Desertion in Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong
The "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" is a story of many things when looked at from the right perspective. The validity of the story actually has nothing to do with its main purpose, which is to explain how Vietnam changed the American soldiers who were a part of the conflict. O'Brien's purpose is to inform his readers of the effect that Vietnam had on American GI's. Told by Rat Kiley, the "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" can be seen as a touching love story; sweethearts united even during a war. However, the true focus of the story is not love but change and desertion.
Kiley is telling the story to illustrate how all GI's changed in their Vietnam experience. The fact that the main character is a woman drives his point even farther home. She is the very portrait of mainstream, wholesome America; the only thing she lacks is an apple pie. Kiley describes her as "This cute blonde - just a kid, just barely out of high school - she shows up with a suitcase and one of those plastic cosmetic bags." (O'Brien 90) This girl is the antithesis of what one would expect to find in Vietnam. She is pure and innocent. Throughout her time in Vietnam she changes from this image to something very different, she spends less time with her boyfriend, Mark Fossie. Mary Anne hangs around with the Green Berets, who are very different from the other soldiers. Eventually she becomes one of them, marking a total transformation, "There was no emotion in her stare, no sense of the person behind it. But the grotesque part, he said, was her jewelry. At the girl's throat was a necklace of human tongues. Elongated and narrow, like pieces of blackened leather, the tongues were threaded along a length of copper wire, one overlapping the next, the tips curled upward as if caught in a final shrill syllable." (O'Brien 110) Vietnam changed Mary Anne; it forced her to become something as foreign to America as the war itself.
The "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" is also a story of desertion: desertion of people and customs. Mary Anne deserts her boyfriend and her culture. As she becomes more involved into Vietnam she drifts away from her boyfriend, Fossie. She disappears one night and Fossie is distraught, "'Gone,' Fossie said, 'Rat, listen, she's sleeping with somebody.
Rat states "She'd hopped a C-130 up to Chu Lai and stayed overnight at the USO and the next morning hooked a ride west with the resupply chopper"(90). It is irrational for this to happen and in war, a high school girl cannot climb on to a plane without notice. Even though this event appears to be fake, Rat succeeds on what he is doing to readers--showing how desperate and lonely soldiers are in war. A Vietnam soldier will go to crazy lengths for a woman or something that allow them to get away from war and forget
	The novel illuminates light on the situation not just during the Vietnam era, but also rather throughout all history and the future to come. Throughout mankind’s occupation of earth, we have been plagued by war and the sufferings caused by it. Nearly every generation of people to walk this earth have experienced a great war once in their lifetimes. For instance, Vietnam for my father’s generation, World War 2 for my grandfather’s, and World War 1 for my great-grandfather’s. War has become an unavoidable factor of life. Looking through history and toward the future, I grow concerned over the war that will plague my generation, for it might be the last war.
Based on true story, Lieutenant Phillip Caputo and his experience of the Vietnam War. During this era there was a rebalance act within the young adults community in America, they did not want to live the boring and peaceful life their parents lived. This generation of young adults got fixated on the stories and heroes that came from the WWII and what they can do to experience this “trill” first hand. The novel is written with Lieutenant Phillip Caputo in mind starting when he first enrolled in the Marine Corps at the age of 20 in hopes of chasing his fixated dream of the war. At first Phillip had this elusion that the war would only last a couple of months and that he’ll be the American hero everyone talked about. Then the slap to the face
O Brien 's point of view is an accurate one as he himself because he is a Vietnam veteran. The title of the short story is meaningful because it describes each soldier’s personality and how he handles conflict within the mind and outside of the body during times of strife. The title fits the life as a soldier perfectly because it shows the reality that war is more than just strategy and attacking of forces. O’Brien narrates the story from two points of view: as the author and the view of the characters. His style keeps the reader informed on both the background of things and the story itself at the same
Through the stories of 5 womens lives throughout the time period of the Vietnam War, Moreau helps the reader to grasp the way they are feeling by interpreting the voices of the other family members. (Moreau, 35) She uses words and phrases to express the need they need for their fathers and how life at home isn’t the same without them there. One can picture the emptiness and loneliness they feel inside. Also writing the autobiographies in first person point of view, lets the reader know every feeling, every movement and expresses the empty hole in their stomachs having to take care of an entire family alone (Hales). What Moreau was trying to grasp with this concept, is to make the reader feel and almost experience what it would be like if it were them in one of the wives position. Although only a few actually got to experience this feeling, we should all understand what it’s like to be in a situation like that and have our sympathy for them. Letters were written very few times, but when the time came to be able to write, th...
The impact of the Vietnam War upon the soldiers who fought there was huge. The experience forever changed how they would think and act for the rest of their lives. One of the main reasons for this was there was little to no understanding by the soldiers as to why they were fighting this war. They felt they were killing innocent people, farmers, poor hard working people, women, and children were among their victims. Many of the returning soldiers could not fall back in to their old life styles. First they felt guilt for surviving many of their brothers in arms. Second they were haunted by the atrocities of war. Some soldiers could not go back to the mental state of peacetime. Then there were soldiers Tim O’Brien meant while in the war that he wrote the book “The Things They Carried,” that showed how important the role of story telling was to soldiers. The role of stories was important because it gave them an outlet and that outlet was needed both inside and outside the war in order to keep their metal state in check.
Fife’s poetry uses modern language with wording clearly understood by her audience. This approach of using simple, modern language gives the interpretation that Fife is wanting to attract a youth audience, or young adults to read her poetry. Strong imagism is a concept that is used in all three of the poems. This concept of imagism is used to make the reader feel empathy towards the characters within the poem as well as give the reader a vibrant image of what is happening to said characters. In her poem “This is not a Metaphor” it is said:
"Speaking of Courage" in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, is more than a story about a soldier's personal experience of the Vietnam War. It is more than a story about his fight for his country, God, and fellow soldiers, and not to mention his return home. "Speaking of Courage" is not only an allegorical story about the disconnection between Vietnam and the rest of the world, but also an allegory about the disconnection between the soldiers and the life they once led.
Our founding fathers did not have the technology that we have today so of course it was not included in the constitution. Many court cases have been very disputable when it comes to the constitution and laws on technology. Since the constitution does not directly talk about technology, people have interpreted parts of it, such as the fourth amendment, differently.
"The war was over and there was no place in particular to go" (157). Thoughts of sorrow and loss overwhelm the Vietnam veterans upon their return back home. Crushed from the horror of war, they come back to even bigger disappointments and sadness. Instead of the mellow lives they lead before they left their native country and the presence of warm and caring everyday life, most of them encounter empty beds, cold family ambiance and overall loss. Already physically and emotionally defeated, they find betrayal instead of recuperating trust. There is nothing to nourish their depleted and deprived psyches; they do not find anything to rely on. Even in instances of supportive partners, the inevitable horrors of the war haunt them in sleep or come back to them in daydreaming. They all came back with multitude of disorders, predominately with a post traumatic stress disorder with the common symptoms of recurring nightmares, hypersensitivity, avoidance behavior, and intrusive thoughts, feelings and memories-commonly found in war vets. The Things They Carried represents a compound documentary novel written by a Vietnam veteran, Tim O'Brien, in whose accounts on the Vietnam war one encounters graphical depictions of the PTSD. Thus, the stories "Speaking of Courage," "The Man I Killed," "How to Tell a True War Story," "Enemies" and "Friends, " "Stockings," and "The Sweetheart of The Song Tra Bong "all encompass various examples of PTSD.
Many of the short stories within the collection The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien, can be compared and contrasted in regards to elements including theme, characters, and technique. In “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” the character Mary Anne Bell appears to be apparently similar to the character Martha from “The Things They Carried,” in that both are young women who have relations with a soldier in the war. Though upon further analysis of Mary Anne, it appears she is far from alike to Martha. Rather, an unexpected parallel can be drawn between the characters Mary Anne and Elroy Berdahl, from “On the Rainy River,” in that both appear to be epitomes of masculinity. The peculiar connection between these characters developed by Tim O’Brien shines a light on the ambiguity of conventional gender roles of men and women.
Mary Rowlandson was a pretentious, bold and pious character. Her narrative did not make me feel sorry for her at all, which is strange since she really did go through a lot. During the war, the Narragansett Indians attacked Lancaster Massachusetts, and burned and pillaged the whole village. During the siege Mary and her six year old child were shot, she watched her sister and most of her village either burn or get shot. She was kept as a captive, along with her three children and taken with the Narragansett’s on their long retreat. The exposition of the story is set immediately. The reader is perfectly aware of Missus Rowlandson’s status and religious beliefs. She constantly refers to the Narragansetts in an incredibly condescending way, to the point that you know that she does not even consider them human. She paints them as purely evil pe...
For example the treatment of slaves. Slaves in many societies were people who were treated poorly, whipped for not doing work, had very little possessions, and treated with disrespect. In contrast, Homer displays a world where slaves are treated with dignity, even though they are lower down in society’s hierarchy. (Slavery Ancient Greece, n.d.) The Odyssey also shows how mortals and the gods exhibit many similar attributes and failings. Homers uses these to give his world of The Odyssey a new meaning, one that may have lessons for today. To not be caught in the trap of jealously, greed and lust, and to treat people who are not as ‘powerful’ with some respect. This is a core message in The Odyssey and which is still relevant
William Golding is essentially the king of symbolism and covert delineation. The Lord of the Flies is a novel based around a large handful of English schoolboys becoming stranded on an island that will later become a sadistic dystopia. The boys are left unsupervised with only their ill experienced wits to survive and rule. A power struggle breaks out between two of the main characters, Jack and Ralph, Jack being the antagonist and Ralph being the protagonist of the story. In modern pop culture, Jack and Ralph would compare to an event like North Korea versus South Korea. Lord of the Flies is home to many forms of symbolism, including the importance of Piggy 's glasses, the fire on the island, the sow 's head, the beast and the conch shell; all of these items play a huge role in shaping the story, tone and the mood.
students to wear uniforms or not. I have weighed the pros-and-cons, and although I can see a few drawbacks, ultimately, I support the idea. While I’ve considered the notion that uniforms may restrict our student’s individuality, undermine the whole “free education” idea, and might also be viewed as a band-aid solution to a few of the larger concerns our public schools face, however I strongly maintain that there are far more advantages than disadvantages. The U.S. Departments of Education’s Manual on School Uniforms states “Uniforms by themselves cannot solve all of the problems of school discipline, but they can be one positive contributing factor