Question 7 - The Things They Carried

The story "The things they carried" is true to it's title, as it explores the items carried by soldiers during the Vietnam war. The author, Tim O'Brien, examines the obvious physical items carried by different soldiers including certain letters, pictures, and other things that hold the promise of tomorrow back home in the U.S. O'Brien explores a much deeper meaning of "things carried" by these soldiers which includes a wide range of emotional scars that the war inflicted on these young men. When Smiley talks about "de-genderizing" the war, I believe she would like for the reader to not look at war in the typical fashion: Men go to war, women stay home and go to college; she may look at these stereotypes as perhaps damaging to those women who live under this segmentation. I personally do not see how to completely escape this depiction due to many different numerical statistics of this war and others.
When Smiley speaks of the "story re-defines American masculinity", I think she is referring to the look at what is important to the soldiers in this story, which some may think is not consistent with an "overly masculine war machine" who has little room for feelings outside the war and the job at hand. I do not think that the story redefines American masculinity, only describes it further, and showing different sides of the men who cherished the "normal" things that home meant to them. This story implies that in addition to all of the physical things that the soldiers carried with them, each with an accurate weight included, there were many more emotional burdens that outweighed the physical items.

Shane Greenup