Lieutenant jimmy Cross, in Tim O'Brien's short story. "The Things They Carried," is a man suffering under many burdens. The story is specifically about those burdens--real and imagined, substantial and emotional. The context is war, in which Cross and the men under his command, face death at any moment. In fact, the death of one man is featured prominently in the story. However, it is the weight of the burden under which the living suffer which is the heart of the story. The dead man is free, in the sense that he no longer suffers under the weight of the fears and longings of the living.
Cross is the center of these burdens in the story. He bears an extra burden: he believes himself to be responsible for the death of the man. Cross believes his obsessive thinking about a woman back home has directly and/or indirectly led to the death of the man. His memories and imaginings about the woman serve him as an escape from the war, but they are also a cause for added concern because they prevent him from being as alert to the safety of his men as he would otherwise be.
While these mental, emotional, moral and even spiritual concerns weigh down on the lieutenant, he is also burdened by physical items. In fact, the story is so dense with descriptions of the items Cross and his men carry at various times and places that the reader would be forgiven for suspecting that they could barely move. Not coincidentally, when the man is shot and dead, the description emphasizes the aspect of weight in his dying and falling: "Like cement" (8). The clear implication is that Cross and all the men in the war suffer from such a terrible collection of heavy physical, emotional and other burdens, that when the strings of life are cut there is nothing but the dead weight of cement. The accompanying implication, emphasized by most of Cross's observations, is that much of his and their energy is taken up in simply keeping upright under such burdens.
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