TTTC - One Pager 1

Annalise Steinmann P.
1
In The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, O’Brien focalizes on the global problem of
war tarnishing one’s ability to correctly process one’s emotions, in his passage about the
young VC water buffalo, within the vignette titled “How To Tell a True War Story.”
O’Brien’s use of overly casual, non descriptive language regarding the deaths of his
fellow soldiers throughout the book juxtaposed to his detailed description of the death of
the waterbuffalo aid him in conveying the global issue of war’s creating distorted emotional
reactions to traumas.. For example, after the death of Rat Kiley’s best friend, Curt Lemon,
Kiley reacts rather unemotionally and stiffly, similarly to the rest of the soldiers, including
O’Brien. O’Brien conveys this through simply stating that Lemon was “playing catch with Rat
Kiley, laughing, and then he was dead,” only to follow that statement with a comment on the
thick tree cover and the lengthy amount of time it took to cut an “LZ for the dustoff”( 74).
O’Brien presents Lemon’s death rather plainly and flatly, as his death was purely
unsurprising to these Vietnam soldiers; it was something they’d become desensitized to, as
they’d seen enough of their platoon killed and have been responsible for killing many
others. As the audience would take his death rather flatly as well due to these feelings
posed by O’Brien, he uses the death of the water buffalo to encapsulate the immense pain
being felt by Kiley, which is shown through O’Brien’s intense, detailed description of the
water buffallo’s murder, as he explains the order in which Kiley shot every body part and the
level of pain felt by the water buffalo at each shot (75). This is because animals hold a
special place in the hearts of humans, as they generally represent innocence and an overall
pleasing atmosphere, and the appalling death of the water buffalo is something that affects
more of the readers more closely, not just because of the detail, but because of the animal
itself. This water buffalo represents the innocence in all of the soldiers that’s brutally
murdered and destroyed upon arrival to Vietnam, and the death of many innocent
Vietnamese and U.S soldiers within the war, and in other words, the buffalo is used to depict
the evolution of these soldiers’ emotions and ability to process them.
Also, the emphasis on certain details within the passage exhibits the strange
emotional behaviour of the soldiers, touching on the global issue of how war acts as the
fun-house mirror through which emotions are filtered. For instance, When first approaching
the water buffalo, Rat Kiley treats the baby animal with kindness, offering him a can of C
rations and stroking his nose, when suddenly “Rat shrugged,” and began barbarously killing
the animal (75). The small, seemingly insignificant word, “shrugged,” noted an entire 180
degree shift in Kiley’s mood: from nice to murderous, showing how unstable the emotions
of a soldier in Vietnam are. Rather than simply mourning the death of his friend, Kiley reacts
with such a violence and passion, showing that if the setting of war wasn’t present, if war
hadn’t tarnished Kiley’s ability to properly handle his emotions, a baby buffalo wouldn’t have
died within Kiley’s grieving process. Later, to dispose of the body, Kiowa and Mitchell
Sanders “dumped it in the village well”(76). Despite its appearance as a minor detail, this is a
testament to the mentality of soldiers during war: even after witnessing the emotional
breakdown of a fellow soldier, in the wake of the death of one of their own men, they still
find it within them to smite the Vietnamese, to avenge the death of Lemon through an
attack on an innocent Vietnamese village, as war has warped their ability to simply grieve
the death of their friend without hurting other people in the process.
In conclusion, the anecdote of the VC water buffalo helps O’Brien convey the global
issue of war severely altering how emotions are processed.

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Annalise Steinmann P.

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