This chapter is rich with subtext about Martha that is continued from the preceding chapter. In "The Things They Carried," Lt. Cross is preoccupied with thoughts of Martha: When checking on Lee Strunk who is searching a tunnel, "suddenly, without willing it, he was thinking about Martha. . . . he tried to concentrate on Lee Strunk and the war, all the dangers, but his love was too much for him." "The Things They Carried" is a story about longing, Lt. Cross's longing for Martha's love; "Love" is a story about longing as well. In this chapter, however, Lt. Cross longs for what could never have been, compared to his hopeful longings while he was in-country, which helped him both to maintain his ability to face the discomforts and horrors of war and to question his competence because of his constant thoughts of Martha.
In offering more details about Martha — that she became a Lutheran missionary, that she had never married, that she did not know why she had not — including her remark about how men do "those things," the author subtly reveals that Martha had been the victim of rape. This detail connects to Lt. Cross's fixation on her virginity in the preceding chapter; it undoes the "reality" of Lt. Cross's fantasies by making his wish that she was a virgin an impossible "reality," and therefore begins to undo the reader's sense of what is truth or fantasy. O'Brien demonstrates the complicated relationship between truth and fantasy in the final sentence of the chapter when "O'Brien," the narrator, promises not to mention the burden Martha carries, the rape that is alluded to, but still makes it the crux of the chapter. Thus the focus of the entire vignette remains unmentioned.
