Literary Fashions in War LiteratureThe immediate impact of The Things They Wore is based on O'Brien's fidelity to detail. The items they carried were largely determined by necessity. Necessities or near-necessities included P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat pads, wrist watches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, Kool-Aid packets, lighters, matches, sewing kits, military payment certificates, C rations and two or three canteens of water. Together, these items weighed between 15 and 20 pounds. These facts combine with the intangible and the psychological. They all carried ghosts, shared the weight of memory, and carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die or who had already died. O'Brien uses his details and sense of war to make sense of his war story. I felt that the use of tragedy, myth and gothic were well-constructed literary modes in the novel "The Things They Wore". These men in the story carry heavy physical burdens, they also all carry heavy emotional burdens, composed of grief, terror, love and longing. Each man's physical burden underlines his emotional burden. After the war, the psychological burden men carry during war continues to define them. Those who survive carry guilt, grief, and confusion, and many of the stories in the collection are about these survivors' attempts to come to terms with their experience. Repeatedly in The Things They Carried, O'Brien forces this image before us to convey the tragedy of war. It also serves as a metaphor for the struggle of American soldiers in Vietnam, "the shit" referring to the "daily combat operations endured by GIs in the field" (Clark 463). O'Brien relays this conventional metap...... middle of paper ...... tracing external mythologies to internal mythologies and comparing both to actual truths. O'Brien begins making these comparisons early on, when he presents the outward mythology of courage in opposition to the experience of his soldiers. O'Brien says, "War is all about posture and conduct" (15). This is not simply a reference to how soldiers should stand or how they carry their packs. It's also about the things soldiers carry in their minds, and the posture they must maintain is the challenge of showing courage in the face of immense fear. A myth, like that of O'Brien at the head of modern war novels, the term courage takes on new dimensions. It becomes more personal. It requires an honest quest on the part of the individual to discover their own inner truths. Once found, we must have the courage to defend it against the enemy that is myth..