the things they carried field trip discussion questions

The Things They Carried Field Trip Summary

• After he writes "In the Field," O'Brien takes a ten-year-old Kathleen to Vietnam with him. They go to the field where Kiowa died.
• The place looks smaller, and peaceful. It's twenty years after Kiowa's death.
• Kathleen doesn't really get why they're there. She says it smells.
• During the touristy part of their trip, Kathleen has held up well.
• She asks why the war started. O'Brien says that some people wanted one thing, and others wanted another thing. When Kathleen asks what he wanted, he tells her that all he wanted was to stay alive.
• She doesn't understand why he can't forget the war, why he needed to come to Vietnam, and why he was in Vietnam in the first place.
• At the field where Kiowa died, O'Brien takes a few pictures. Kathleen is bored.
• O'Brien pulls out a cloth bundle from the jeep and wades into the river. Ignoring Kathleen's protests, he gets to the point where Mitchell Sanders had found Kiowa's rucksack, and takes Kiowa's moccasins out of the bundle. He lets the moccasins sink down into the muck.
• He notices an old farmer watching him. The old man raises his shovel grimly, then brings it down and begins to dig.
• O'Brien gets out of the water, and Kathleen observes, correctly, that he stinks to high heaven. She asks him if the old man is mad at him, and he says no. All that is over.

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W hy's T his F unny?

The Things They Carried

• In “Field Trip” the narrator returns to Vietnam after the war. Who accompanies him on the trip.
• what does the narrator bring with him on the field trip that he intends to “and actually does” leave behind in Vietnam? Explain why this item is significant to the events of the tiny night 20 years prior

Tim's daughter Kathleen accompanies him on the trip. He brings Kiowa's moccasins with him and buries them in the mud as a sign of respect.

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The Things They Carried

Tim o’brien.

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Tim O’Brien's The Things They Carried . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

The Things They Carried: Introduction

The things they carried: plot summary, the things they carried: detailed summary & analysis, the things they carried: themes, the things they carried: quotes, the things they carried: characters, the things they carried: symbols, the things they carried: literary devices, the things they carried: theme wheel, brief biography of tim o’brien.

Historical Context of The Things They Carried

Other books related to the things they carried.

• Full Title: The Things They Carried
• When Written: 1980s
• Where Written: The United States
• When Published: 1990
• Literary Period: Contemporary
• Genre: War Novel
• Setting: Vietnam; Minnesota; central Iowa

Extra Credit for The Things They Carried

Film Adaptation. "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" was made into a movie in 1998. It was titled A Soldier's Sweetheart and starred Kiefer Sutherland.

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The Things They Carried Discussion Questions

• In the opening chapter, the narrator writes that his fellow soldiers “carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing.” When most people think about what soldiers fear most, do you think they would say it’s this particular fear?
• In the last two sentences of “On the Rainy River,” the narrator writes, “I was a coward. I went to the war.” What does this story have to say about choices and consequences?
• In the second section of “On the Rainy River,” the narrator describes in vivid detail his job as a declotter in a meatpacking plant. How are the images he uses in describing this job similar to the images he uses to characterize fighting in Vietnam? What effect or idea does the book convey with this related imagery?
• In “On the Rainy River,” the narrator claims that Elroy Berdahl was “the hero of my life.” Discuss this characterization.
• About halfway through “On the Rainy River,” the narrator begins referring to the reader as you. Consider, for example, the repeated references and questions to you on page 56. What effect does this sudden occurrence of direct address have on the reader?
• Explain the narrator’s definition of “a true war story,” as explained in “How to Tell a True War Story.” What does he mean when he says that true war stories are never about war? What does he mean when he writes of one story, “That’s a true story that never happened”?
• In “The Man I Killed,” the narrator repeatedly describes details about the victim. What point do you think the book makes in this chapter and elsewhere about the humanity of the casualties?
• In “Speaking of Courage,” the narrator describes the experiences of Norman Bowker after he returned from fighting in Vietnam. What points do this chapter and the remainder of the book make about veterans’ lives after the war?
• The Things They Carried has several different accounts of a single event, Kiowa’s death. How does this relate to memory, storytelling and truth?
• How is the story of Linda, the little girl, in the final chapter, “The Lives of the Dead,” related to themes and issues raised earlier in the book?

Content last updated: October 31, 2003

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• The Things They Carried
• Tim O'Brien
• Literature Notes
• Book Summary
• About The Things They Carried
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• On the Rainy River
• Enemies and Friends
• How to Tell a True War Story
• The Dentist
• Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong
• The Man I Killed and Ambush
• Speaking of Courage
• In the Field
• The Ghost Soldiers
• The Lives of the Dead
• Character Analysis
• Lt. Jimmy Cross
• Norman Bowker
• Mary Anne Bell
• Henry Dobbins
• Tim O'Brien Biography
• Critical Essays
• The Things They Carried in a Historical Context
• Narrative Structure in The Things They Carried
• Style and Storytelling in The Things They Carried
• The Things They Carried and Loss of Innocence
• The Things They Carried and Questions of Genre
• Full Glossary for The Things They Carried
• Essay Questions
• Practice Projects
• Cite this Literature Note

Summary and Analysis Field Trip

O'Brien and his daughter travel to Vietnam and visit the site of Kiowa's death. O'Brien and 10-year-old Kathleen visit the tourist spots, which she enjoys, but it is clear to him that she does not understand the war that had happened 20 years earlier. She wonders "why was everybody so mad at everybody else." She thinks her father is "weird" because he cannot forget the past.

They arrive at the field where Kiowa died, and O'Brien notes how it looks like any farming field now. They walk to where the field meets the river. O'Brien unwraps a cloth bundle that holds Kiowa's old moccasins. With the moccasins, he wades in, swimming out to where Kiowa's rucksack had been recovered, and reaches in and wedges the moccasins into the river bottom. O'Brien holds the glance of an old Vietnamese farmer working nearby, whom Kathleen thinks looks angry. The man holds a shovel over his head like a flag, and O'Brien tells his daughter that the anger that the man would have felt was finished and in the past.

The point of this vignette is for O'Brien to attain some closure for the loss of Kiowa. He held an image in his mind for over 20 years of the field where Kiowa had died, but he immediately finds that the reality is nothing like the image in his mind. For example, now the land seems to be at peace, where before every hill and blade of grass made him feel fear at night — the fear of war. Neither his memory nor his field trip were truer than the other — they were simply different truths. O'Brien questions what is Vietnam: Is it a memory, is it a country, is it both, or is it neither?

Not insignificantly, O'Brien brings his daughter, Kathleen, on this trip, for he wants her to understand more about his past. Yet he finds that as attentive and interested as she is, she does not understand much, like the need to trek out into one of a thousand fields in the middle of a foreign country. When she asks about the meaning, all O'Brien can do is give an obscure answer. At first he says that there are three different perspectives, Kathleen's, his own, and those who sent him to this country. In the end, though, he simply answers, "I don't know." It is not that Vietnam has no meaning, but that he cannot understand or explain it to anyone else, even his own daughter.

Kathleen does not see the need to remember; she calls her father "weird" for his inability to forget that past. O'Brien does not see himself as weird, however, and although he never says it, he must regret his daughter's immediate desire to ignore such an important piece of his past. Perhaps this is why when they are in the field, he does not make an exhaustive effort to explain everything to her.

The scene in the field is the climax of the story, where for once the production of meaning comes from O'Brien rather than simply having meaning swarm around him. He describes the field as the locus for his emotional emptiness; he blames it for the man he has become. It is in this field, however, that he is finally able to create meaning for some part of what happened to him. Unlike the dancing girl from "Style" and the unintelligible monks from "Church," this time it is O'Brien, wading out into the marsh, touching the water, who is participating in an action that has a meaning. Conversely, Kathleen is now the observer who can merely look upon her father and not understand what he is doing. So O'Brien the writer creates a cycle where meaning and ignorance move through a generation. Now he as an ex-soldier, a friend, a father, and also a writer will tell stories and give meaning. His audience, however, may not understand him, and maybe be left only to mock his movements rather than participate and communicate with him. O'Brien's battle has shifted from a field in Vietnam to a culture, and rather than a gun or knife he now has a story, a book, and a family with which he must contend.

Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum Burial place of Ho Chi Minh, Vietnamese leader and first president of North Vietnam (1954-1969). His army was victorious in the French Indochina War (1946-1954), and he later led North Vietnam's struggle to defeat the U.S.-supported government in South Vietnam.

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