Journal of Ecohumanism January 2022 Volume: 1, No: 1, pp. 57 – 71 ISSN: 2752-6798 (Print) | ISSN 2752-6801 (Online) journals.tplondon.com/ecohumanism Journal of Ecohumanism All rights reserved @ 2022 Transnational Press London Received: 1 October 2021 Accepted: 5 January 2022 DOI: https://doi.org/10.33182/joe.v1i1.1904 ‘They Carried the Land Itself:’ Eco-Being, Eco-Trauma, and Eco- Recovery in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried James M. Cochran 1 Abstract This essay calls for a wider use of Tina Amorok’s (2007) concepts of eco-Being, eco-trauma of Being, and eco-recovery of Being in ecocritical literary studies. I propose the adoption of Amorok’s concepts as a literary hermeneutic because it provides a theoretical model that positions ecological damage as central to wartime trauma. To demonstrate the effectiveness of Amorok’s framework, the following essay reads Tim O’Brien’s 1990 novel The Things They Carried alongside Amorok’s eco-Being, eco-trauma, and eco-recovery. Reading O’Brien’s text through Amorok’s model is particularly intriguing and noteworthy because almost no critics investigate the ecocritical dimensions of O’Brien’s novel. Yet, despite the absence of green scholarship surrounding O’Brien’s novel, Amorok’s framework, as I will show, draws attention to the environmental costs of war as depicted in O’Brien’s novel. Applying Amorok’s model as an ecocritical lens to The Things They Carried demonstrates how we can use Amorok’s tripartite structure to further unpack the ecological dimensions of fiction that seemingly have little to do with the environment. Keywords: Eco-Trauma; Dark Ecology; Twentieth-Century American Literature; War Fiction Introduction When most critics analyze Tim O’Brien’s 1990 novel The Things They Carried, they focus on the traumatic experiences of O’Brien and other veterans in Vietnam. Psychological readings are common. For example, in her 1998 article, Tina Chen argues that O’Brien’s desire to constantly revisit and rewrite war stories is a symptom of the displaced “veteran experience,” and more recently, in her 2011 article, Catherine Rolen argues that connection between storytelling is essential to traumatic recovery in O’Brien’s fiction. For many critics, trauma and recovery from that trauma are central to O’Brien’s text. Another popular area of critical study for O’Brien’s works is eco-criticism. In “The Legacy of the American War in Vietnam,” Nanette Norris presents an ecofeminist reading of The Things They Carried, exploring how Mary Anne’s experience disrupts a unified masculine war narrative. The most extensive eco-critical study is Rosalind Poppleton-Pritchard’s 2000 dissertation A Crisis ‘in country’: An Ecocritical Approach to Tim O'Brien's Fiction, which reflects on the ecological impact of American military rhetoric and considers the environmental movement’s impact on O’Brien’s works. Few critics, however, have combined ecological and trauma readings of O’Brien’s novel. One critic who does read The Things They Carried from an ecocritical lens is Brian Jarvis (2008). 1 James M. Cochran, Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York, United States. Email: cochranj@hartwick.edu.