Free Things They Carried Essays: Friendship In Vietnam

Friendships In Vietnam

One strives to find an individual to be able to connect on an intellectual and emotional level. The prime definition of a friend, defined by Google is, “a person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection.” Despite there being a concrete definition, friendship has no terminology because everyone’s view on it is distinct and miscellaneous. The pure definition of friendship is defined on one’s own notion. In The Things They Carried, Rat Kiley and Curt Lemon had a bona fide friendship that was equivalent to no other friendship. Mark Fossie and Mary Anne Bell also had a friendship that was beyond than just a friendship. Both relationships were so complementary but yet contradicted each other sufficiently.
Since they were both reasonably juvenile to be going to war, they knew the same struggle of suddenly being put into this war and dealing with all the wickedness that surrounded them daily. Both Rat Kiley and Curt Lemon had childlike personalities which made them even more drawn to each other. They felt as if the war was a game that must be experienced in a comical aspect to fend off the definite reasoning the war had happened. Everytime Rat Kiley and Curt Lemon had to go out for an excursion, Curt Lemon would primarily be the one to turn it into a shenanigan. While out on a river Curt Lemon had gone fishing with a crowd of hand grenades and a vast majority of the fish had kicked the bucket because of Curt Lemon’s crazy antic (65). Despite being childish, Curt Lemon’s courageousness and sense of adventure shaped him up to be an overall lad who wanted to do nothing but good in the war. As for Rat Kiley, he had a more sober viewpoint on the war. He seemed to be an overly exaggerated person when speaking about anything at all. “Among the men in Alpha Company, Rat had a reputation for exaggeration and overstatement, a compulsion to rev up the facts, and for most of us it was normal procedure to discount sixty or seventy percent of anything he had to say” (85). When he had retold the story of Mark Fossie and Mary Anne Bell, he tended to cut himself off a plethora
He had flown out his girlfriend from, “Cleveland to Los Angeles, LA to Bangkok, Bangkok to Saigon. She'd hopped a C-130 up to Chu Lai and stayed overnight at the USO and the next morning hooked a ride west with the resupply chopper” (90). They began developing a relationship since the start of sixth grade and both knew right away they were the one for each other. At the beginning of her stay, Mark Fossie and Mary Anne Bell were very snug as a bug in a rug with each other and Fossie would not mind the way Mary acted around the other soldiers. He showed nothing but love for her. Mary Anne Bell seemed to like the experience of the war and she felt like she wanted to become a part of it and that was exactly what she had done. Unlike Rat and Lemon, Fossie and Mary developed a falling out. Towards the end of Mary’s stay, Fossie had become fed up with the way she became and put a stop to it and wanted to send her back. As this was going on, Mary Anne Bell suddenly disappeared and Fossie no longer heard from her