carried a corpse out to "a dry paddy. . .and sat smoking the dead man's dope until the chopper came. Lieutenant Cross kept to himself"(8). Even the squad's supervisor, the platoon leader Lieutenant Cross, is unaffected by the soldiers' blatant use of an illegal substance; he has become so used to the occurrence that he no longer condemns its use. For even a leader of men to be morally warped by the war is an effective idea in O'Brien's discouragement of war.As George Carlin once said to a New York audience, "We love war. We are a warlike people, and therefore we love war"(Carlin 1992). This view is common today among Americans since the advent of long-distance warfare and bright, colorful explosions; however, in the guerrilla warfare of Vietnam, the grudging participants loathed the idea. Tim O'Brien very effectively portrays their hatred and the severe negative effects the war had on American soldiers in his excellent, convincing novel The Things They Carried. The skillful choice of details and several types of diction that reveal his theme of induced violence, his anti-war statement, and his view of the reversal of morals among GIs are effective in presenting O'Brien's views in this, "The Last War Novel"(McClung 96)....
