O’Brien mentions in The Things They Carried that he writes because he cannot forget, even though he has already transitioned from a time of war into a time of peace. Regarding the death of his fellow comrade, Kiowa, he states: “It was hard stuff to write. Kiowa, after all, had been a close friend, and for years I’ve avoided thinking about his death and my own complicity in it”. Here he exemplifies how the war has impacted him, how it has made him repress his memories, throughout the course of many years, of those close to him that he has lost as a result of the war. Ironically, however, he also wrote: “I did not look on my work as therapy, and still don’t. Yet when I received Norman Bowker’s letter, it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse”. Thus, the mere act of writing down his stories, while they are hard to endure, helps him to keep himself from deteriorating, whether mentally, physically, or both, and helps him to endure the war’s after…