She wrote to him and told him of a story where she was on the New Jersey shoreline with a friend, she monitored the waves and how they were "separate but together" meaning that they will come together again and again for eternity (O'Brien 234). She mailed him a pebble from the Jersey beach "milky-white color with flecks of orange and violet, oval-shaped, like a miniature egg", and Cross carried this pebble with him at all times during marches of villages to villages since he wanted her to be there with him in the war forever or if he died he wanted her to be there when he did. The pebble carried Cross through the worst times. For example, the platoon stopped at underground tunnel, their orders were to examine then blow up all tunnels they came across. One of his men went down into the tunnel, after a while the soldier didn't pop up and Cross without warning thought of "the stress fractures, the quick collapse, the two of them buried alive under all that weight. Dense, crushing love" (O' Brien 235). Cross was consumed and distracted by the thoughts of Martha even when he is most needed to protect his men, but Martha was there. The weight of Martha in his conscience was killing him and those around him. Ted Lavender was killed because Cross wasn't monitoring his crew during a session of rest from their long marches; Cross was reading the letters he received from Martha when Lavender was shot and dropped to the ground with a type of dense gravity of all the things he carried. The darkness of the tunnel carried the uncertainty that one may come out alive or never come out at all. The darkness didn't just lay in the tunnel, it was all around the soldiers. The darkness laid wait behind each bush, each village, each foxhole, each and every time they went out into the unknown there was a darkness that plagued them. .
The objects they carried had a weight from the emotional toll.