The Madness Behind Ambush in The Things They Carried

The ID is the part of the brain which controls and contributes all of the primal instincts one is born with. It is responsible for things such as need for food, sex, etc. This segment of the psyche is normally balanced out with the super ego by the ego, but in some cases it can act too quickly for the rest of the psyche to even notice what is happening to the rest of the body. In the chapter Ambush, Tim shows prime examples and implications of this.

Ambush starts by continuing the story from “The Man I Killed” (TMIK), except it switches the narration. In TMIK, the story is told from someone else’s P.O.V, while Ambush is told from Tim’s P.O.V directly. In this he states that they were all taking turns watching the camp, and that it was finally his turn and he remembers that the night was very hot and foggy. He watched and watched for hours but nothing happened and everything was all right, it wasn’t until the sun began to rise and the fog finally started to lift a bit that he saw a figure walking towards him, it appeared as if it was coming out of the fog. His immediate reaction was that he just wanted to make the man go away. He did not want to kill him, he just simply imagined him vanishing. He then goes on to explain that once he threw the grenade, he didn’t even think about it. “The bomb went off before I even threw it.” It was his primal and gut instinct to protect his own - and everyone around him’s - safety. It was never a moral dilemma of, is it right or is it wrong, it was do it before you can even process what you are attempting to do because once you think about it for too long you won’t be able to follow through with it. In this state of mind, he surpassed his own morals, and thoughts and is a clear example of how the ID can overpower the ego and superego in times of do or die situations.