“Friends” is a short story about two soldiers, Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk, who have become friends and rely on each other during their service in Vietnam. They sign a contract saying that if either one of them is severely wounded, the other would “end it”. Strunk is afraid after he trips an explosive and loses a leg. Jensen tells Strunk he won’t kill him. The soldiers get news that Strunk died in the helicopter, and Jensen is relieved.
What really intrigues me about this story is the extremity of friendship that these two soldiers have developed in order to agree to kill the other if he ends up in a wheelchair. In the end of the story, when the soldiers learn of Strunk’s death, the narrator says that the news “seemed to relieve Jensen of an enormous weight.” Thus, closing the story with a powerful thought, which is; “he was actually going to kill Strunk.” It’s a scary thought, and it does get to me.
The first comparison I could make between anything in The Things They Carried, and a poem that we have read in class would be to the poem, “Her Kind.” There is a dark and chaotic undertone, more prevalent in “Her Kind,” but definitely there throughout The Things They Carried. The first lines of the poem describe a similar loss of control to madness that is prevalent among some of the soldiers who were forced to ignore their morals in the name of war;
“I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming of evil, I have done my hitch”
I think the word “possessed,” says it best, because that is, what I feel, the manner in which soldiers revert to during war.
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