Another world portrayed in The Things They Carried In several stories in The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien addresses how American soldiers in the Vietnam War they related to being "in the country", or out of one's own country and on the other side of the world. O'Brien creates the concept that Vietnam and the war there are "another world" throughout the stories. None of the soldiers he writes about feel at home in Vietnam, and none of them successfully adjust emotionally to being so far from home. O'Brien subtly introduces the concept of "another world" into the book's title story. In describing how easy it would be for a soldier to give in to the pressures of war and collapse on the trail, thus being sent home or to the hospital, the narrator says that "the helicopter... would take you... away across the world [italics added ]” (21-22). The attentive reader will grasp O'Brien's subtlety and realize that if the soldiers - because the narrator speaks for the soldiers as a collective - feel as if Vietnam were not in the world, then they must feeling like they are in "another world." This exact phrase is used later in the same story. When Lieutenant Cross thinks of his girlfriend Martha, he berates himself for his useless fantasies Mount Sebastian, it's another world" (24). Then in "How To Tell A True War Story", O'Brien reiterates the concept. The soldiers in the story hear music coming from afar, and the narrator describes it as "everything very civilized, except this is not civilization. This is Nam" (74). This blunt statement captures the soldiers' sense of being in "another world." For them, Vietnam is a world without civilization; it is a world so different from the one they are accustomed to that they cannot work. O'Brien returns to the idea of ​​"another world" once again in "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong." far away" (98). Mary Anne has joined the world of Vietnam, the world of war, and has lost touch with the "real world." It's the same thing that happened to O'Brien's soldiers. Finding themselves in another world made them lose the ability to relate to their own world, and this manifested itself in veterans as soon as they returned from war.