How do water and the sewage field help readers' understanding of "The Things They Carried"?

The next mention of rainwater and the sewage field is located in the chapter "In The Field." As the chapter begins, the Song Tra Bong river has overflowed (due to the rains) and the muck is now thigh-deep in the sewage field.

Again, there is the mention of Kiowa's corpse submerged in the sewage field. This imagery highlights the fact that war is no respecter of persons. In all respects, Kiowa is a fine soldier and human being; yet, he dies in a sewage field. In war, he is just another soldier caught up in the realities of battle. O'Brien asserts that the rains are also part of the 'war.' When it rains, the sewage fields are tedious and difficult to patrol. The soldiers must labor against gravity to make their way through the muck.

During patrols, the soldiers all look alike, their faces caked in the muck from the sewage fields. This imagery again reinforces the fact that, in war, every soldier is nondescript and dispensable. In the chapter, we learn that, although Lieutenant Cross prefers to treat his men like human beings, he must instead treat them as "interchangeable units of command" in order to maintain his sanity as a leader.

The sewage field is also a treacherous place during mortar attacks; during such times, there is no place to hide. The field simply erupts in explosions of "rain and slop and shrapnel." The falling shells cause great craters to form in the sewage field; when the craters fill back up with mud, all manner of things are pulled down with it into the depths of the field. This is how Kiowa's body becomes submerged in the field. In fact, his fellow soldiers have to dig laboriously to free his entrenched body from the stubborn muck. Again, the sewage field represents all the ugliness of war, how it buries our humanity and how it destroys our will to survive.

The next mention of the sewage field is in the chapter "Field Trip." Here, after twenty years, the author is supposedly visiting the sewage field with his daughter, Kathleen. In this chapter, the sewage field is no longer as imposing as it once was. It is "flat and dreary and unremarkable." Yet, all the author can remember as he stands before the field is how it has robbed him of all his sensibilities. To him, the field will always represent all the "vulgarity and horror" of the Vietnam War. Essentially, the book itself is a cathartic exercise that facilitates redemption and renewal. By once more confronting his past at the sewage field, the author begins to heal.