the things they carried enemies analysis

The Things They Carried

Tim o’brien, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

The Things They Carried

By tim o'brien, the things they carried summary and analysis of "enemies, "friends," "how to tell a true war story," and "the dentist".

“Enemies” and “Friends”

One day, when they are out on patrol, two members of the company get into a fistfight over a missing penknife. Dave Jensen wins the fight and breaks Lee Strunk ’s nose. Jensen is worried about retaliation, though. Revenge could be dangerous, because all of the troops carry guns. Jensen keeps an eye on Strunk and gets more and more paranoid. One day, he can’t stand it anymore. He goes temporarily crazy, firing his gun into the air, and yelling Strunk’s name over and over again.

That same night, he borrows a pistol and uses it to break his own nose. Then he seeks out Strunk to ask him if they are “square.” Strunk says yes. Strunk privately laughs at Jensen because he was the one that had stolen Jensen’s knife in the first place.

“Friends” is set a few months after “Enemies.” After the penknife incident, Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk had learned to trust one another. They made a pact that if either were seriously injured or crippled the other would find a way to kill him. As far as O’Brien can tell, the two were serious about the deal.

In October, Lee Strunk steps on a mortar, and half of his leg is blown off by a mortar round. The rest of the leg must be amputated. When a helicopter arrives to take him away to be treated, Strunk wakes up from his faint and sees Dave Jensen standing over him. He is terrified of his friend, thinking that Jensen will kill him. Jensen repeatedly tells him to relax, but Strunk remains petrified. Later the men find out that Strunk has died in the helicopter. Jensen is relieved.

Much of the book is made up of short character studies, one- or two-page at most. These can and do stand separate from the book as a whole; O’Brien published some of them in magazines on their own. Together, “Friends” and “Enemies” serve to display the absurdity of war. Roles shift fluidly at war. Your worst enemy may become your fastest friend. Your fastest friend may become your executioner – which is Lee Strunk’s fear. Social codes and norms break down completely. Even a retreat to “eye for an eye” Biblical law (Jensen breaking his own nose) doesn’t seem to make sense. There are no social norms or codes governing the troops. O’Brien points out that war is essentially a state without laws. But stories are simple, spare, opaque enough to seem like moral parables, communicating universal truths regarding all wartime friendships -- so that the critique of war seems to range farther than just Vietnam and deeper than this particular moment in history.

“How to Tell a True War Story”

Rat Kiley and Curt Lemon invent a macho game to play together. They toss smoke grenades back and forth to each other. One day the game goes wrong and a grenade explodes, killing Lemon. Lemon had been standing under a tree in the shade, and stepped out into the sunlight to catch the grenade. He must have thought he was killed by the sunlight, reflects O’Brien, who witnesses the event. O’Brien has to go up into the tree to pick out the remains. A soldier makes a bad pun on “lemon tree,” one of the many morbid jokes in the book.

After Lemon is killed, Rat Kiley sits down and writes his sister a long letter about how brave and funny her brother was. The sister never writes back. For this Rat Kiley dismisses her as a “dumb cooze.” O’Brien says you can tell a true war story by its “absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.” This is a true story, he writes, because Kiley calls the girl a “dumb cooze.”

O’Brien leaves aside the story of Lemon’s death to explain to the reader how they can discern what is a true war story. One way, he writes, is if the story seems too crazy to believe, or if it never ends. O’Brien relates a story told to him by fellow soldier Mitchell Sanders : a group of soldiers went out at night into the mountains on patrol. They heard what sounded to them like a large orchestra, or a large enemy cocktail party. The sound drove the troops crazy, and they ordered an enormous air strike on the empty mountains. O’Brien writes that this is a good example of a “true” story, whether it happened or not.

Another “true” story that O’Brien tells is that of a water buffalo. The day that Curt Lemon died, the company found a baby water buffalo in the woods. Rat Kiley tortured it. He shot it in all the places in its body where a wound would not be fatal. Kiley had just lost his best friend, O’Brien explains, to help justify the story. He tortured the buffalo and cried. Back home, when old women cry listening to that story, O’Brien says they don’t understand. They understand that war is about beauty and friendship, too. They only understand tired generalizations: “war is hell", etc.

“How to Tell a True War Story” passes judgment on the very act of storytelling. There is a right way and a wrong way to do it, an authentic way and an inauthentic way. O’Brien frowns on telling stories with a macho perspective, as Lemon would have done. But he also objects to the polar opposite: telling tear-jerking stories for an effect. This short story acts as a guide to the style of the entire book. O’Brien tells only what he believes are “true stories”: absurdist stories that never end, stories that could not possibly have happened. What he is asking for from his reader in return is a minimum of sentimentality. Not only is there a right and a wrong way to tell stories, this chapter tells the reader, but there is a right and a wrong way to listen to them.

Identifying varying methods of storytelling is also a way for O'Brien undercut his own narrative. One of the projects of the book is to put readers on guard against unreliable narrators. This is a deeply political agenda. O’Brien is angry with his generation of young men and women for not asking enough questions of authority figures. He blames them, at least partially, for being blindly led into the quagmire of Vietnam. He wants to teach his readers to do better: to ask questions, not to believe too easily.

“The Dentist”

Curt Lemon was one of O’Brien’s least favorite fellow soldiers. After Lemon was killed, O’Brien had a hard time mourning him. Lemon liked to act the macho man and take unnecessary risks. He once went trick-o- treating in a Vietnamese village on Halloween, to the horror and amazement of the villagers.

O’Brien says that it is not a good idea to glorify the dead or become sentimental about them. He tells the story of Lemon’s visit to the dentist to illustrate the point. One day a dentist came in on a helicopter to check up on the men’s teeth. Lemon was so afraid that when it was his turn he passed out in the dentist’s chair. Later, he was so ashamed that he woke up the dentist in the middle of the night. After rousing him out of bed, Lemon insisted that he had a toothache, and forced the dentist to remove one of his perfectly good teeth.

Lemon provides a comic example of conventional machismo. His swagger and bravado provide much needed humor to the troops. They considered his trick-and-treating caper a great joke. “The Dentist,” however, is a flashback. The reader already knows that it is precisely this bravado that will get Lemon killed. This provides dramatic irony, a literary technique by which the reader knows more about the character’s fate than the character himself.

O’Brien objects to both macho swaggering and trite aphorisms. He grants war a privileged status as a topic by circumscribing the ways in which it may be described. (He makes no such pronouncements, for example, about how to describe love, which is also dealt with in the book.) “War is hell,” does not qualify as a worthy war story, because it has no impact, according to O’Brien. Macho tales of violence and heroism like Lemon’s have too much impact, and are also unworthy. O’Brien argues that there is a right and a wrong form of storytelling.

The Things They Carried Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Things They Carried is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

is this a war story, per se? if so who is the main character, and why?

This particular story is more about sexual longing than war. Mark Fossie seems to be the main character who wants to import his girlfriend.

What is it that Jimmy cross carries with him? What do they represent?

Jimmy always carries letters from Martha. His identity and hopes for the future are part of those letters.

How does Tim kill his first enemy

I think with a grenade.

Study Guide for The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried study guide contains a biography of Tim O'Brien, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Things They Carried
• The Things They Carried Summary
• Character List

Essays for The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.

• Rationalizing the Fear Within
• Physical and Psychological Burdens
• Role of Kathleen and Linda in The Things They Carried
• Let’s Communicate: It’s Not About War
• Turning Over a New Leaf: Facing the Pressures of Society

Lesson Plan for The Things They Carried

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Things They Carried
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Things They Carried Bibliography

The Things They Carried Enemies Summary

• Lee Strunk and Dave Jensen get in a fight over a missing jackknife. Dave Jensen breaks Strunk's nose so hard that Strunk has to be flown back to the rear.
• When Strunk returns two days later, Dave Jensen gets nervous. Paranoid. He keeps away from Strunk and feels like he's always under attack.
• One afternoon, he starts shooting his gun in the air, yelling Strunk's name. All the other soldiers hit the ground (of course).
• When he runs out of ammo, Jensen puts his head in his arms and refuses to move for two or three hours.
• That night, he breaks his own nose with a pistol.
• Then he goes up to Strunk and asks if they're even. Strunk says they are.
• Later, though, Strunk is still laughing, saying that Jensen is crazy, and that he'd actually stolen Jensen's jackknife.
• It's kind of unclear whether Strunk means that Jensen is crazy to forgive Strunk for stealing his jackknife and that he didn't need to break his own nose to be even, or that Jensen is just crazy in general. Knowing this book, it's probably both.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

Analysis of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 26, 2021

In the short story cycle The Things They Carried (1990), Tim O’Brien cemented his reputation as one of the most powerful chroniclers of the Vietnam War, joining the conversation alongside Philip Caputo ( A Rumor of War ), Michael Herr ( Dispatches ), David Halberstam ( The Best and the Brightest ), and the poet Bruce Weigl ( Song of Napalm ), among others. Comprising 22 pieces—some little more than vignettes, others more “traditional” stories—the collection details the experiences of the soldier Tim O’Brien, who returns to his native Minnesota after a tour of duty in Vietnam. In his subsequent role as author, O’Brien records his recollections in a false memoir of sorts as a way of reconstructing the war’s elusive “truth.” O’Brien’s goal in The Things They Carried, he tells Michael Coffey, “was to write something utterly convincing but without any rules as to what’s real and what’s made up. I forced myself to try to invent a new form. I had never invented form before” (60).

“In the Field” follows Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and his platoon of 17 remaining men as they search a Vietnamese muck field for Kiowa, a lost comrade. Cross, who figures prominently in several of the book’s pieces—including the eponymous “The Things They Carried,” the collection’s most anthologized story—feels tremendous guilt over Kiowa’s death, not the least because the previous evening, just before an ambush, Cross refused to disobey orders and to move his men to higher, and therefore safer, ground. Kiowa, buried when a fellow soldier inadvertently gave away the platoon’s position to the enemy, was a popular soldier. Out of respect for their fallen comrade, the men dutifully wade through waist-deep sewage searching for his remains; they sustain themselves with a morbid sense of humor, making light of the situation in order to quell their fear of random, sudden death at the hands of a faceless enemy. Cross quickly realizes that he is ill suited for the military, having been shipped to Vietnam after joining the officer training corps in college only to be with friends and to collect a few college credits. “[Cross] did not care one way or the other about the war,” O’Brien intones, “and he had no desire to command, and even after all these months in the bush, all the days and nights, even then he did not know enough to keep his men out of a shit field” (168).

Tim O’Brien/The Austin Chronicle

War is a great leveler in O’Brien’s fiction. In the field where Cross and his men search for Kiowa, “The filth seemed to erase identities, transforming the men into identical copies of a single soldier, which was exactly how Jimmy Cross had been trained to treat them, as interchangeable units of command” (163). The young lieutenant, however, suspends his humanity only with great difficulty. Ruminating on Kiowa’s death, he imagines writing a letter to the soldier’s father before deciding that “no apologies were necessary, because in fact it was one of those freak things, and the war was full of freaks, and nothing could ever change it anyway” (176). Cross’s rationalization may absolve him (at least in part) of his guilt over Kiowa’s death, though it is also a tacit admission of his lack of control over the war’s daily life-and-death struggles. Cross’s desire to organize the details of Kiowa’s death in his own mind is an extension of O’Brien’s attempt in The Things They Carried to construct a coherent narrative that finds the essential truth of war (a notion that the author confirms in the ironically titled “How to Tell a True War Story” which acts as an interpretive key to his recollections).

Upon the discovery of Kiowa’s body, the men properly mourn the loss of their fellow soldier, though “they also felt a kind of giddiness, a secret joy, because they were alive, and because even the rain was preferable to being sucked under a shit field, and because it was all a matter of luck and happenstance” (175). Cross, yearning for war’s end, imagines himself on a golf course in his New Jersey hometown, free of the burden of leading men to their deaths. O’Brien examines the onus of responsibility often, and in the related story “Field Trip,” which details the author’s return to Vietnam two decades later to the field where Kiowa died, O’Brien finds a world barely recognizable as the one he left behind. “The field remains, but in a form much different from what O’Brien remembers, smaller now, and full of light,” Patrick A. Smith writes of O’Brien’s visit. “The air is soundless, the ghosts are missing, and the farmers who now tend the field go back to work after stealing a curious glance in his direction. The war is absent, except in O’Brien’s memory” (107). But it is memory, O’Brien makes clear, that supersedes experience and haunts soldiers long after the shooting has stopped.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Coffey, Michael. “Tim O’Brien: Inventing a New Form Helps the Author Talk about War, Memory, and Storytelling.” Publishers Weekly, 16 February 1990, pp. 60–61. O’Brien, Tim. “In the Field.” In The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Smith, Patrick A. Tim O’Brien: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005.

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• The Things They Carried

Tim O'Brien

• Literature Notes
• Book Summary
• About The Things They Carried
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• On the Rainy River
• Enemies and Friends
• How to Tell a True War Story
• The Dentist
• Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong
• The Man I Killed and Ambush
• Speaking of Courage
• In the Field
• The Ghost Soldiers
• The Lives of the Dead
• Character Analysis
• Tim O'Brien
• Lt. Jimmy Cross
• Norman Bowker
• Mary Anne Bell
• Henry Dobbins
• Tim O'Brien Biography
• Critical Essays
• The Things They Carried in a Historical Context
• Narrative Structure in The Things They Carried
• Style and Storytelling in The Things They Carried
• The Things They Carried and Loss of Innocence
• The Things They Carried and Questions of Genre
• Full Glossary for The Things They Carried
• Essay Questions
• Practice Projects
• Cite this Literature Note

Summary and Analysis The Things They Carried

An unnamed narrator describes in third person the thoughts and actions of Jimmy Cross, the lieutenant of an Army unit on active combat duty in the Vietnam War. Lt. Cross is preoccupied by thoughts of Martha, a young woman he dated before he joined the Army. He thinks about letters she wrote him; he thinks about whether or not she is a virgin; he thinks about how much he loves her and wants her to love him. Her letters do not indicate that she feels the same way.

The narrator lists things that the soldiers carry with them, both tangible and intangible, such as Lt. Cross's picture of and feelings for Martha. Other members of the unit are introduced through descriptions of the things they carry, such as Henry Dobbins who carries extra food, Ted Lavender who carries tranquilizer pills, and Kiowa who carries a hunting hatchet. O'Brien introduces readers to the novel's primary characters by describing the articles that the soldiers carry. The level of detail O'Brien offers about the characters is expanded upon and illuminated in the chapters that follow, though O'Brien distills the essence of each characters' personality through the symbolic items each carries. Henry Dobbins carries a machine gun and his girlfriend's pantyhose. Dave Jensen carries soap, dental floss, foot powder, and vitamins. Mitchell Sanders carries condoms, brass knuckles, and the unit's radio. Norman Bowker carries a diary. Kiowa carries a volume of the New Testament and moccasins. Rat Kiley carries his medical kit, brandy, comic books, and M&M's candy. The narrator offers additional detail about selected items; for example, the poncho Ted Lavender carries will later be used by his fellow soldiers to carry his dead body.

This device is an example of the author and narrator embedding small details in the text that will be further explained later in the book. It is important to note, too, how the details are selective; they are recalled by a character, the unnamed narrator of the chapter. The details of what each man carries are funneled through the memory of this narrator.

O'Brien details at great length what all the men carry: standard gear, weapons, tear gas, explosives, ammunitions, entrenching tools, starlight scopes, grenades, flak jackets, boots, rations, and the Army newsletter. They also carry their grief, terror, love, and longing, with poise and dignity. O'Brien's extended catalog of items creates a picture in the reader's mind that grows incrementally. O'Brien's technique also allows each character to be introduced with a history and a unique place within the group of men.

Lt. Cross is singled out from the group, and O'Brien offers the most detail about his interior feelings and thoughts. Many of these soldiers "hump," or carry, photographs, and Lieutenant Cross has an action shot of Martha playing volleyball. He also carries memories of their date and regrets that he did not try to satisfy his desire to become intimate with her by tying her up and touching her knee. O'Brien stresses that Lt. Cross carries all these things, but in addition carries the lives of his men.

Even as O'Brien opens The Things They Carried, he sets forth the novel's primary themes of memory and imagination and the opportunity for mental escape that these powers offer. For example, as Lt. Cross moves through the rigorous daily motions of combat duty, his mind dwells on Martha. Importantly, as he thinks about Martha, he does not merely recall memories of her; instead he imagines what might be, such as "romantic camping trips" into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. O'Brien describes these longings of Lt. Cross as "pretending." Pretending is a form of storytelling, that is, telling stories to oneself. O'Brien underscores the importance of Lt. Cross's actions by emphasizing the artifacts — Martha's letters and photograph — and characterizes Lt. Cross as the carrier of these possessions as well as of his love for Martha.

O'Brien moves from employing the literary technique of describing the soldiers' physical artifacts to introducing the novel's primary characters. The minute details he provides about objects that individuals carry is telling, and particular attention should be paid to these details because they foreshadow the core narratives that comprise the novel. This technique of cataloging the things the soldiers carry also functions to create fuller composites of the characters, and by extension make the characters seem more real to readers.

This aesthetic of helping readers connect with his characters is O'Brien's primary objective in the novel, to make readers feel the story he presents as much as is physically and emotionally possible, as if it were real. Though the minutiae that O'Brien includes — for example the weight of a weapon, the weight of a radio, the weight of a grenade in ounces — seems superfluous, it is supposed to be accretive in his readers' imaginations so that they can begin to feel the physical weight of the burdens of war, as well as, eventually, the psychological and emotional burdens (so much as it is possible for a non-witness to war to perceive). O'Brien's attention to sensory detail also supports this primary objective of evoking a real response in the reader.

With Lavender's death, O'Brien creates a tension between the "actuality" of Lt. Cross's participation in battle and his interior, imagined fantasies that give him refuge. In burning Martha's letters and accepting blame for Lavender's death, Cross's conflicting trains of thought signal the reader to be cautious when deciding what is truth or fantasy and when assigning meaning to these stories. While he destroyed the physical accoutrements, the mementos of Martha, Lt. Cross continues to carry the memory of her with him. To that memory is also added the burden of grief and guilt. Despite this emotional burden, O'Brien, as he continues in the following chapter, begins to highlight the central question of the novel: Why people carry the things they do?

rucksack A kind of knapsack strapped over the shoulders.

foxhole A hole dug in the ground as a temporary protection for one or two soldiers against enemy gunfire or tanks.

perimeter A boundary strip where defenses are set up.

heat tabs Fuel pellets used for heating C rations.

C rations A canned ration used in the field in World War II.

R & R Rest and recuperation, leave.

Than Khe (also Khe Sahn) A major battle in the Tet Offensive, the siege lasted well over a month in the beginning of 1968. Khe Sahn was thought of as an important strategic location for both the Americans and the North Vietnamese. American forces were forced to withdraw from Khe Sahn.

SOP Abbreviation for standard operating procedure.

RTO Radio telephone operator who carried a lightweight infantry field radio.

grunt A U.S. infantryman.

hump To travel on foot, especially when carrying and transporting necessary supplies for field combat.

platoon A military unit composed of two or more squads or sections, normally under the command of a lieutenant: it is a subdivision of a company, troop, and so on.

medic A medical noncommissioned officer who gives first aid in combat; aidman; corpsman.

M-60 American-made machine gun.

PFC Abbreviation for Private First Class.

Spec 4 Specialist Rank, having no command function; soldier who carries out orders.

M-16 The standard American rifle used in Vietnam after 1966.

flak jacket A vestlike, bulletproof jacket worn by soldiers.

KIA Abbreviation for killed in action, to be killed in the line of duty.

chopper A helicopter.

dustoff Medical evacuation by helicopter.

Claymore antipersonnel mine An antipersonnel mine that scatters shrapnel in a particular, often fan-shaped, area when it explodes.

Starlight scope A night-vision telescope that enables a user to see in the dark.

tunnel complexes The use of tunnels by the Viet Cong as hiding places, caches for food and weapons, headquarter complexes and protection against air strikes and artillery fire was a characteristic of the Vietnam war.

The Stars and Stripes A newsletter-style publication produced for servicemen by the U.S. Army.

Bronze Star A U.S. military decoration awarded for heroic or meritorious achievement or service in combat not involving aerial flight.

Purple Heart A U.S. military decoration awarded to members of the armed forces wounded or killed in action by or against an enemy: established in 1782 and re-established in 1932.

entrenching tool A shovel-like tool, among its other uses, used to dig temporary fortifications such as foxholes.

zapped Killed.

freedom bird Any aircraft which returned servicemen to the U.S.

sin loi From Vietnamese, literally meaning excuse me, though servicemen came to understand the term as meaning too bad or tough luck.

Previous Character List

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

book summaries and study materials

Summary and Analysis Enemies and Friends

Over the next month, Jensen and Strunk begin to pair up on ambushes together and cover each other on patrol. They slowly build up their friendship and trust. They draw up a pact that says if either one of them is badly wounded, that the other would kill him. They both sign the agreement. A few months later, Strunk is severely injured when he steps on a rigged mortar round. The blast of the explosion severs his right leg at the knee. A medic treats Strunk and prepares him for evacuation. Jensen goes to Strunk before he is evacuated out, and as Strunk opens his eyes and sees Jensen, he pleads with him not to kill him. Jensen tries to say some encouraging words, and swears not to follow their agreement and kill Strunk. Strunk is evacuated by helicopter, but the unit learns later that he had died in transit. O’Brien thinks this news brought relief to Jensen, who felt a heavy burden.

O’Brien presents the story of a fight within a war, making us focus initially on the difference between a war and a fight. The fight is in some ways a microcosm to the macrocosm of Vietnam; both are violent engagements, both pit enemies against one another, and both have rules that are often ignored by the participants. O’Brien shows some of the similarities between the two, such as the seeming randomness of the quarrel between Strunk and Jensen in the “Enemies” vignette, and Strunk stepping on a mortar bomb in the sister vignette, “Friends.” O’Brien says that the fight was over “something stupid — a missing jackknife,” but however meaningless the reason, the fight was nonetheless a vicious engagement between two foes.

In addition to the randomness of Vietnam, O’Brien highlights the meaninglessness of it by beginning the description of the fight with the jackknife and by using the vignette as a metaphor for this meaninglessness that the characters feel. Strunk laughs uncontrollably when Jensen breaks his own nose out of fear for what Strunk might do in retaliation, and admits that he in fact did steal the knife. He laughs because Jensen breaking his nose has no meaning — Jensen was justified in his attacking Strunk in the first place. The uselessness of his gesture, motivated by fear, causes us to view the entire fight as void of meaning. We can then apply this model to Vietnam, seeing how the larger battle, no matter who wins or loses, will be meaningless.

On the other hand, O’Brien shows how the microcosm/macrocosm model fails by making the fight and the war different. First, the fight is more personal and emotional, for example, than Strunk stepping on a mortar bomb. Strunk gets his nose broken because of a fight, because his enemy relentlessly beat him and crushed his bones; he loses his leg for no reason other than where he stepped. He could not have known or prevented it, and anyone in the company could have the same happen at any moment. The fight is personal, between two opponents; the war is not. What the war lacks is a visible opponent, a physical enemy. When Strunk and Jensen fight, the quarrel becomes emotional and out-of-control because they have both yearned for a real enemy to touch, see, and destroy. In other words, Strunk and Jensen find in their opponent the physical presence that that war has denied them.

Because of the realness of a physical opponent, everything is more intense. Jensen’s inability to relax is an example of how the fight is more pressing, more real to him than the war. After all, should a soldier be more afraid of one of his own company, even someone with whom he has had an argument, than an entire country of men who would shoot him on sight? Probably not, but the proximity and physicality of his new “enemy” fills Jensen with greater fear than all the Viet Cong. Likewise, the pact that Jensen and Strunk form is an extension of this personal side of war. O’Brien tells us that they did not become friends per se, but they learned to trust one another enough to form a death pact. Yet even though this was a sign of trust between two men, they still insisted on drawing it up on paper, signing it, and getting witnesses. They trusted each other enough to end their lives but not enough to go without public ratification of their pact.

In the end, when Strunk loses his leg, his fear of Jensen killing him is absolute. He does not appeal to any in his company who knew of the pact, just Jensen, whom he insists swear not to kill him. Ironically, the oath is enough to appease Strunk, where earlier an oath would not suffice; the desperateness of his situation forces him to take Jensen’s promise on faith alone. Trust, then, depends on the situation, not on the person. Strunk trusts Jensen not to kill him on his word, but he would not trust him to make the original pact without a compact. O’Brien makes us wonder whom you can trust in a war.

The “Friends” vignette wraps up with Jensen violating his original pledge and not killing Strunk. Yet when news of Strunk’s death comes to him, it “seemed to relieve Dave Jensen of an enormous weight.” Jensen had gone back on his word and failed his friend, thus making himself no good friend to Strunk. Perhaps because he had not been severely wounded, Jensen had not undergone the same transformation that Strunk had, wishing for a life after a massive and debilitating wound more than the death of a soldier. Either way, Strunk’s death fulfills Jensen’s promise not to let either of them live after sustaining such a wound. He is able again to be Strunk’s friend not through his actions, but through fate and his inaction. O’Brien forces us to question what is right and wrong in a war. If Jensen had lived up to his pledge, he would be a murderer. By failing to do it, even at Strunk’s behest, he proves himself no friend. O’Brien makes us wonder which is worse.

jackknife A large pocketknife.

LZ Gator Landing zone south of Chu Lai.

pull guard To be assigned to a sentinel shift, to keep watch.

wheelchair wound A permanently debilitating wound, especially loss of limbs or wounds which would cause paralysis.

rigged mortar round A short-range weapon that fires a shell on a high trajectory.

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• The Things They Carried
• Tim O'Brien
• Literature Notes
• Enemies and Friends
• Book Summary
• About The Things They Carried
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• On the Rainy River
• How to Tell a True War Story
• The Dentist
• Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong
• The Man I Killed and Ambush
• Speaking of Courage
• In the Field
• The Ghost Soldiers
• The Lives of the Dead
• Character Analysis
• Lt. Jimmy Cross
• Norman Bowker
• Mary Anne Bell
• Henry Dobbins
• Tim O'Brien Biography
• Critical Essays
• The Things They Carried in a Historical Context
• Narrative Structure in The Things They Carried
• Style and Storytelling in The Things They Carried
• The Things They Carried and Loss of Innocence
• The Things They Carried and Questions of Genre
• Full Glossary for The Things They Carried
• Essay Questions
• Practice Projects
• Cite this Literature Note

Summary and Analysis Enemies and Friends

On patrol, Lee Strunk and Dave Jensen fight over Jensen's missing jackknife, which he presumed Strunk stole. Jensen easily overpowers Strunk, hitting him repeatedly and breaking his nose. Because of this, Jensen starts to worry, growing anxious of what revenge Strunk might take on him. He keeps track of Strunk, paying attention to his whereabouts and being cautious of him when Strunk handles weapons. This tension builds up in Jensen, and he is continually nervous, until he eventually snaps and begins firing his weapon into the air, yelling Strunk's name. Later that night, Jensen borrows a pistol and uses it to break his own nose. He shows Strunk what he has done and asks whether they were now even; Strunk says sure. The next morning, Strunk can't stop laughing; he had stolen the jackknife.

Over the next month, Jensen and Strunk begin to pair up on ambushes together and cover each other on patrol. They slowly build up their friendship and trust. They draw up a pact that says if either one of them is badly wounded, that the other would kill him. They both sign the agreement. A few months later, Strunk is severely injured when he steps on a rigged mortar round. The blast of the explosion severs his right leg at the knee. A medic treats Strunk and prepares him for evacuation. Jensen goes to Strunk before he is evacuated out, and as Strunk opens his eyes and sees Jensen, he pleads with him not to kill him. Jensen tries to say some encouraging words, and swears not to follow their agreement and kill Strunk. Strunk is evacuated by helicopter, but the unit learns later that he had died in transit. O'Brien thinks this news brought relief to Jensen, who felt a heavy burden.

O'Brien presents the story of a fight within a war, making us focus initially on the difference between a war and a fight. The fight is in some ways a microcosm to the macrocosm of Vietnam; both are violent engagements, both pit enemies against one another, and both have rules that are often ignored by the participants. O'Brien shows some of the similarities between the two, such as the seeming randomness of the quarrel between Strunk and Jensen in the "Enemies" vignette, and Strunk stepping on a mortar bomb in the sister vignette, "Friends." O'Brien says that the fight was over "something stupid — a missing jackknife," but however meaningless the reason, the fight was nonetheless a vicious engagement between two foes.

In addition to the randomness of Vietnam, O'Brien highlights the meaninglessness of it by beginning the description of the fight with the jackknife and by using the vignette as a metaphor for this meaninglessness that the characters feel. Strunk laughs uncontrollably when Jensen breaks his own nose out of fear for what Strunk might do in retaliation, and admits that he in fact did steal the knife. He laughs because Jensen breaking his nose has no meaning — Jensen was justified in his attacking Strunk in the first place. The uselessness of his gesture, motivated by fear, causes us to view the entire fight as void of meaning. We can then apply this model to Vietnam, seeing how the larger battle, no matter who wins or loses, will be meaningless.

On the other hand, O'Brien shows how the microcosm/macrocosm model fails by making the fight and the war different. First, the fight is more personal and emotional, for example, than Strunk stepping on a mortar bomb. Strunk gets his nose broken because of a fight, because his enemy relentlessly beat him and crushed his bones; he loses his leg for no reason other than where he stepped. He could not have known or prevented it, and anyone in the company could have the same happen at any moment. The fight is personal, between two opponents; the war is not. What the war lacks is a visible opponent, a physical enemy. When Strunk and Jensen fight, the quarrel becomes emotional and out-of-control because they have both yearned for a real enemy to touch, see, and destroy. In other words, Strunk and Jensen find in their opponent the physical presence that that war has denied them.

Because of the realness of a physical opponent, everything is more intense. Jensen's inability to relax is an example of how the fight is more pressing, more real to him than the war. After all, should a soldier be more afraid of one of his own company, even someone with whom he has had an argument, than an entire country of men who would shoot him on sight? Probably not, but the proximity and physicality of his new "enemy" fills Jensen with greater fear than all the Viet Cong. Likewise, the pact that Jensen and Strunk form is an extension of this personal side of war. O'Brien tells us that they did not become friends per se, but they learned to trust one another enough to form a death pact. Yet even though this was a sign of trust between two men, they still insisted on drawing it up on paper, signing it, and getting witnesses. They trusted each other enough to end their lives but not enough to go without public ratification of their pact.

In the end, when Strunk loses his leg, his fear of Jensen killing him is absolute. He does not appeal to any in his company who knew of the pact, just Jensen, whom he insists swear not to kill him. Ironically, the oath is enough to appease Strunk, where earlier an oath would not suffice; the desperateness of his situation forces him to take Jensen's promise on faith alone. Trust, then, depends on the situation, not on the person. Strunk trusts Jensen not to kill him on his word, but he would not trust him to make the original pact without a compact. O'Brien makes us wonder whom you can trust in a war.

The "Friends" vignette wraps up with Jensen violating his original pledge and not killing Strunk. Yet when news of Strunk's death comes to him, it "seemed to relieve Dave Jensen of an enormous weight." Jensen had gone back on his word and failed his friend, thus making himself no good friend to Strunk. Perhaps because he had not been severely wounded, Jensen had not undergone the same transformation that Strunk had, wishing for a life after a massive and debilitating wound more than the death of a soldier. Either way, Strunk's death fulfills Jensen's promise not to let either of them live after sustaining such a wound. He is able again to be Strunk's friend not through his actions, but through fate and his inaction. O'Brien forces us to question what is right and wrong in a war. If Jensen had lived up to his pledge, he would be a murderer. By failing to do it, even at Strunk's behest, he proves himself no friend. O'Brien makes us wonder which is worse.

jackknife A large pocketknife.

LZ Gator Landing zone south of Chu Lai.

pull guard To be assigned to a sentinel shift, to keep watch.

wheelchair wound A permanently debilitating wound, especially loss of limbs or wounds which would cause paralysis.

rigged mortar round A short-range weapon that fires a shell on a high trajectory.

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Indian government ordered killings in Pakistan, intelligence officials claim

Allegations of up to 20 assassinations since 2020 follow Canada’s accusation of Delhi role in murders of dissidents

The Indian government assassinated individuals in Pakistan as part of a wider strategy to eliminate terrorists living on foreign soil, according to Indian and Pakistani intelligence operatives who spoke to the Guardian.

Interviews with intelligence officials in both countries, as well as documents shared by Pakistani investigators, shed new light on how India’s foreign intelligence agency allegedly began to carry out assassinations abroad as part of an emboldened approach to national security after 2019. The agency, the Research & Analysis Wing (Raw), is directly controlled by the office of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, who is running for a third term in office in elections later this month.

The accounts appear to give further weight to allegations that Delhi has implemented a policy of targeting those it considers hostile to India. While the new allegations refer to individuals charged with serious and violent terror offences, India has also been accused publicly by Washington and Ottawa of involvement in the murders of dissident figures including a Sikh activist in Canada and of a botched assassination attempt on another Sikh in the US last year.

The fresh claims relate to almost 20 killings since 2020, carried out by unknown gunmen in Pakistan. While India has previously been unofficially linked to the deaths, this is the first time Indian intelligence personnel have discussed the alleged operations in Pakistan, and detailed documentation has been seen alleging Raw’s direct involvement in the assassinations.

The allegations also suggest that Sikh separatists in the Khalistan movement were targeted as part of these Indian foreign operations, both in Pakistan and the west.

According to Pakistani investigators, these deaths were orchestrated by Indian intelligence sleeper-cells mostly operating out of the United Arab Emirates. The rise in killings in 2023 was credited to the increased activity of these cells, which are accused of paying millions of rupees to local criminals or poor Pakistanis to carry out the assassinations. Indian agents also allegedly recruited jihadists to carry out the shootings, making them believe they were killing “infidels”.

According to two Indian intelligence officers, the spy agency’s shift to focusing on dissidents abroad was triggered by the Pulwama attack in 2019 , when a suicide bomber targeted a military convoy in Indian-administered Kashmir, killing 40 paramilitary personnel. The Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed claimed responsibility.

Modi was running for a second term at the time and was brought back to power in the aftermath of the attack.

“After Pulwama, the approach changed to target the elements outside the country before they are able to launch an attack or create any disturbance,” one Indian intelligence operative said. “We could not stop the attacks because ultimately their safe havens were in Pakistan, so we had to get to the source.”

To conduct such operations “needed approval from the highest level of government”, he added.

The officer said India had drawn inspiration from intelligence agencies such as Israel’s the Mossad and Russia’s KGB, which have been linked to extrajudicial killings on foreign soil. He also said the killing of the Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered in 2018 in the Saudi embassy, had been directly cited by Raw officials.

“It was a few months after the killing of Jamal Khashoggi that there was a debate among the top brass of intelligence in the prime minister’s office about how something can be learned from the case. One senior officer said in a meeting that if Saudis can do this, why not us?” he recounted.

“What the Saudis did was very effective. You not only get rid of your enemy but send a chilling message, a warning to the people working against you. Every intelligence agency has been doing this. Our country cannot be strong without exerting power over our enemies.”

Senior officials from two separate Pakistani intelligence agencies said they suspected India’s involvement in up to 20 killings since 2020. They pointed to evidence relating to previously undisclosed inquiries into seven of the cases – including witness testimonies, arrest records, financial statements, WhatsApp messages and passports – which investigators say showcase in detail the operations conducted by Indian spies to assassinate targets on Pakistani soil. The Guardian has seen the documents but they could not be independently verified.

The intelligence sources claimed that targeted assassinations increased significantly in 2023, accusing India of involvement in the suspected deaths of about 15 people, most of whom were shot at close range by unknown gunmen.

In a response to the Guardian, India’s ministry of external affairs denied all the allegations, reiterating an earlier statement that they were “false and malicious anti-India propaganda”. The ministry emphasised a previous denial made by India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, that targeted killings in other countries were “not the government of India’s policy”.

In the killing of Zahid Akhund , an alias for the convicted Kashmiri terrorist Zahoor Mistry who was involved in the deadly hijacking of an Air India flight, the Pakistani documents say a Raw handler allegedly paid for information on Akhund’s movements and location over a period of months. She then allegedly contacted him directly, pretending to be a journalist who wanted to interview a terrorist, in order to confirm his identity.

“Are you Zahid? I am a journalist from the New York Post,” read messages in the dossier shown to the Guardian. Zahid is said to have responded: “For what u r messaging me?”

Millions of rupees were then allegedly paid to Afghan nationals to carry out the shooting in Karachi in March 2022. They fled over the border but their handlers were later arrested by Pakistani security agencies .

According to the evidence gathered by Pakistan, the killings were regularly coordinated out of the UAE, where Raw established sleeper cells that would separately arrange different parts of the operation and recruit the killers.

Investigators alleged that millions of rupees would often be paid to criminals or impoverished locals to carry out the murders, with documents claiming that payments were mostly done via Dubai. Meetings of Raw handlers overseeing the killings are also said to have taken also place in Nepal, the Maldives and Mauritius.

“This policy of Indian agents organising killings in Pakistan hasn’t been developed overnight,” said a Pakistani official. “We believe they have worked for around two years to establish these sleeper cells in the UAE who are mostly organising the executions. After that, we began witnessing many killings.”

In the case of Shahid Latif , the commander of Jaish-e-Mohammed and one of India’s most notorious militants, several attempts were allegedly made to kill him. In the end, the documents claim, it was an illiterate 20-year-old Pakistani who carried out the assassination in Pakistan in October, allegedly recruited by Raw in the UAE, where he was working for a minimal salary in an Amazon packing warehouse.

Pakistani investigators found that the man had allegedly been paid 1.5m Pakistani rupees (£4,000) by an undercover Indian agent to track down Latif and later was promised 15m Pakistani rupees and his own catering company in the UAE if he carried out the killing. The young man shot Latif dead in a mosque in Sialkot but was arrested soon after, along with accomplices.

The killings of Bashir Ahmad Peer , commander of the militant outfit Hizbul Mujahideen, and Saleem Rehmani, who was on India’s most-wanted list, were also allegedly planned out of the UAE, with transaction receipts from Dubai appearing to show payments of millions of rupees to the killers. Rehmani’s death had previously been reported as the result of a suspected armed robbery .

Analysts believe Pakistani authorities have been reluctant to publicly acknowledge the killings as most of the targets are known terrorists and associates of outlawed militant groups that Islamabad has long denied sheltering.

In most cases, public information about their deaths has been scant. However, Pakistani agencies showed evidence they had conducted investigations and arrests behind closed doors.

The figures given to the Guardian match up with those collated by analysts who have been tracking unclaimed militant killings in Pakistan. Ajay Sahni, the executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management in Delhi, said his organisation had documented 20 suspicious fatalities in Pakistan by unknown attackers since 2020, though two had been claimed by local militant groups. He emphasised that because of Pakistan’s refusal to publicly investigate the cases – or even acknowledge that these individuals had been living in their jurisdiction – “we have no way of knowing the cause”.

“If you look at the numbers, there is clearly a shift in intent by someone or other,” said Sahni. “It would be in Pakistan’s interest to say this has been done by India. Equally, one of the legitimate lines of inquiry would be possible involvement of the Indian agencies.”

Pakistan’s foreign secretary, Muhammad Syrus Sajjad Qazi, publicly acknowledged two of the killings in a press conference in January, where he accused India of carrying out a “sophisticated and sinister” campaign of “extraterritorial and extrajudicial killings” in Pakistan.

Islamabad’s accusations were met with scepticism by others, due to the longstanding animosity between the two neighbouring countries who have gone to war four times and have often made unsubstantiated accusations against the other.

For decades India has accused Pakistan of bankrolling a violent militant insurgency in the disputed region of Indian-administered Kashmir and of giving a safe haven to terrorists. In the early 2000s, India was hit by successive terrorist attacks orchestrated by Pakistan-based Islamist militant groups, including the 2006 Mumbai train blasts , which killed more than 160 people, and the 2008 Mumbai bombings , which killed 172 people.

Both countries are known to have carried out cross-border intelligence operations, including small bomb blasts. However, analysts and Pakistani officials described the alleged systematic targeted killings of dissidents by Indian agents on Pakistani soil since 2020 as “new and unprecedented”.

The majority of those allegedly killed by Raw in Pakistan in the past three years have been individuals associated with militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, and in several cases have convictions or proven links to some of India’s deadliest terrorist incidents, which have killed hundreds of people. Others were seen to be “handlers” of Kashmiri militants who helped coordinate attacks and spread information from afar.

According to one of the Indian intelligence officers, the Pulwama attack in 2019 prompted fears that militant groups in Pakistan were planning a repeat of attacks such as the 2008 Mumbai bombings.

“The previous approach had been to foil terrorist attacks,” he said. “But while we were able to make significant progress in bringing the terrorist numbers down in Kashmir, the problem was the handlers in Pakistan. We could not just wait for another Mumbai or an attack on parliament when we are aware that the planners were still operating in Pakistan.”

In September, the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, told parliament there were “credible allegations” that Indian agents had orchestrated the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Sikh activist who was gunned down in Vancouver. Weeks later, the US Department of Justice released an indictment vividly detailing how an Indian agent had attempted to recruit a hitman in New York to kill another Sikh activist, later named as Gurpatwant Singh Pannun.

Both men had been major advocates of the Khalistan movement , which seeks to create an independent Sikh state and is illegal in India. India denied any involvement in the killing of Nijjar, while according to a recent report , India’s own investigation into the Pannun plot concluded that it had been carried out by a rogue agent who was no longer working for Raw.

According to one Indian intelligence official, Delhi recently ordered the suspension of targeted killings in Pakistan after Canada and the US went public with their allegations. No suspicious killings have taken place so far this year.

Two Indian operatives separately confirmed that diaspora Khalistani activists had become a focus of India’s foreign operations after hundreds of thousands of farmers, mostly Sikhs from Punjab, descended on Delhi to protest against new farm laws. The protest ultimately forced the government into a rare policy U-turn, which was seen as an embarrassment .

The suspicion in Delhi was that firebrand Sikh activists living abroad, particularly those in Canada, the US and the UK, were fuelling the farmers’ protests and stirring up international support through their strong global networks. It stoked fears that these activists could be a destabilising force and were capable of reviving Khalistani militancy in India.

“Places were raided and people were arrested in Punjab, but things were actually being controlled from places like Canada,” said one of the Indian intelligence operatives. “Like other intelligence agencies, we had to deal with it.”

In the UK, Sikhs in the West Midlands were issued “threat to life” warnings, amid growing concern about the safety of separatist campaigners who Sikhs claim are being targeted by the Indian government.

Before the US and Canadian cases, a high-profile Khalistani leader, Paramjit Singh Panjwar , was shot dead in Lahore last May. Pakistani investigators claimed they had warned Panjwar that his life was in danger a month before he was killed and said another Khalistani activist living in Pakistan has also faced threats to his life.

Panjwar’s assassination is among those alleged to have been carried out by Indian operatives using what Pakistani agencies described as the “religious method”. According to the documents, Indian agents used social media to infiltrate networks of Islamic State (IS) and units connected to the Taliban, where they recruited and groomed Pakistani Islamist radicals to carry out hit jobs on Indian dissidents by telling them they were carrying out “sacred killings” of “infidels”.

These agents allegedly sought help from former IS fighters from the Indian state of Kerala – who had travelled to Afghanistan to fight for IS but surrendered after 2019 and were brought back through diplomatic channels – to get access to these jihadist networks.

According to an investigation by the Pakistani agencies, Panjwar’s killer, who was later caught, allegedly thought he was working on the instructions of the Pakistan Taliban affiliate Badri 313 Battalion and had to prove himself by killing an enemy of Islam.

The killing of Riyaz Ahmad , a top Lashkar-e-Taiba commander, in September last year was allegedly carried out by Raw in a similar manner. His killer, Pakistan believes, was recruited through a Telegram channel for those who wanted to fight for IS, and which had been infiltrated by Raw agents.

They have claimed the assassin was Muhammad Abdullah, a 20-year-old from Lahore. He allegedly told Pakistani investigators he was promised he would be sent to Afghanistan to fight for IS if he passed the test of killing an “infidel” in Pakistan, with Ahmed presented as the target. Abdullah shot and killed Ahmed during early morning prayers at a mosque in Rawalkot, but was later arrested by Pakistani authorities.

Walter Ladwig, a political scientist at King’s College London, said the alleged shift in strategy was in line with Modi’s more aggressive approach to foreign policy and that just as western states have been accused of extrajudicial killings abroad in the name of national security, there were those in Delhi who felt “India reserves the right to do the same”.

Daniel Markey, a senior adviser on south Asia at the United States Institute of Peace, said: “In terms of India’s involvement, it all kind of adds up. It’s utterly consistent with this framing of India having arrived on the world stage. Being willing to take this kind of action against perceived threats has been interpreted, at least by some Indians, as a marker of great power status.”

The allegations of extrajudicial killings, which would violate international law, could raise difficult questions for western countries that have pursued an increasingly close strategic and economic relationship with Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) government, including pushing for intelligence-sharing agreements.

A former senior Raw official who served before Modi’s premiership denied that extrajudicial killings were part of the agency’s remit. He confirmed that nothing would be done without the knowledge of the national security adviser, who would then report it to the prime minister, and on occasion they would report directly to the prime minister. “I could not do anything without their approval,” he said.

The former Raw official claimed that the killings were more likely to have been carried out by Pakistan themselves, a view that has been echoed by others in India.

Pakistani agencies denied this, pointing to a list of more than two dozen dissidents living in Pakistan to whom they had recently issued direct warnings of threats to their lives and instructed them to go into hiding. Three individuals in Pakistan said they had been given these warnings. They claimed others who had not heeded the threats and continued their normal routines were now dead.

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