Sherman Alexie once said, “When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing.” When human beings are faced with a struggle, they have two options: face what they face or fall prey to the struggle. In the story "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien, the author recounts the experiences of Alpha Company soldiers as they pass through the fields of Vietnam during the Vietnam War. War is traumatic and often changes people permanently. Soldiers face more emotional, mental and physical trauma than most people have ever had to endure. Every week they encountered death, disease and destruction. The men face the uncertainty, fear and death around them in surprisingly tender, funny or horrifyingly brutal ways to deal with what they have seen. Faced with war, each man reacts in his own way and changes based on the circumstances he encounters. Throughout the story, Azar and the other soldiers use humor as a form of response. Throughout the war jokes are continually made to remove reality from the situation and make it less real than it actually is. The jokes covered the fears they carry with them. Create the necessary distance so that the war does not reach them. Finding things to joke about helped the soldiers have a sense of purpose and existence even as everything around them was crumbling. According to Tim O'Brien, “They found jokes to tell. They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness…. When someone died, they weren't dying at all because in a curious way it seemed written in a script...". They choose to mock their experiences rather than deal with the pain associated with them, as shown through their ritual of... middle of paper... how he chooses to eliminate his pain. The buffalo was the embodiment of his pain and he needed something to take his pain out on, so he starts shooting bits and pieces of the buffalo. According to the narrator, “it was not to kill; it hurt... The whole platoon stood there watching, feeling all kinds of things, but there wasn't much mercy for the little water buffalo. Their goal was never to kill the buffalo, but rather to make it experience the slow, deathly pain that all of them had felt since the war began. A similar incident occurred immediately following Lavender's death, when Alpha Company chose to obliterate the city to ease the pain caused by Lavender's death. In situations like these, even though violence is often not the best choice, it is one of the only ways they overcome the tragedy of war..