"Look, if you think about it, it's not crazy...Bring in a girl...No war here." (93) And that is exactly what the soldiers did in Tim O'Brien's book, "The Things They Carried", they brought the 'gentler sex' into their violent world. Women are introduced into the lives of a few soldiers who struggled emotionally because of the ties they had with these women. In the same sense females are utilized in this novel to bring closure to the war scene for these men. The narrator exposes his open-minded thoughts of women through the different situations in the novel in order to appeal to the audience in diverse ways. Numerous females are portrayed in the novel for certain aspects the narrator brings to focus. How does O'Brien's technique of introducing women characters throughout the novel contribute to his overall message for the reader? More specifically, how do these women affect the lives of these soldiers and what is their importance? What reaction does O'Brien evoke from his audience through these women?
             O'Brien immediately begins his novel with a female character. Martha, the teenager whom Lieutenant Jimmy Cross was infatuated with, "was an English major at Mount Sebastian, and she wrote beautifully about her professors and roommates and midterm exams, about her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for Virginia Woolf; she never mentioned war" (1). This character is one who the whole audience could relate to; she was oblivious to what happened in the war and she had no desire to comprehend it. Furthermore, she had no clue as to how these soldiers lived. "Jimmy Cross humped his love for Martha up the hills and through the swamps...At night, sometimes, Lieutenant Cross wondered who had taken the picture, because he knew she had boyfriends, because he loved her so much, and because he could see the shadow of the picture-taker spreading out ag...