Cross?s feelings. "On the morning after Ted Lavender died, First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross crouched at the bottom of his foxhole and burned Martha?s letters. Then he burned the two photographs. There was a steady rain falling. . . He realized it was only a gesture. Stupid, he thought. Sentimental, too, but mostly just stupid. Lavender was dead. You couldn?t burn the blame." (Hansen, 436) This section is very vivid in the portrayal of Lt. Cross. The reader can easily see the man, crouching in the bottom of a muddy hole, burning photographs while thinking of a terrible blame he felt was his: it is a sad scene to picture. Another thing O?Brien does in his story is, as I mentioned above, to concentrate more on thoughts and seemingly minor details rather than on events. In the story, O?Brien skips the burning of a village in just a simple remark that makes it almost feel like an afterthought. ("Afterward they burned Than Khe." Hansen, 427) But, he spends almost half of the story explaining what exactly the men carried with them, going into full detail of why they carried these things, how much they weighed, etc. This is for a very good reason, though. O?Brien uses this weight factor as a symbolism and parallel to the "weight" of the emotional baggage and mental conflicts the men must also carry with them as they trek through this strange foreign land. At the bottom of the eleventh page O?Brien mentions this directly: "They all carried emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing---these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity! , they had tangible weight." (Hansen, 434-435) He then goes on for another half of a page describing other emotional baggage they carried. This shows some of the real horror of war; not who wins or who dies, but also what effect it has on all parties involved, including the soldiers out there usually fighting battles that they would rather not be fighting. Als...
