The Horror of Humiliation

“You’re at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River….the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier….You’re twenty-one years old, you’re scared, and there’s a hard squeezing pressure in your chest. What would you do” (56)? Tim O’Brien is so wrought with fear that he wants the reader of The Things They Carried to feel exactly what he is feeling. The Things They Carried is a work of fiction by Tim O’Brien depicting the lives of soldiers, one of them being Tim O’Brien, during the Vietnam War. War is a terrible place, yet the greatest fear shown in the book is the fear of embarrassment. The ability to overcome this fear or not changes the lives of the soldiers tremendously.

Norman Bowker is one of those soldiers. Norman is afraid his father will think less of him because of what he did in Vietnam. He envisions himself explaining to his father about “the seven medals he did win… then he would have talked about the medal he did not win and why he did not win it” (141). Norman and the soldiers had to spend a rainy night in a “shit field” (146). “Everything was black and wet” when the “field just exploded. Rain and slop and shrapnel…all they could do was worm down into the slime and cover up and wait” (148). Norman was in the midst of battle when he heard his friend Kiowa screaming. “[Norman] grabbed Kiowa by the boot and tried to pull him out….and then suddenly he felt himself going…The shit was in his nose and eyes….He released Kiowa’s boot and watched it slide away” (149).

Norman is telling this story in his head after the war as he drives around a seven-mile loop in his hometown in Iowa. He imagines telling it to his father, but he never articulates it. He is afraid his father will disapprove of him since he “almost won the Silver Star” and did not actually win it (141). Norman expresses his worries about his father to Tim one night. “I’ll tell you something, O’Brien. If I could have one wish, anything, I’d wish for my dad to write me a letter and say it’s okay if I don’t win any medals. That’s all my old man talks about…he can’t wait to see my goddamn medals” (36). According to Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Reasoning, Norman is operating at a stage three because he wants his father to approve of him. Norman is unable to move beyond his fear of disappointing his father and in 1978 “hanged himself in…his hometown in central Iowa” (155). Norman’s life ended because of his inability to overcome his fear.

Tim O’Brien was afraid of being shamed as well, although he wishes that he was not. At the beginning of the chapter “On the Rainy River,” Tim talks about what he wishes courage was like. He hopes that it “comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down” (40). Yet the day comes when Tim receives his draft notice, the day he needs to draw on his “account,” and he can not. He flees to the Rainy River, which separates Minnesota from Canada, and eventually gets out on the river in a boat staring Canada in the face. “All [he] could do was cry…That old image of [himself] as a hero, as a man of conscience and courage, all that was just a …dream” (57). He then sees images of his family, his hometown, and many other people “whooping and chanting and urging [him] toward one shore or the other” (59). And with “All those eyes on [him]…right then [he] submitted….[He] would go to the war—[he] would kill and maybe die—because [he] was embarrassed not to” (59). Tim makes one of the biggest decisions of his life based on the fact that he is too embarrassed to go to Canada. Like Norman, Tim is acting at a stage three of Kohlberg’s moral stages because he acts based on what others will think of him. He is afraid that others will think less of him if he decides to go to Canada instead of Vietnam. And submitting to his fear, Tim heads to war.

In contrast, Rat Kiley conquers the fear of embarrassment to get out of war. This fear is one that weighs heavily on all of the soldiers’ minds. “[The soldiers] carried the…greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing” (21). For Rat, this fear considerably strained him because he was the medic. He had to look after everyone else’s health and safety before his own; but if he wasn’t okay then no one would be. During a period of about two weeks, the soldiers only moved around at night. “[I]t was a tense time for everybody…[but] the strain was too much for [Rat]” (218). “Sometimes he’d stare at guys who were still okay, the alive guys, and he’d start to picture how they’d look dead…[and] he couldn’t shut off the pictures” (222). Rat was not alright, and it was obvious to everyone. Finally Rat could not take it and “took off his boots and socks, laid out his medical kit, doped himself up, and put a round through his foot” (223). He did this in front of everyone, therefore facing public humiliation. Normally, “[the soldiers] spoke bitterly about guys who had found release by shooting off their own toes or fingers,” but “Nobody blamed him….Lieutenant Cross went over and said he’d vouch that it was an accident….Everybody stood in a little circle, feeling bad about it, trying to cheer him up” (22, 223-224). Rat Kiley was acting at a stage 6 because he rose above the “soldier’s greatest fear” and shot himself for everyone’s sake.

By overcoming his personal fear, Rat Kiley progressed to the highest stage of moral reasoning. While facing all of the dangers of war, it was the overwhelming fear of humiliation that drove at least one of the major decisions made by each of the characters. Rat Kiley was able to overpower this fear; Norman and Tim were not. Tim O’Brien is showing the reader that it is difficult, but still possible, to achieve the highest level of moral reasoning, even within the context of war.