It was recorded nearly 2.6 million soldiers were sent to Vietnam to fight a gruesome war. About 58,000 of those 2.6 million soldiers perished by the time the Vietnam War was over (Vietnam War Statistics, 1997). These men had to live and die with strength, wits, impassive, and remorseless, all given by the society they were viewed in. Tim O’Brien a Vietnam War veteran born in Austin, Minnesota, was drafted into the war in 1968. He went through hell and back to write his book the Things They Carried (1990). With his experience, he shows how the war directly and indirectly changes a man through the repercussions of war. Soldiers in the Vietnam War embody a hyper masculine role that is constantly being exemplified throughout society, thereby …show more content…
It didn’t matter who they were before the war. It mattered who they were going to be in the war, side by side other men. As their time progresses in Vietnam, they begin to build a tolerance to the horrors of war, and begin to embody a hyper masculine personality. All signs of emotions are hidden from their face. They embody the stereotype of all real men being able to stay composed and not let their emotions impair their judgement and duty. In the chapter The Things They Carried, O’Brien introduces the character Lieutenant Jimmy Cross who shares these same traits and believes that all men hide their emotions. In the chapter Lieutenant Jimmy Cross says, “They were tough. They carried all the emotional baggage of men who mights die. Grief, terror, love, longing - these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight” (O’Brien, 1990, p. 21). He explains how his men are carrying all those bottled up emotions waiting to be express but aren’t being express. Due to the hyper masculine role they adopted …show more content…
This causes some men make decisions based on what they believe. One common decision is men not wanting join the war because they’re afraid of dying and taking another person's life. The men don’t receive any mental training when it comes to taking a life or seeing a comrade fall. In the chapter The Rainy River, Tim O’Brien introduces a character named after himself that doesn’t believe he is the right person to be drafted into the war, and he says “I imagined myself dead. I imagined myself doing things I could not do--charging an enemy position, taking aim at another human being.” (O’Brien, 1990, p. 44). He is one of the men that share the common fear of dying and taking a
These stories show the harsh realities of the Vietnam War communicated by Tim O’Brien’s memory. O’Brien does not shy away from the importance of friendship during the war. Soldiers are
People often reminisce about the decisive victories and suffering defeats of war, but the overwhelming horrors and tragedies of the actual soldiers are often overlooked. Because of this harsh truth, Tim O’Brien sheds light on the physical and psychological burdens on the life of a common soldier through his autobiography, The Things They Carried. Despite all the atrocities found in the Vietnam War, O’Brien still manages to appreciate life and all the people around him. Through all of this, everyone who reads this book can learn something new about the world around them in addition to something about themselves. Ultimately, The Things They Carried should stay in the curriculum because it truly shows the terrors and hardships of war, exemplifies
In If I Die in a Combat Zone, author Tim O’Brien argues that the Vietnam War was unjust by expressing his disapproval of the war through his own moral beliefs, sharing the descriptions of deaths in Vietnam of the innocent citizens, and by describing how much the war impacted himself and others negatively. In the beginning of the book, O’Brien openly stated his beliefs on the war. He believed it was wrongly accepted and unjust, but he battled his own opinions with society’s views anyway (18). Constantly, O’Brien discussed within his own head about the true definition of bravery and courage (147).
In the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien we learn about O’Brien and his soldiers during the Vietnamese war. The Vietnamese war was a deadly and very costly war between the North Vietnam and their communist allies versus the Southern Vietnam and the United states. Throughout the novel Tim O’Brien narrates many stories about the war. Stories about traumatic incidents, pleasant occasions, sorrowful events, and even peculiar event. Personal accounts about himself and also tells about experiences his fellow soldiers faced.
I do not believe the author is trying to really give us a historical account of his experience in Vietnam. Instead, he is trying to help us understand what the men were feeling. It is obvious that telling these stories has helped O'Brien cope with the horrors of war. The men share a story. It is important to them to be able to share those stories.
The Effects People Don’t See Perspective is something that many people view differently in this world, some people may never know what it's like being put through hard circumstances and different experiences. But sometimes people never get to share or tell their perspective. This is relevant to soldiers because people never see the bravery or courage it took them in war and out of war. However, Vietnam was a civil war where it came to the needs of American assistance also why it's called the “American war” Tim’ O'Brien the author of The Things They Carried is in this war physically and emotionally, the battles he and his platoon had to go through experienced many different emotions. Tim O’Brien illustrates how soldiers go through
O’Gorman begins the article by discussing O’Brien’s earlier war novels and describing how from the beginning he was placed in the ranks of contemporary war writers who were trying to record what was happening in the bloody battles of Vietnam. O’Gornan discusses and uses quotes from O’Brien’s novels If I Die in a Combat Zone, Northern Lights, and more to show how O’Brien had a wide scope of literature. O’Gorman then goes into discussing how O’Brien links to traditional war writers such as Cooper, Crane, and Hemmingway, and how he was influenced by Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, and more writers. However, O’Gorman’s main analysis of The Things They Carried was in the form of the book, the novel is a composite novel comprised of short stories that flow together to create a whole text. O’Gorman believes that O’Brien composed this form because he felt compelled to move from traditional linear novels to something more complex and richer, in choosing this form he is not just writing about war stories but rather stories of humanity.
The Vietnam War was tragic for everybody in it and around it. The Vietnam War was long and costly. More than 3 million people, including 58,000 Americans, were killed in the war. Soldiers that either volunteered or were drafted, 1 out of 10 soldiers were injured or killed during Vietnam. 11,000 were woman and some were nurses, but some were translators, flight controllers and military bandleaders.
Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” is stories centered around the American soldiers in the Vietnam war. O’Brien explains how the harsh atmosphere of war can mentally and physically traumatize a soldier. In order to escape this atmosphere some men fantasize about the women they love. The men do not think of the women as people with their own thoughts and feelings, instead they think of them as forms of comfort or motivation for survival. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and Mark Fossie profess to hate the women they love because the women do not fulfil the fantasies the men have created.
Novelist, Tim O’Brien writes short semi true stories about his and other’s experiences in the Vietnam war. O’Brien wanted to explain to his audience what happens in war and how it effects people after the fact. O’Brien really helps his audience acknowledge how much war really does change people. Tim’s dynamic use of symbolism, imagery, and figurative language emphasizes the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that people experience during and after the war. O’Brien begins by analyzing the thoughts of sorrow and loss overwhelm the Vietnam veterans upon their return back home.
The Vietnam War was very different from the past wars. There were a lot more cases of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) among soldiers than any other wars http://historyofptsd.umwblogs.org/vietnam/ . In ‘The Things They Carried’, a book about the Vietnam War written by Tim O’Brien, using the psychological lense can help us understand how wars can change a person’s mental state dramatically. It can show us what soldiers had to carry during the war, including intangibles, like fear and guilt. These men had to fight a war that the U.S. did not have to be involved in and it changed their whole life.
A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo shows the hard work and difficult tasks the men had to go through to prove themselves and protect their country. The war will change the men’s attitudes and the way they do everything. Men made sacrifices in the Vietnam War most people would never make in a lifetime, they will not just sacrifice but push themselves physically harder than most any other men. The men will also emotionally change from constantly watching other men die, or killing other men. The mens first kill was always the hardest for them, mentally they had so many thoughts of the other mans close ones back home and what they would go through and how it would be all their fault.
In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the author retells the chilling, and oftentimes gruesome, experiences of the Vietnam war. He utilizes many anecdotes and other rhetorical devices in his stories to paint the image of what war is really like to people who have never experienced it. In the short stories “Spin,” “The Man I Killed,” and “ ,” O’Brien gives reader the perfect understanding of the Vietnam by placing them directly into the war itself. In “Spin,” O’Brien expresses the general theme of war being boring and unpredictable, as well as the soldiers being young and unpredictable.
The older man 's behavior contrasts with that of the persona who is young and has barely experienced life. Whereas the speaker is eager to discover life and have new experiences to escape her reality, the older man avoids his truth by focusing on mundane details of his experience in the Vietnam War. Furthermore, the older man was once a young man himself, surely eager to have new experiences, as he enrolled in the army. Instead of having these desires fulfilled, his memories of the war have caused his view of the world to greatly deviate from that of the persona and
In November of 1955, the United States entered arguably one of the most horrific and violent wars in history. The Vietnam War is documented as having claimed about 58,000 American lives and more than 3 million Vietnamese lives. Soldiers and innocent civilians alike were brutally slain and tortured. The atrocities of such a war are near incomprehensible to those who didn’t experience it firsthand. For this reason, Tim O’Brien, Vietnam War veteran, tries to bring to light the true horrors of war in his fiction novel The Things They Carried.