What does Sanders say about the thumb in The Things They Carried?

The taking of the Vietnamese soldier’s thumb as a souvenir of war shows how war changes young men into uncivilized human beings. When Sanders is making the statement, “There it is”, he is talking about how this barbaric act shows what happens when you send young, innocent men off to war.  War changes young men, and they will come back changed and psychologically affected by the things they see and do.   Tim O’Brien often mentions throughout the novel that “they are, after all, only kids”, and suggests to the reader that if you send kids to war, they will come back men who have done horrible things.  This is also seen in the vignette, “How to Tell a True War Story” when Rat Kiley methodically kills a baby water buffalo by wounding it over and over again until it dies.  The water buffalo just stands there and takes it without making a move to escape. The water buffalo is like the soldiers who are psychologically wounded during their many experiences in the war. These wounds cause them to do unnatural, barbaric things.

The “there it is” moral that Sanders suggests exists by the taking of a souvenir of your enemy is that these atrocities are going to happen when men go to war.  The thumb is a symbol of those atrocities and show just how inhumane man can be in an inhumane war.  Sanders is simply pointing that out when he says, “There it is”.    “There it is” means look how far we have fallen, and look at what war causes us to do.