Love Jimmy Cross Character Analysis

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“The Things They Carried,” the Alpha Company is mobilized to fight in the Vietnam War. The soldiers carry goods necessary to their survival as well personal items. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carries letters and photos from a female friend named Martha, and spends most of his time mooning over her. The first casualty for the company is Ted Lavender, shot dead while relieving himself. Cross blames himself for the death because he thinks he was too busy thinking about Martha to properly take care of his troops. He burns her letters and photographs and decides to be a better leader. In “Love,” Jimmy goes to visit the narrator, Tim O’Brien, in his home in Massachusetts after the war. Cross relates that he bumped into Martha after she got home, and that he still loves her although she doesn’t love him back. He has never forgiven himself for Lavender’s death, but pleads with O’Brien to portray him as a great leader if the writer ever writes about their experiences. “Spin” is made up of a collection of recollections of the ordinary things soldiers do when they are at war, such as playing chess games. O’Brien compares the war to a Ping-Pong ball, saying that one can spin it in many different directions. He is now a 43-year-old writer who only writes war stories. His daughter thinks he should find a happier topic, but O’Brien…show more content…
He had just graduated college and planned to go to Harvard for graduate school. He was split between the instinct to run, and the instinct to do what everyone expected: go to war. He took the car up to the Canadian border, and a friendly hotel owner rowed him along a river right up to Canada. In the end he couldn’t bring himself to jump out of the boat. He cried in the boat, paid Elroy for the room, and drove home. It is a hard story for O’Brien to tell, he writes, because it shows that he was a coward and that he made the wrong

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