Bob “Rat” Kiley Character Analysis in The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried Bob “Rat” Kiley Character Analysis

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Bob “Rat” Kiley is the medic in Tim’s platoon. He is close friends with Curt Lemon, who dies when he steps on a land mine. In retaliation for his friend’s death, Rat kills a baby water buffalo that the platoon has rescued and brought to a nearby village. However, aside from this moment of grief, Rat is generally a good-natured boy. According to Tim, he’s an excellent medic, staying cool under pressure and consistently finding his way to the men who need help even in the chaos of combat. However, in “Night Life,” the second to last story in the collection, Tim shares that Rat eventually has a mental breakdown as he struggles to handle the constant sight of death, gore, and suffering. He shoots himself in the foot to escape from combat and, despite Tim’s assertion that most men look down on soldiers who self-harm as a strategy to avoid active duty, everyone in the platoon understands Rat’s decisions and no one judges him for it. This story brings one of the book’s greater themes – that men go to war and kill other people because they’re embarrassed not to – full circle, and, to an extent, relieves the other men of the fear of shame they’ve been carrying with them. A “shameful” act has been completed, and yet, no one considers it shameful.

The water buffalo scene in “How to Tell a True War Story” is a memorable and upsetting one, and one in which Rat features prominently. His decision to kill a young, innocent living being piece by piece, slowly draining it of its life, mirrors the way that his young and innocent friend Curt was killed and blown to pieces by a land mine. As Tim says, the story of Rat killing the baby buffalo is a love story, not a war story. By killing the buffalo, a terrible act, Rat is showing the depth of his love for his friend. It’s a brutal act of love, the sort of love that only exists in times and places of great violence and suffering such as Vietnam, and the cruel killing of an innocent creature likely only increases Rat’s pain rather than diminishes it. But in taking on the pain, guilt, and horror of killing the buffalo, Rat shows how much he is willing to suffer for his lost friend.

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