The Things They Carried: Situational Irony 1 key example

At the start of "Enemies," the narrator explains that Strunk and Jensen get into a vicious fistfight over a missing jackknife. Jensen takes it too far, and hits Strunk again and again, breaking his nose. When Strunk rejoins the company after having his nose looked after, Jensen becomes increasingly paranoid that Strunk will get back at him.

Like fighting two different wars, he said. No safe ground: enemies everywhere. No front or rear. At night he had trouble sleeping—a skittish feeling—always on guard, hearing strange noises in the dark, imagining a grenade rolling into his foxhole or the tickle of a knife against his ear.

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Guilt makes Jensen lose a sense of the "distinction between good guys and bad guys." Obsessed with Strunk's potential schemes, he eventually loses it and begins "firing his weapon into the air." After this, he uses a pistol to break his own nose. This is an instance of situational irony, as Jensen's guilty conscience brings him to inflict the same pain on himself that he inflicted on Strunk. While the reader might have expected Strunk to get back at him, it comes as a surprise that it is Jensen who gets back at himself.

The narrator delivers a second piece of situational irony before the story ends: Strunk admits to having stolen the jackknife that sparked the fight to begin with. As it turns out, Jensen had been right all along. While his reaction may have been unmeasured, his accusations were entirely valid. Had he known this, he probably would not have broken his nose and patched up things with Strunk all of his own accord. For the reader, this is a particularly interesting discovery, because the narrator initially mentions the jackknife in what seems like an incidental aside, making it seem like the source of the conflict is unimportant. In the end, the jackknife was essential.

In "Friends," the narrator describes another unexpected development: the men begin to trust each other. Strunk and Jensen team up on ambushes, cover each other on patrol, share a foxhole, and take turns pulling guard at night. They even make a pact that "that if one of them should ever get totally fucked up—a wheelchair wound—the other guy would automatically find a way to end it." Two months later, Strunk steps on a rigged mortar round, and loses half of his right leg. The characters and reader wonder how Jensen will respond: will he follow their pact and end Strunk's life?

Strunk has the same question and repeatedly begs Jensen not to kill him. Jensen promises he won't. In the end, Strunk dies in the chopper, "somewhere over Chu Lai." The narrator notes that this outcome "seemed to relieve Dave Jensen of an enormous weight." This fate is ironic because the reader had likely begun to expect that one of the men would end the other's life. In the end, Jensen does not follow his side of the deal but is also relieved of wondering whether he did the right thing by not killing Strunk. It is also ironic because Jensen and Strunk—now friends—willingly put themselves in a position of feeling relieved when the other dies.