When the Greek Titan Atlas lost to Zeus in battle, he suffered the harsh fate of being condemned to hold up the entire sky. His predicament, however, is nothing to the personal hell that men of war face. The life of a solider revolves around killing with, and death by guns; in such an environment, it becomes necessary for one to justify one’s own contributions to this atrocity: The constant moral dilemma of whether to kill or face being killed represents a pain that Atlas never had to endure. To declare that all soldiers who have taken a life are heartless, though, cannot be further from incorrect. The fact that these men are (more or less) able to face two of the greatest human fears – the fears of both having committed a horrible crime and having made a horrible mistake – indicates a terrible, internal struggle in any sane individual. And while this conflict has no adequate resolution, these soldiers find a final mental barrier against the bloodshed and sadness in one word: denial. Both the short story, “The Things They Carried,” and the movie, Platoon, demonstrate the important role that denial plays in inspiring disillusionment and allowing soldiers to retain some amount of sanity amidst such horror.  

War unlike anything else is probably the most surreal reality that anyone will ever see. In the short story, “The Things They Carried,” the author, Tim O’Brien, presents the not so typical dramatization of war. He shows a war without the zealous glorification of death, he does not even hand out the notion dying with honor or dignity. O’Brien purposefully gives his war and his characters a nihilistic feel in order to show the necessary denial that the soldiers create. The soldiers only seem capable of “humping” day in and day out. They are not even in Vietnam to fight some greater communist threat; they are there to carry a gun and a pack and a million other items through the jungle until they walk straight out of their minds. O’Brien goes into great detail to reiterate over and over the tremendous toll that this took on the men; “it was automatic, it was anatomy, and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kid of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility”  The physical nature of carrying pounds upon pounds of gear seems to break and force them into a drone of up and down; but this is not the case. Instead the men accept the humping as the only reason they have for being half way across the world in some dense jungle. They abandon conventional logic for something that makes more sense to them. Maybe the idea that these soldiers are there only to lug everything around is absolute preposterous; but to the platoon, the idea of killing people they have never even met is just as unreal.