Linda
Kathleen O'Brien
Linda was Tim O'Brien's girlfriend in 4th grade. When she died, Tim O'Brien learned of mortality and of the ability of stories to keep the dead alive and the past present.
Bobby Jorgenson
Kathleen is Tim's daughter, she serves as a person of untouched innocence and ignorance. She knows little about the war, and her questions to her father help to deepen the readers understanding of how O'Brien's thoughts.
For example: Kathleen asks her father if he killed anyone, and O'Brien says he can answer yes or no, because stories can be just as important as reality.
The medic replacement for Rat Kiley,
he was green when he tried to heal Tim
for the second time. As a result, Tim felt
the Bobby had wronged him by failing to do his job, and didn't forgive him. However, once Tim tried to mentally torture Bobby, and Bobby failed to panic, Tim at last accepted Bobby. Bobby maintains many characteristics of someone new to war, not being as hard, rough, or vengeful as Tim or the other soldiers are.
Elroy Berdahl
The Things They Carried Character Web
Elroy Berdahl is one of the most important characters in the story. Tim refers to him as his hero, the man who saved him. Over the course of six days, Elroy accepts a draft-fleeing O'Brien, and leads him to a point where O'Brien is forced to make a choice. At last confronted with something he can face, O'Brien decides to go to the war he hates, because he feels it would be worse not to.
Mitchell Sanders
Henry Dobbins
Tim O'Brien
Mitchell Sanders was the resident storytelling for the company. Much like O'Brien, he recognizes the power of stories, how they can be just as powerful whether they are lies or not. Also, when he tells the story of the sound heard by six men, he is asked what the moral of that story is. He talks about the silence, saying "There's your moral" This shows how he feels that stories don't need morals to be powerful.
Henry Dobbins was the machine gunner of Alpha company. He is a perfect example of the so called gentle giant, as his size and sense of morality is much greater than the other men's. He talks to Kiowa about how he thought about being a minister, about how sometimes, all you can do is be decent to people, like in war, where all you can do to regain morality is to be decent.
Dave Jensen
After Dave's jackknife goes missing, he suspects that Lee Strunk is the thief, and so beats him up for it. Worried the Lee might take revenge since Dave hit him without cause, he breaks his own nose, giving himself a similar injury so that he and Lee might be even. Eventually, the two become friends, and make a pact to kill the other if one would have to spend the rest of his life horribly disfigured and disabled. When Lee is injured, he forgoes that pact, and Lee dies anyway.
Tim O'Brien is the narrator of the story. After learning the concept of death and the power of storytelling after his friend Linda's death, he relays his experiences to the reader. He tells the the story of his time at war in a series of short stories, told from various points of view. He also includes what happens after the war, presumably to help the reader understand how the war affected the soldiers.
Mary Anne Bell
Azar
Norman Bowker
Azar is very childish and cruel, a boy of 19 in Alpha company. He laughs at and mocks the fallen soldiers, and plays games on cruelty on Bobby Jorgenson and Lavender, blowing away his pup. He is reprimanded by Henry Dobbins after mocking a native girl for dancing, and is finally put in his place after Kiowa dies.
Mary Anne Bell was Mark Fossie's girlfriend. At first, she acted like a common girl. Coy and flirtatious, she talked often with the other men. Her curiosity led her to learn the ways of the medic, and eventually, the soldier. Though her boyfriend Mark tried to keep her the way she was when she first came to the war, she persisted in acting upon her own will. Expressing how she loved the feeling of being a part of this strange, foreign land, she eventually disappears into the countryside, and is never seen again.
Bob "Rat" Kiley
Not much is revealed about Norman Bowker, only that he feels deeply regretful for letting Kiowa sink. Though he won several medals, and failed to get the silver star, he only finds failure in his bravery. "He had been braver than he had ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to be. He also wrote letters to Tim, saying that Tim should write about what it was like out there in the field, and after another bitter letter after the war, committed suicide.
Lee Strunk
Another key member of the squad, Rat Kiley is the medic for Alpha Company. A very level headed character, he healed Tim when he was shot for the first time. He also shared a close bond with Curt Lemon, another of the fallen soldiers. He even went so far as to write a letter to Lemon's sister, but she never writes back, and he vents his anger on a baby buffalo. However, later in the war, he went crazy, claiming to hear the bugs of the night conspiring to get him. He shot himself in the foot, unable to cope, and so was shipped off to Japan.
Lee Strunk is beat up by Dave Jensen for stealing Dave's jackknife. Though Lee has no wishes for revenge, Dave hurts himself to make them square, even though Lee had actually stolen the knife, and had already considered the two even. When he stepped on a mortar round, his leg was blown off, and though he thought that death was preferable to a disabled life, his fear at his time of injury made him disregard all past notions of death and life. However, despite Rat's efforts, Lee dies.
Kiowa
Lavender
Lt. Jimmy Cross
Mark Fossie
Kiowa is one of the primary characters in this book. Thought much of his description is found only shortly before his death, it is shown that his death greatly impacted Tim and Norman Bowker. Rational and accepting, Kiowa is one of Tim's close friends in the company. However, he is met with a grisly death, sinking into the grime and muck of a sewage field.
Lavender is another one of the soldiers in Alpha Company. He is shown to be a very kind person, as he takes in a stray puppy and raises it during the war. Also, he is shown to be a very relaxed person, or a least someone who wants to be, because he doses up on dope every now and then to stay cool and mellow.
Before joining up with alpha company, Rat was with a small medical detachment near the village of Tra Bong. Allegedly, Mark Fossie was a young medic who decided to bring his girlfriend in to Vietnam. As his girlfriend changed after seeing the land and the wounded, he tried harder and harder to submit her to his will. However, he was unable to do this.
Lt. Jimmy Cross was the leader of Alpha Company. Shown to just be a boy in love thrown into a war, he is jarred into action when Lavender, a soldier in the company, is killed. He was torn before, between his love for Martha back in America and the danger of the war, but he blamed only himself for Lavender's death, so decided to forsake his love in favor of keeping his men alive. As the commanding officer of the company, he bears the weight of all the dead, all the men killed under his command. In this sense, he is like O'Brien, bearing the weight of the fallen.
Curt Lemon
Curt Lemon was one of the four people in Alpha company who died when O'Brien was uninjured. He died after stepping on a rigged 105 round during a game of catch. Before he died, he wanted to prove his bravery, and when he was mocked for his fear of dentists, he deliberately had one of his teeth pulled out to end the embarrassment.