








































© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

[Expo. 3.2 (2009) 165–171] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.165 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

The Good News (and Who’s Listening) in Tim O’Brien’s 
The Things They Carried

JOHN RUFF

Valparaiso University

In reading The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, one is likely to 
notice that the book’s stories of the Vietnam War often allude to the New 
Testament. What exactly is the author hoping to accomplish with these 
connections? This essay proposes that in creating characters reminiscent of 
Jesus, Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, O’Brien means to illustrate the power 
of stories to save those who are open to receiving their truth.

I will not attempt here to claim fiction writer Tim O’Brien as a Chris-
tian writer, or make of his great collection of stories about the Vietnam 
War, The Things They Carried (1990), a Christian allegory. He and his 
work are much more complicated than that. I will argue, though, that 
if you read the stories closely you will hear O’Brien invite us to think 
about the relation of his stories about Alpha Company in Vietnam in 
1969 to certain New Testament stories, and I hope to demonstrate 
how such thinking reveals a number of interesting and meaningful 
connections. Further, I want to take seriously the claim his narrator 
makes in the first sentence of the last story of the collection that “sto-
ries can save us” (255).

I begin with that old question, what’s in a name? Or two names, Jim-
my Cross and Martha. Or three: let us add Mary. In the title story for 
this collection of connected short stories, we meet, in the first sentence 
in the first story of the book, “First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross,” who 
“carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian 
College in New Jersey. They were not love letters exactly, but Lieuten-
ant Cross was hoping…”(3).

Whatever O’Brien’s intention, it strikes me as nearly impossible for 
a reader not to wonder if there is a connection between a character 



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named Jimmy Cross in a story called “The Things They Carried” and 
Jesus, who in each of the four Gospels carried and died on a cross. 
(Yes, we might also ask ourselves what’s in a pair of initials, J.C.).  
Jesus, according to the Gospels of Luke and John, knew, and in John’s 
Gospel it says he knew and “loved” a woman named Martha, who 
figures prominently in two New Testament stories about love, one of 
them about love, death, and resurrection. In Luke’s Gospel the story 
of Martha and Mary comes at the conclusion of Chapter 10, which 
begins, eerily enough, if you are tracking O’Brien back into the New 
Testament as I am, with Jesus sending a group of his followers out “as 
sheep among wolves” carrying “no purse, no bag, no sandals” on a 
healing and evangelizing mission, from which they all return amazed 
at their success (Luke 10:1–20 NRSV). This stands in stark contrast to 
the story of Alpha Company, who set out more in the guise of wolves 
than sheep, grossly overloaded and largely doomed to failure. Though 
they too are evangelists of a sort, and ultimately they too are on a mis-
sion of healing. The narrative of Luke 10 circles back from the story 
of Jesus’ disciples to Jesus himself engaging in dialogue with a young 
lawyer about eternal life and love, which Jesus concludes by narrat-
ing the story of the Good Samaritan to explain to the lawyer who his 
neighbor is. Indeed, this is rich territory in Luke’s Gospel, where in the 
chapter just previous Christ admonishes his followers to “take up their 
crosses daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). Having concluded the story 
of the Good Samaritan, Jesus is described as arriving at a village where 
a woman named Martha receives him into her house. Martha has a 
sister named Mary, “who sat at Jesus’ feet and listened to what he was 
saying.” Martha is described as being “distracted by her many tasks,” 
and when she admonishes Jesus to scold her sister Mary for not help-
ing her, Jesus defends Mary and upbraids Martha. “Martha, Martha,” 
he says, “you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need 
of only one thing. Mary has chosen that better part, which will not be 
taken away from her” (Luke 10:38–42).

The “better part” Mary chooses is to be present to her guest, to  
attend to him, to listen to him. There is, in fact, a Mary in Tim O’Brien’s 
book, besides Martha the only other prominent adult female character 
in any of the stories. Mary Ann Bell, the sweetheart referred to in the 



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title of the story about her, “The Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong,” is in 
many ways Martha’s polar opposite. Mary’s situation is tragic and rich-
ly complicated, and I don’t intend to explore it in detail here. I bring 
her up because like the Mary in Luke’s Gospel, Mary Ann Bell listens. 
She attends. Like a bell, she reverberates when she is struck, by what 
she sees and hears and experiences. After the medic Rat Kiley tells her 
incredible story, he discloses to his skeptical auditors that he loved her, 
that they all did at the remote medical base where she unexpectedly 
arrived one day to be with her boyfriend from Cleveland, with whom 
she stayed until the incubus that was Vietnam swallowed her up—Rat 
loved her and says they all loved her because “she was there” (123). 
Physically, intellectually, and emotionally, she was there. But back to 
Martha: is the biblical Martha and her story or stories connected to the 
Martha that Jimmy Cross would love? 

We meet Jimmy Cross and Martha in the first story, “The Things 
They Carried.” The story is technically, formally an ingenious work 
of short fiction that introduces most of the characters of Alpha Com-
pany and many of the most important conflicts to afflict them through 
the sometimes hypnotic recitation of a long catalog of everything they 
packed in their rucksacks, everything they carried, physically, emotion-
ally, spiritually, into, across, and out of Vietnam. Into this catalog or 
litany O’Brien weaves fragments of the story of Jimmy Cross and Mar-
tha with the story of the death of Ted Lavender, the first member of 
Alpha Company to die in the book, from a sniper wound on an after-
noon when the company is exploring and exploding Vietcong tunnels. 
As will become typical in these stories, the death comes without warn-
ing, it happens without drama, there is nothing heroic or picturesque 
about it, and it seems to serve no larger military or moral purpose. It 
couldn’t be more banal, more pointless, more pathetic. What connects 
these two story strands is the fact that Jimmy Cross, the platoon leader, 
will blame himself for Lavender’s death, in large part because he was 
thinking about Martha rather than attending to his men. 

The problem with Jimmy Cross’s Martha, like Luke’s Martha, is that 
she is too “worried or distracted,” or as another earlier translation of 
Luke puts it, too “careful.” She signs her letters “love,” but Jimmy Cross 
concedes to himself that it is just a way of signing letters. Sitting in his 



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foxhole rereading his letters from Martha, Jimmy recalls how once in a 
movie theatre when he touched her knee through her skirt, she recoiled 
and looked at him sadly. Jimmy Cross fantasized about throwing Mar-
tha over his shoulder, carrying her to her dorm room, tying her in her 
bed, and touching her knee all night, but he never did it, which fills 
him with regret. He’s too careful, she’s too careful, and his need to be 
brave, to love and to be loved, to be taken in and attended to, is frus-
trated. In the episode that leads to the death of Ted Lavender, while 
Lee Strunk, the man who drew the short straw, is still underground 
exploring and preparing to blow up a Vietcong tunnel, Jimmy Cross 
fantasizes about being buried alive with or even in Martha:

Kneeling, watching the hole, he tried to concentrate on Lee Strunk 
and the war, all the dangers, but his love was too much for him, he 
felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside [Martha’s] lungs and breathe 
her blood and be smothered. He wanted her to be a virgin and not 
a virgin, all at once. He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets. Why  
poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? 
Not lonely, just alone . . . it was the aloneness that filled him with love. 
He remembered telling her that one evening. How she nodded and 
looked away. And how, after, when he kissed her, she received the kiss 
without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin’s eyes, 
just flat and uninvolved. (12)

In The Things They Carried we meet this sort of failure to connect, 
this failure to risk love, this failure to touch or be touched, this failure 
to be penetrated by another’s love and life and story and suffering, over 
and over again. One failure of attention breeds another; and men die, 
physically, emotionally, spiritually. Lee Strunk does actually crawl out 
of that tunnel, “grinning, filthy, and alive,” and for a moment a reader 
may feel relieved. In the margins of my dog-eared text I’ve written the 
word “Lazarus” next to the passage that follows. Lazarus was Martha 
and Mary’s brother, who in the Gospel According to John had died 
while Jesus was away, whom Jesus would miraculously raise from the 
dead. The reader can judge for herself if there is a connection between 
the two stories or if I’m just overreaching:

Lieutenant Cross nodded and closed his eyes while the others clapped 
Strunk on the back and made jokes about rising from the dead.



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Worms, Rat Kiley said. Right out of the grave. Fucking zombie.
The men laughed. They all felt great relief.
Spook city, said Mitchell Sanders.
Lee Strunk made a funny ghost sound, a kind of moaning, yet very 
happy, and right then Ted Lavender was shot in the head on his way 
back from peeing. He lay with his mouth open. The teeth were broken. 
There was a swollen black bruise under his left eye. The cheekbone was 
gone. Oh shit, Rat Kiley said, the guy’s dead. The guy’s dead, he kept 
saying, which seemed profound—the guy’s dead. I mean really. (13)

In the story of Lazarus in Chapter 11 of John’s Gospel, Jesus gets 
a message from Martha and Mary that their brother Lazarus is sick, 
but instead of going immediately to Bethany to attend to him, Jesus 
delays two days. When he finally arrives Lazarus has been dead and 
buried for four days, and when Martha hears he is coming she goes 
out to meet him. Her first words to Jesus are “Lord, if you had been 
here, my brother would not have died.” What sounds like a profession 
of faith also has the ring of accusation to it. They go back and forth, 
and it sounds more like theology than grief and love to me. Jesus keeps 
talking like Lazarus is not really dead, and then he talks as if he is. It 
is confusing. Jimmy Cross, in the episode under consideration, also 
stands accused of not being there; he accuses himself, actually, of not 
really being fully present for his men. “Lieutenant Cross gazed at the 
tunnel. But he was not there. He was buried with Martha under the 
white sand at the Jersey shore. They were pressed together, and the peb-
ble in his mouth was her tongue” (12).

Let us turn from Martha to Mary for a moment, who is identified in 
John’s Gospel as the Mary who anointed Jesus with oil and bathed his 
feet with her hair. In John’s Gospel Mary comes to Jesus after Martha 
returns home, to tell Mary Jesus has sent for her. Mary rushes out to 
meet Jesus, falls at his feet, and tells him, “Lord, if you had been here, 
my brother would not have died.” The passage continues:

When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also 
weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, 
“Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” 
Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him.”

(John 11:1–37)



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So what does it all add up to, if we take this excursion out of O’Brien’s 
text to the Gospels of Luke and John? What if Lee Strunk is reborn 
again? Ted Lavender still dies: Ted Lavender isn’t asleep, as Jesus says 
about Lazarus. Ted Lavender is “really” dead.

From Kiowa, the only overtly Christian character in the book and 
the most sympathetic but not for that reason, we learn how deeply  
affected Jimmy Cross is by the death of Ted Lavender. That night while 
using the New Testament he keeps packed in his rucksack for a pil-
low, Kiowa reflects on Jimmy Cross’s “capacity for grief ” and confesses 
that he “wanted to care as Jimmy Cross cared” (18). Ironically, Jimmy 
Cross will the next day burn his love letters and photos from Martha 
in an attempt to steel himself: the narrator reports how “he would not 
tolerate laxity. He would show strength, distancing himself ” (24). He 
would “dispense with love” (25). The contrast with Jesus in the story of 
Lazarus couldn’t be starker.1

But this irony leads back to the way in which O’Brien’s claim in the 
first sentence of the last story can and ought to be taken seriously: that 
is, “that stories can save us.” And I need to get to “the good news” I 
promised in my title. First, the sentence states that stories “can” save us. 
It doesn’t say they do save us, have saved us, or will save us. But there 
is hope that they can. Ted Lavender is not, as Rat Kiley says, “really 
dead.” He seems so, but that’s what O’Brien calls elsewhere a “story-
truth” (203–204). Ted Lavender is words on a page. So is Rat Kiley. 
So is the narrator Tim O’Brien. But the story truth of Ted Lavender’s 
absurd death in Vietnam has the capacity to put us there and to make 
us feel something: loss, the terrible absurdity of war, the awful things 
that men do to other men. In the Gospel passage from John, Jesus is 
troubled when he goes to see where Lazarus is buried; Mary’s weeping 
troubles his soul. It puts him there. Lazarus rises again on the tide of  
Jesus’s tears. Over and over, the problem O’Brien creates for himself 
and for his whole platoon of storytellers is how to make something 
present to the auditor, or to a whole group of auditors, sometimes a 
character or group of characters within a story, sometimes the reader 
whom O’Brien as narrator-in-chief will occasionally address directly. 
The task is to get that auditor to listen, to pay attention, to feel some-
thing, to open themselves up to the experience of another person’s sto-



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ry, to open themselves up to another loss and pain, or to the possibility 
of love: all this through the salvific agency of a story. In Luke’s Gos-
pel, Jesus attempts to save a lawyer’s soul with the story of the Good  
Samaritan. That’s what O’Brien is about. He is the major evangelist in 
this collection, and the creator of other minor evangelists—they all tell 
and listen to and critique the telling and receiving and failure to tell 
and receive the truth of stories. All of them, in league with O’Brien, are 
trying to save our souls, not just our bodies, our lives, our souls, with 
stories. I find that good news, even with the promise now unfinished, 
unrealized, and often repudiated. 

Note

1. Even more ironically, Ted Lavender’s death and Jimmy’s failure to love or be 
loved by Martha, are only two of the crosses Jimmy Cross will carry in The 
Things They Carried; an even greater cross will involve his responsibility for the 
death of Kiowa, the most important death in the book, not on a cross but in 
a shit field, a brilliant recasting of Golgotha if there ever was one. It is a death 
that haunts not just Jimmy Cross, but the whole platoon, especially a soldier 
named Norman Bowker, who died by his own hand believing he could have 
saved Kiowa, and the narrator Tim O’Brien, whose incautious action may 
have inadvertently killed him. In another paper I hope to explore what invita-
tions O’Brien issues to us to think of that death alongside the death of Jesus as 
recorded in the Gospels, both deaths recorded through a variety of accounts, 
and how O’Brien makes that death and other deaths recorded in The Things 
They Carried redemptive.

References

O’Brien, Tim

1990 The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence.

Attridge, Harold W., ed.

2006 HarperCollins Study Bible. Rev. ed. San Francisco: HarperCollins.




