The Things They Carried conflicts

In O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”, O’Brien faces multiple types of conflicts. The short story that comes to mind the quickest is “On the Rainy River”. O’Brien faces Man versus Society in this short story. He does not believe that the war is right in any way. He calls himself a twenty-one year old college student that is a ‘Liberal’, justifying that him being drafted into the war is unbelievable. He runs away from his home town in hopes of ditching the war. This is two conflicts now. Man versus Self and Man versus Society.  O’Brien runs and lives with Elroy Berdahl for almost a week. I believe O’Brien is conflicted with himself. He cannot find it in himself to go to the war, because he does not want to be a pawn of the government fighting a useless war. He is conflicted with himself and since he is running from the draft he is conflicted with society. Society needs him to fight in the war and to bring back justice. “Destroy those Commies!” and all of that propaganda. In the end O’Brien gets paddled down the Rainy River, a river in Minnesota that goes to Canada, and Berdahl makes it apparent that O’Brien can get off and run to be in Canada. O’Brien now has the choice of being a draft runner or going to war. O’Brien chooses the latter, only because of persuading himself. Berdahl does not say a word, besides smiling and nodding. O’Brien could have ditched the draft, but he was conflicted with himself so he goes to war.
My favorite scene has been when Mitchell Sanders  tells the trillion dollar artillery drop story. Mitchell Sanders tells the story of the six men hiking in the Vietnam mountains. As the men trek through the mountains they hear something. Something like an orchestra or as they say chamber music. They hear chatting and instruments playing. They hear martini glasses and other civilized sounding things. They say they hear a cocktail party and radio a massive army to blow up whatever it was. They call in air strikes and napalm trees. They blow down the mountain ridge and they still hear them. They head down the mountain and say absolutely nothing. When the colonel asks for all the explosives and incendiaries the men look at him and say nothing, like they’re blind and dumb. The colonel says it was six trillion dollars and they continue to say nothing. It’s my favorite because the colonel is amazed of their silence. I love how eerie it is, that they hear noise before and after the artillery drop, and it is in the middle of absolutely no where.

It isn’t connected to the main characters conflict. It’s an eerie and funny story.