Although O'Brien lists some literal "things" the soldiers carry, the soldiers are also carrying other "things" such as emotional burdens and memories. Some emotional burdens they carry are their pride and fear. They carry pride and fear because they want to be the typical patriotic men eagerly serving the country, and are expected to fulfill their duties as men. They are labeled to be a lot of things but they are fearful of failure and things that usually happen to soldiers, such as your friends dying, death, or going crazy from anxiety and experiencing disturbing events and sights. Another "thing" the soldiers carry are memories from their pasts that connect them to their present predicaments, and their oncoming futures. Although a lot of them were physical memories such as letters, photographs or tokens from past relationships, it's what those memories reminded them of and the feelings they got from them that the soldiers carried. The soldiers also carried with them imagination, hope, loyalty, and love. They carried imagination and hope because it was a subconscious way for them to cope with the war; by imagining that there is a better place for them, and what could, should, or would have been, what lives they might be able to have in the future, or how better it would be when the war was over. They're hopeful for a time when they're not always afraid for their lives and burying their friends. The soldiers carry loyalty because they have to, and they carry love for the ones they love back home and for their fellow soldiers. Although they're told that they're expected to fight on behalf of love for their country, the only motivation that let them live that way(an environment where the mindset is that death is a norm and killing is acceptable) is the love they have.
Jimmy Cross is the lieutenant of a group of soldiers in Vietnam. He loves a girl named Martha who goes to college back in the states and had given him a photo, a lucky rock-charm, and two letters signed, "love". Lieutenant Cross occasionally daydeams about Martha even when he knows Martha doesn't love him back. On one day when he was daydreaming again about Martha, one of his soldiers, Ted Lavender, was shot and killed. He never forgave himself for Lavender's death and decided that day that he wouldn't keep hoping in Martha by daydreaming about her. He decided to do his duty as a leader and stop being foolish. His friend's death caused Lieutenant Cross to lose his innocence about the war and made him realize that it's not going to be easy, and that there's no time for things back at home. He realized his duty to his country and essentially, became a man. This came about with a lot of pressure from the war itself, but his friend's death was the final push over the edge.
The movie The Most Dangerous Man in America, the history of the Vietnam War, and the novel "The things They Carried" are alike in that they reveal that many 'things' are not as innocent as they outwardly seem. Daniel Ellsberg realized during his career in the Pentagon that he and thousands of others working under the president were withholding a great scandal; that four presidents so far have spread lies, falsely exaggerated, and withheld a lot of the actual conditions of the war. He also realized that the people working under them had taken advantage of the general public's natural assumption that the president would only act upon his moral correctness. So when one looks back at the history of the Vietnam war they'll usually remember it as bittersweet. It reminds us about our country and it's failures to be the just and honest and free nation it's supposed to be. After that war, people started to realize as a nation that they weren't invincible. That they weren't perfect. And most importantly, they realized that they can't always win. The people of America went through the same "thing" that Lieutenant Jimmy Cross did in the novel, The Things They Carried; both of them were shocked into disillusionment.
