The author’s intent in ‘The Things They Carried” is to show how everyone carries emotional baggage, and the effects that carrying that baggage has on people. In this story the men carry a lot of emotional and physical baggage, and they are constantly struggling with carrying it, and learning to let some of it go. The story follows a pattern in which the narrator rotates talking about three things; the physical weight of all the supplies the men carry followed by their emotional baggage, Ted Lavender’s death, and Cross’s love for Martha. The narrator goes into great detail about the items each man carries, the weight of each item, and then follows with the emotional baggage of said man. This is to show the universal struggle between men.
