In the fifth chapter of The Things They Carried, O’Brien tells the story of Dave Jensen and Less Strunk, two soldiers that are turned against each other by the war. Jensen and Strunk fist fought “about something stupid- a missing jackknife-but even so the fight was vicious” (62). During their fight Jensen breaks Stunk’s nose, and afterward becomes overly paranoid about how Stunk might seek revenge. Although “There were no threats, no vows of revenge, just a silent tension between them” (63), Jensen constantly worried about whether or not Stunk would seek revenge:
Eventually, after a week of this, the strain began to create problems. Jensen couldn’t relax. Like fighting two different wards, he said. No safe ground: enemies everywhere. No front or rear. At night he had trouble sleeping- a skittish feeling- always on guard, hearing strange noises in the dark, imagining a grenade rolling into his foxhole or the tickle of a knife against his ear. The distinction between good guys and bad guys disappeared for him.
Evidently, after fighting with the Vietnamese for so long he can no longer distinguish the enemy, and begins fighting not only with a man on his own side, but with himself.
One of the most disturbingly profound effects of war involves not only an inability to distinguish the real enemy, but an inability to distinguish oneself from the land. In chapter 9, O’ Brian tells the story of Mary Anne, the innocent blonde girlfriend of soldier Eddie Diamond. Because their squad was stationed in an area seemingly away from the war, Eddie Diamond paid for his girlfriend to fly to Vietnam. Eventually Mary Anne got sucked into the horror of the land. As Rat Kiley explains to Tim, what happened to Mary Anne “was what happened to all of them. You come over clean and you get dirty and then afterwards it’s never the same” (114). Mary Anne had only been in Vietnam for a few months before she started to go crazy. The war affected her intensely by soaking her very soul into the violence and destruction of Vietnam, leaving her hopelessly absorbed in the war. As Mary Anne represents a “soldier” unable to disconnect from the actual war, O’Brien tells a similar story of a soldier that cannot forget the war once he returns home.