Elysabeth Buncab

Boyatt

AP Literature

22 March 2019

The Things They Carried​: Open Prompt

One’s environmental surroundings can affect that person’s psychological and moral traits

greatly due to different types of pressures and demands it has on the individual. Tim O’brien

portrays how the rough conditions of the Vietnam War affects the soldier psychological traits,

making them change completely from who they are in the civilian world. O’brien uses the

character, Rat Kiley, to emphasize how a person;s surrounding takes a toll on the person’s

psychological well being, through vivid imagery, emotional appeal, and brutality of war

decisions.

To begin, Rat Kiley was a medic that has experienced probably the most violence out of

any soldier at war because he has to deal with the blood and terrible injuries everyone

experienced. Being a medic and experiencing the pain and blood second hand can take a toll on a

person’s mental health. Also, being a medic, which is essential for the battlefield you have an

added pressure of saving everyone that has been shot, fallen a victim to a booby trap or a life

threatening disease. And losing a soldier, even if you did everything you could do, is added extra

stress and guilt because the medic couldn't save them. O’brien describes the war as hot, dark,

lonely, and savage-like. He shows how the dark affected Rat Kiley so much that Kiley shot his

own foot because he couldn’t take it. The pressure and uncomfortableness of having to stay

awake throughout the silent and pitch black night, while trying to avoid the major threat of an
attack by the enemies when basically blind creates another type of fera inside someone’s head. It

makes people think about their darkest thoughts and hear things, like Rat Kiley. The difficult

adjustment to do the opposite of what you have to took a toll on Rat Kiley’s psychological well

being making him become mad. O’brien’s dark and descriptive imagery emphasizes that under

pressure of a new environment can affect a person’s psychological health.

Continuing, Tim O’brien describes how the tough conditions of war can create a new

type of personality for a person. Rat Kiley, whom was a good person going into the war

transformed into an emotional mess when exiting the war. The adjustment for him to be silent

throughout the night and fight blindly was too hard that he began to emotionally breakdown and

question himself. In the story Kiley begins to talk to himself and to the voices in his head

because that was the effect of war on him. Throughout his process of becoming mad he would

breakdown and tell his fellow men that he tried his best as a medic, trying to save anyone and the

pressures of war was too much for him. Resulting in him shooting his own foot so he can get

discharged from the war, O’brien uses this emotional and vulnerable side of a tough American

war soldier to show the great difficulty a person goes through emotionally due to their physical

surroundings.

Lastly, O’brien shows how moral traits also transform from the war. As a medic Rat

Kiley had to pick and choose the battles he wanted to fight. Not battles between enemies, but

mental battles with himself, deciding whether or not he should try to save this man or use his

energy towards another that could be more useful to the platoon. In the beginning of the war he

tried saving everyone he could, but as the war progressed he had to begin to decide how and

where he would chose to spend hsi energy. In the story O’brien praises Rat Kiley because he was
the best medic he had ever met. When he was shot for the first time Rat Kiley not only attended

to O’brien’s wound but also physically fought in the battle. But, it is later revealed that even

though Kiley did his best he felt the guilt of death because he couldn’t help everyone. Rat

Kiley’s inner moral battle of his job, once again, emphasizes how a person’s surroundings affects

their action and behavior creating psychological battle within the individual.

All in all, Tim O’brien utilizes Rat Kiley’s mental breakdown as a prime example of how

surroundings affect a person’s psychological health and influences them to evolve into a

different person, act and behave differently due to the pressures of their environment.