Lieutenant Jimmy Cross In The Things They Carried

"Lieutenant Cross kept to himself. He pictured Martha's smooth young face, thinking he loved her more than anything, more than his men, and now Ted Lavender was dead because he loved her so much and could not stop thinking about her" (O'Brien 6).

He has so much responsibility that he blames himself for the death of two of his soldiers: Ted Lavender and Kiowa. There are two deaths that Cross blames himself for: Ted Lavender and Kiowa. He feels guilty because he thinks that if he had been watching his soldiers carefully than it would not have happened. “When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war… A moment of carelessness or bad judgment or plain stupidity carried consequences that lasted forever.” (O’Brien 169) Someone or something must be blamed when a man died. Jimmy Cross always blamed himself because he was the leader. He carried a lot of guilt throughout the war. He blames himself for thinking of Martha instead of focusing on the war.

Through the exchange of letters between Lt. Jimmy Cross and the center of his infatuation Martha in “The Things They Carried”, he allowed himself to become more obsessed with the thought of her. The letters simply state the events Martha encounter in her daily life, lines

"They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing."(20) The novel The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien is collection of war story that focuses around his life and relationships with people in the Vietnam War, especially the part people usually choose not to focus on: The burden, the guilt and the regret. In the war stories it is forgotten that soldiers that fought in those wars are real people that had to deal with the consequences of their actions. O'Brien integrates this into the book by making Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, the highest ranking soldier in their group, the scapegoat.

This statement suggests that he wants to taste her, yet they have not (or will not) kiss each other. Furthermore, this provides evidence that his insatiable love for her is a weighty test for Lt. Cross -- and this burdensome weight drives Lt. Cross to become detached from important situations. Psychologically, Martha's letters make Lt. Cross fixated on his love, which the reader supposes is unreciprocated by Martha. Clearly, Lt. Cross wants a mutually loving relationship with Martha, evidenced when the narrator states, "More than anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her" (434). Twice in the first two pages, Lt. Cross notes, "They were not love letters" (434). Furthermore, when Martha's salutation, ?Love, Martha,' is mentioned, Lt. Cross sadly resigns and "understood that ?Love' was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant" (435). These thoughts are not obsessive in and of themselves, but the fact that Lt. Cross mulls over these overwhelming feelings while leading a group of soldiers suggests that Martha is an inordinate weight on Lt Cross' shoulders.

By choosing to daydream about Martha, Cross not only puts himself in danger, but his men as well. O’Brien writes, “He pictured Martha’s smooth young face, thinking he loved her more than anything, more than his men, and now Ted Lavender was dead because he loved her so much and could not stop thinking about her” (337-8). Because Cross is thinking of Martha he didn’t realize that there was someone watching his squad, which causes the death of one of the members, Ted Lavender. With this readers can determine that Cross is not taking the danger of the war seriously, and is too caught up with his feelings for Martha, even though he knows that she doesn’t feel the same way. This the start of Cross’s change in character, “and as a consequence Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war” (345). Cross realizes that the death of Lavender is on his hands because he wasn’t serious enough, and would have to carry this death for the rest of war, and possibly his

Tim O’Brien talks in the first chapter “The Things They Carried” about the soldier Jimmy Cross, who is blaming himself for the death of Ted Lavender. “He tried not to cry. With his entrenching tool, which weighed 5 pounds, he began digging a hole in the earth.

In the beginning of the story I thought this was going to be a love story about a man at war a girl that is back home. Due to the first line in the story saying, “First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letter from a girl named Martha, a junior at mount Sebastian College in New Jersey,” (O’Brien pg. 322). Which made me think this will be inserting love stories are always my go to book, but then it says “They were not the love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack,” (O’Brien pg. 322). At that moment I was confused on what the author was saying, but intrigued on where it was going to lead the story too. The more Jimmy Cross talked about how the mean “humped” what they brought and

In the first chapter in the book, titled The Things They Carried, Jimmy Cross is one of the many examples throughout the novel in where a soldier has a way to escape from the realities of war. Cross, who is a lieutenant in his company, carries two photographs of a girl named Martha whom he truly loves and wishes nothing else but to be with her in the end. Along with the photographs, he carries letters from Martha herself as well as her good-luck pebble in his mouth. Martha’s letters has a huge impact on Cross’s escape on reality because those letters do not mention war at all but for him to stay safe. All of these items comforts Cross and eventually reminisce about the times when he was back home with Martha away from any war. He relives a moment when he was with Martha at the movies, and then remembers that he touched her knee but Martha did not approve and pushed his hands away. Now while he’s in Vietnam, he does nothing but fantasizes taking her to her bed, tying her up, and touching that one knee knee all night long.

Jimmy Cross, they met at a college in New Jersey but nothing sparked between them besides a friendship. There isn't any hope of them ever being together but Jimmy Cross still thinks about her constantly everyday. In one particular letter she sends him a good-luck-pebble. "Martha wrote that she had found the pebble on the Jersey shoreline and carried it in her breast pocket for several days" (8). Jimmy Cross reads the letter spends hours wondering who she was at the beach with, if she was with a man, if they were a couple. When the women sent letters home, it really helped keep the morale of the soldier's. Although Martha continues to kind of mislead Jimmy when she signs the letters "love." "Ted Lavender was shot in the head on his way back from peeing. He lay with his mouth open" (12).

In Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”, O’Brien created several allusions that each character endured during the Vietnam War. Throughout the story were vast representations of the things soldiers carried both mentally and physically. The things they carried symbolized their individual roles internally and externally. In addition to symbolism, imagination was a focal theme that stood out amongst the characters. This particular theme played a role as the silent killer amongst Lt. Cross and the platoon both individually and collectively as a group. The theme of imagination created an in depth look of how the war was perceived through each character which helped emphasize their thoughts from an emotional stand point of being young men out at war.

He had touched these items day by day, wondering who had been beside her while she had retrieved the pebble from the beach, or who placed the shadow in the photo of her. His mind would race day and night, making it difficult for him to provide adequate attention on the war. Cross “would yell at his men to spread out the column, to keep their eyes open, but then he would slip away into daydreams, just pretending, walking barefoot along the Jersey shore; with Martha, carrying nothing” (396). Cross would hope for nothing more than to be carrying nothing. These physical objects weighed him down terribly after the death of Ted Lavender. He had loved Martha much more than his men, and due to his overpowering love he had lost one of them. The pebble was not only a symbol of importance to Cross as he dealt with the trauma of war, but as the physical weight he carried due to the death of his man. These physical symbols helped to identify a shift in the story when Cross decides to open up and make a change to the way he is coping with the war after Lavender’s death. This “wouldn’t help Lavender, he knew that, but from this point on he would comport himself as an officer” (403).

The psychological burden that plagues the soldiers the most is fear. The fear of death. Even though the soldiers’ experience fear at some point, showing that fear only reveals vulnerabilities to the enemy and sometimes the crueler fellow soldiers. “They carried all the 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.” (O'Brien, 1990) The

Jimmy Cross being the immature lieutenant is affected being responsible of his men, and carries much of the war’s burden. Every time one of Cross’s men dies, he experiences deep regrettable feelings that he should have been a better

Aside from abandoning the letters and pictures, Jimmy Cross also abandons his innocence. He wants to concentrate on the responsibilities of leading his men, for "he was now determined to perform his duties firmly and without negligence." The new lieutenant Cross would dispose of the good luck pebble, issue "new SOP's, and would confiscate the remainder of Lavender's dope. Overall, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross would accept the blame for what had happened to Ted