war, but the end of his guilt. 

In the bible, fifteen, the same number of meters the farmer and the narrator were apart, is a holy number, due to it being the product of three and five.   Five on its own symbolizes grace, while three symbolizes divine perfection, thus fifteen represents Divine Grace, the perfect moment of no enemies, no war, no guilt, no fear.  O’Brien problems had been resolved.

In a way, O’Brien’s daughter symbolizes the reader.  Even the most sagacious person that’s unexposed to any war may never appreciate and understand a true soldier, the events they’ve watched, the actions they’ve done, the memories they have.  How should O’Brien tell the daughter or the reader?  What words should he use?  What actions should he include?  What feelings should he express?  it’s almost hopeless to attempt injecting the pain, excitement, and vibe a soldier has into the average person’s brain.  Looking for Kiowa’s body, searching for Billie’s picture, and seeking for the narrator’s memories are just three events that Tim O’Brien explains the “…story-truth…” of In The Things They Carried, chapters In the Field and Field Trip.