Throughout the book, Tim O’Brien offers clues to the men’s personalities through the specific items they carry as well as telling the reader what they are like and describing their actions. One thing O’Brien says of all the men is that they were haunted: “They all carried ghosts.” He largely leaves it for the reader to identify those ghosts.
Henry Dobbins appears in the stories “The Things They Carried,” “Church,” and “Style.” Much of the information is about his physical appearance and his actions; very little direct information about his personality is provided. Inferences about his personality can be drawn from the other soldiers’ nicknaming him “Good soldier Jesus.”
Three times Dobbins is described as “a big man”; all three times this is related primarily to his abilities and duties. He carried additional rations; he was a machine gunner who carried the M-60 and ammunition, totaling at least 33 pounds; and he was excluded from tunnel duty.
In regard to personality, we learn that he was “fond of canned peaches,” which were part of the extra rations, and that he drew comfort or physical warmth from “his girlfriend’s pantyhose wrapped around his neck….”
Henry seems to be a straightforward, probably unimaginative, even stolid man. In two situations, when the cynical jokester Sanders is trying to provoke a reaction, Henry does not take the bait. When Sanders and Bowker take a Vietnamese soldier’s thumb as a souvenir, Sanders says there is a moral, but Henry says he does not see it; a similar exchange is repeated later regarding Lavender’s drugs, and he dismisses Sanders’s provocation as “cute.” Because he is the machine-gunner, however, he is often responsible for considerable destruction and killing when the soldiers go into a village, which seems to be a primary source of his “ghosts.”
When the soldiers spent time with some Buddhist monks (“Church”), Dobbins says he is not religious but is drawn to the social interactions that could come with church. Drawing on his store of rations, he gives the monks peaches and candy. Saying that they should be nice to them, he also mimes washing his hands. This might be a Christian analogy to Pontius Pilate, symbolizing Dobbins’s need to rid himself of guilt for the killing he has done; however, that seems to contradict the Christ symbolism the other soldiers’ nickname generates.
The place where Dobbins’s size and ghosts seem to come together in a revealing way is in the story style. After shooting up a Vietnamese village, they find a teenage girl left alive and dancing. Later when another soldier, Azar, mocks her, Dobbins loses it. He picks Azar up, dangles him over a well, and threatens to drop him down it. Here we seem to see an expression of Dobbins’s inner torment, or ghosts, over killing the girl’s family, community, and countrymen. “Dance right,” he says to Azar, projecting onto him the contradictions over the morality of their behavior.
Henry Dobbins is presented to us as an all-round good guy, the moral exemplar of what an American soldier should be. Though the various stories that make up The Things They Carried depict the moral ambiguities of the fog of war, there's nothing especially complicated about the character of Henry Dobbins. Despite the horrors of war, he still manages to retain a strict moral code, one by which he lives his life on the front line. It's notable, for example, that he behaves respectfully towards the Vietnamese, an attitude not widely shared in Alpha Company.
That code is deeply suffused with a religious spirit, and Henry's faith insulates him, to some extent, from the chaos and bloodshed surrounding him, giving him a maturity of outlook singularly lacking in other soldiers, most notably Azar. But his faith, though mainly conventional, combines with elements of superstition, such as his belief that a pair of pantyhose will act as a talisman to ward off death.
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