What didn't they carry through the hills in Vietnam?! O'Brien begins to develop his characters (and fellow soldiers) by directly saying what their job was in the war. The weight continued to add up. They carried "... P-38 can openers, pocket knives, ... dog tags, ... C rations, ... and two or three canteens of water" not to mention machinery and guns (page 2). The intangibles, however, is what O'Brien wanted to execute as almost unbearable: "Grief, terror, love, longing- these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight" (page 20). O'Brien uses a juxtaposition to show the extremes at which one may be involved with war: "they carried... whatever seemed appropriate as a means of killing or staying alive (page 7). O'Brien has a way of writing memories that captures my mind, like when he says on page 7 that "they carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried." I could almost feel (probably because of the weight experienced during back country on Summer Field Studies) the weight and unbelief that my body could handle all that!
I find cleverness inspiring and invigorating, partly because I'm not too quick-witted. So when I read that Lieutenant Jimmy Cross "humped his love for Martha up the hills and through the swamps," I laughed aloud. The pun meant that he carried the love through Vietnam (which inevitably cost him) and also hinted at the fact that Cross wanted a little more with Martha than just an old photograph.
Ha! humped.
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