The Things They Carried

This story is one the narrator has never told anyone before—not even his wife. It makes him squirm. In June of 1968, one month after graduating from college, the narrator was drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. He was 21 years old. The war seemed wrong to him: “Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons” (38). He took a small stand against the war, although nothing radical. He receives the draft notice on June 17, 1968. His mother and father are eating lunch in the kitchen. He opens the letter, reads the first lines, and feels “the blood go thick behind [his] eyes” (39). He feels he is too good to go to war and not a soldier by nature.

The narrator spends the summer of 1968 working at a meat-packing plant in his hometown in Minnesota: “The plant specialized in pork products, and for eight hours a day I stood on a quarter-mile assembly line—more properly, a disassembly line—removing blood clots from the necks of dead pigs” (40). He uses a heavy water gun and comes home after work smelling of pig. Even though he bathes and scrubs thoroughly, the smell doesn’t go away.

He borrows his father’s car and aimlessly drives, thinking over his options. The government has ended many graduate school deferments. He cannot claim to be opposed to the war as a matter of principle or on religious grounds. He feels a sense of terror; he doesn’t want to die. He confesses, “[a]t some point in mid-July I began thinking seriously about Canada” (42). His conscience tells him he should make a run for it, but he feels split. He fears losing the respect of his friends, parents, and neighbors if he leaves for Canada. He feels a range of emotions—including sickness—until one day, he feels something break inside him while working on the pig line. After dropping his water gun, the narrator drives home, showers, packs a suitcase, and drives north.

He spends the night in a gas station parking lot and “[i]n the morning, after gassing up, I headed straight west along the Rainy River, which separates Minnesota from Canada, and which for me separated one life from another” (45). He eventually pulls into “an old fishing resort called the Tip Top Lodge” (45). The man who greets him when he opens the door is named Elroy Berdahl. He is “eighty-one years old, skinny and shrunken and mostly bald. He wore a flannel shirt and brown work pants” (46). He has blue-ish gray eyes. Without asking, he seems to know the narrator’s exact situation.

The narrator spends six days at the lodge. He is the only guest; he eats his meals with Elroy Berdahl and plays Scrabble with him in the evenings. They rarely engage in small talk. Throughout his stay, the narrator often feels sick or filled with sorrow and has trouble sleeping. He imagines being chased by the police after escaping into the woods of Canada. Elroy Berdahl has the narrator assist with chores around the lodge. At one point it seems as though Elroy is on the verge of directly asking the narrator something, but at the very last moment changes his mind.

At dinner one night, the narrator asks Elroy how much he owes for his stay. Elroy adds up the number of nights and meals the narrator had and comes up with a figure. After washing the dishes, however, Elroy decides to subtract wages from the figure, calculating the number of hours that the narrator worked around the lodge. Elroy calculates that he owes the narrator $115. He places “four fifties” (51) on the table, but the narrator refuses to pick them up. The next morning, the narrator finds “an envelope tacked to my door. Inside were the four fifties and a two-word note that said EMERGENCY FUND. The man knew” (51).

On the narrator’s last full day at the lodge, Elroy takes him fishing out on the Rainy River. It’s a sunny and cool afternoon. Elroy steers the boat upstream, crossing into Canadian waters. After he cuts the engine, Elroy “opened up his tackle box and busied himself with a bobber and a piece of wire leader, humming to himself, his eyes down” (53). The narrator stares at Elroy and then out to Canada. He notices the brush, timber, berries, and squirrels along the shoreline, and feels a tightness in his chest. Eventually, he begins to cry. Elroy hums to himself, pretending not to notice. The narrator realizes that “Canada had become a pitiful fantasy” and that “[r]ight then, with the shore so close, I understood that I would not do what I should do. I would not swim away from my hometown and my country and my life” (55). He visualizes figures and events of his personal history—past and future—mixed with historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln lining the shore. After some time, Elroy turns the boat back toward Minnesota. The narrator leaves the lodge the next morning, drives home, “and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again” (58).