The Things They Carried

The morning after Kiowa dies, the soldiers wade through the muck in the falling rain, searching for his body. As they search for the body, Azar makes crude comments about Kiowa’s death, and Norman Bowker tells him to be quiet. Mitchell Sanders finds Kiowa’s rucksack. They decide not to tell the Lieutenant, Jimmy Cross. Jimmy Cross stands far away composing a letter in his head to Kiowa’s father. He reflects on how he should’ve camped on higher ground. He imagines apologizing to Kiowa’s father for the mistake: “My own fault, he would say” (162). He moves across the field to a young soldier, who is bent at the waist and feeling along the bottom of the field. The young soldier thinks of how he and Kiowa had been talking the night before, and how the young soldier used a flashlight to show Kiowa a picture of his girlfriend, “and then the field exploded all around them” (163). The young soldier tried to crawl toward the screaming, but instead went under the muck. When he came back up again, there were no more screams:

He remembered grabbing the boot. He remembered pulling hard, but how the field seemed to pull back, like a tug-of-war he couldn’t win, and how finally he had to whisper his friend’s name and let go and watch the boot slide away (164).