Annalise Steinmann P.

1 
In ​The Things They Carried ​by Tim O’Brien, O’Brien focalizes on the global problem of 
war tarnishing one’s ability to correctly process one’s emotions, in his passage about the 
young VC water buffalo, within the vignette titled “How To Tell a True War Story.” 
O’Brien’s use of overly casual, non descriptive language regarding the deaths of his 
fellow soldiers throughout the book juxtaposed to his detailed description of the death of 
the waterbuffalo aid him in conveying the global issue of war’s creating distorted emotional 
reactions to traumas.. For example, after the death of Rat Kiley’s best friend, Curt Lemon, 
Kiley reacts rather unemotionally and stiffly, similarly to the rest of the soldiers, including 
O’Brien. O’Brien conveys this through simply stating that Lemon was “playing catch with Rat 
Kiley, laughing, and then he was dead,” only to follow that statement with a comment on the 
thick tree cover and the lengthy amount of time it took to cut an “LZ for the dustoff”( 74). 
O’Brien presents Lemon’s death rather plainly and flatly, as his death was purely 
unsurprising to these Vietnam soldiers; it was something they’d become desensitized to, as 
they’d seen enough of their platoon killed and have been responsible for killing many 
others. As the audience would take his death rather flatly as well due to these feelings 
posed by O’Brien, he uses the death of the water buffalo to encapsulate the immense pain 
being felt by Kiley, which is shown through O’Brien’s intense, detailed description of the 
water buffallo’s murder, as he explains the order in which Kiley shot every body part and the 
level of pain felt by the water buffalo at each shot (75). This is because animals hold a 
special place in the hearts of humans, as they generally represent innocence and an overall 
pleasing atmosphere, and the appalling death of the water buffalo is something that affects 
more of the readers more closely, not just because of the detail, but because of the animal 
itself. This water buffalo represents the innocence in all of the soldiers that’s brutally 
murdered and destroyed upon arrival to Vietnam, and the death of many innocent 
Vietnamese and U.S soldiers within the war, and in other words, the buffalo is used to depict 
the evolution of these soldiers’ emotions and ability to process them. 
Also, the emphasis on certain details within the passage exhibits the strange 
emotional behaviour of the soldiers, touching on the global issue of how war acts as the 
fun-house mirror through which emotions are filtered. For instance, When first approaching 
the water buffalo, Rat Kiley treats the baby animal with kindness, offering him a can of C 
rations and stroking his nose, when suddenly “Rat shrugged,” and began barbarously killing 
the animal (75). The small, seemingly insignificant word, “shrugged,” noted an entire 180 
degree shift in Kiley’s mood: from nice to murderous, showing how unstable the emotions 
of a soldier in Vietnam are. Rather than simply mourning the death of his friend, Kiley reacts 
with such a violence and passion, showing that if the setting of war wasn’t present, if war 
hadn’t tarnished Kiley’s ability to properly handle his emotions, a baby buffalo wouldn’t have 
died within Kiley’s grieving process. Later, to dispose of the body, Kiowa and Mitchell 
Sanders “dumped it in the village well”(76). Despite its appearance as a minor detail, this is a 
testament to the mentality of soldiers during war: even after witnessing the emotional 
breakdown of a fellow soldier, in the wake of the death of one of their own men, they still 
find it within them to smite the Vietnamese, to avenge the death of Lemon through an 
attack on an innocent Vietnamese village, as war has warped their ability to simply grieve 
the death of their friend without hurting other people in the process. 
In conclusion, the anecdote of the VC water buffalo helps O’Brien convey the global 
issue of war severely altering how emotions are processed.