Fear plays a very large part of life, and when faced with high risk situations it makes a mountain out of a molehill. The Things They Carried is a series of vignettes written by Tim O’Brien that tells his story as a soldier in the Vietnam War. Many of the vignettes he tells are deeply disturbing. They express the fear O’Brien and the men in the Alpha Company felt while stationed in Vietnam. O’Brien shows this through the use of flashbacks of the travesties he witnessed. He uses the unfamiliar setting and the intense, rapidly changing mood to strengthen them. These three elements of style truly bring out O’Briens writing, and show the emotion behind his words, helping the reader fully understand his experiences. Many of the flashbacks that stood out in The Things They Carried were fueled by fear. A few stand out because of the emotional shock they evoked in the members of the Alpha Company. O’Brien had a flashback of a day off in a sunny valley. Most of the men were …show more content…
The Vietnam War was the first of its kind. There were no defined enemies or battlefields making it very stressful on the soldiers stationed there. Most of Alpha Company’s encounters with the enemy were unplanned. Not knowing when they were going to be attacked was very alarming for most of the men. Being in the unforgiving jungles of Vietnam, made it so the soldiers could try and prepare for the worst but could never relax. “When a mission took them to the mountains, the carried mosquito netting, machetes, canvas traps, and extra bug juice.” They didn’t know the land or how to navigate it from day to day. At any moment something could jump out of the trees and attack, be it an animal or an enemy soldier. Moreover they were assigned with an unknown group of men that they were told to entrust their lives to. Dave Jensen couldn’t take the pressure of not knowing who to trust or when the next attack would come and it drove him
Vietnam War was one of the hardest wars ever fought. There are several reasons for this statement. It was basically impossible to conquer the territory because there were no boundaries. The soldiers had to put up with the climate, land, diseases and most importantly themselves. This essay is about yet another reason: the relationship between the soldiers and the officers.
Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is a very uniquely written book. This book is comprised of countless stories that, though are out of order, intertwine and capture the reader’s attention through the end of the novel. This book, which is more a collection of short stories rather than one story that has a beginning and an end, uses a format that will keep the reader coming back for more.
The Unromantic Reality of War- Like all the other soldiers in Fallen Angels, Richie joins the army with the illusions about what war is like. Like many American civilians, he has learned about war from movies and stories that portray battle as heroic and glorious, the army as efficient and organized, and warfare as a rational effort that depends on skill. What the soldiers actually find in Vietnam bears almost no resemblance to such a mythologized and romanticized version of war. The army is highly inefficient and fallible. Most of the officers are far from heroic, looking out only for their own lives and careers rather than the lives of their soldiers. In the heat of battle, the soldiers think only about self-preservation and ways they can personally survive the onslaught of chaos and violence.
The soldiers that fought in the Vietnam War had to endure many incredibly horrifying experiences. It was these events that led to great human emotions. It was those feelings that were the things they carried. Everything they carried affected them, whether it was physical or mental. Everything they carry could in one way or another cause them to emotionally or physically break down.
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.
In conclusion, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien gives some authentic portrayals throughout the book of how soldiers could be affected by the war. The stories may not be all true to the teeth, but they are authentic to the point where this could really happen and has happened to countless of soldiers. O’Brien gives us an inside view of a true authenticity to what has happened and what could happen to all the characters in his
We are all killers, through our mutual silence we try to avoid the blame and ignore the destruction we cause. In Tim O’ Brien’s The Things they Carried the reader is emerged in the setting of Vietnam through the Alpha Company, a platoon of soldiers including O’Brien himself. Throughout the novel Tim O’Brien is plagued by his experiences in Vietnam yet his portrayal of others reveals a sense of betrayal towards the entire world which causes the reader to rethink their own view of war.
Literary Analysis Essay on The Things They Carried The book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is fiction and truth wound together to create a frustrating and addicting novel of fiction about the Vietnam war. O’Brien created stories by using his experiences during the Vietnam whether they are true stories or not is an unattainable knowledge for the reader, the only person of that knowledge is only O 'Brien himself. Through his writing he emphasized the the fact that you cannot perfectly recall the experiences of your past when your telling a story but the way it is told is “true sometime than the happening-truth(O’Brien 171) which helps give The Things They Carried depth beyond that of a “true”, true story. O’Brien has many characters in his book, some change throughout the book and others +are introduced briefly and change dramatically during their time in war and the transition to back home after the war.
War is no child 's play, but unfortunately, we have had times in our past when the youth of our great nation had to defend it. Combat is not an easy for anyone; watching death, the constant ring of gunfire, the homesickness, fearing for your life, and witnessing bloodshed daily, this will begin to take its toll. The minds threshold for brutality can only handle so much and eventually will become sickened by these events. This sickness is called Post-traumatic stress disorder. As shown through the characters of The Things They Carried, soldiers of war may begin to show PTSD symptoms before the war is over, and may continue to fight the disorder after the war has ended.
Some tangible things they carried with them were remind them of home and provide them with some luck, while others helped keep them alive during the war time. The intangible things the men carried helped the men be carried through the war and survive. Each man carried something different both mentally and physically. Tim O’Brien saw and experienced these men and what they had to go through during this time of war. The chapter “The Things They Carried” shapes each character into who he was during the war and shows us the reality of the Vietnam
The novel, “The Things They Carried”, is about the experiences of Tim O’Brian and his fellow platoon members during their time fighting in the Vietnam War. They face much adversity that can only be encountered in the horrors of fighting a war. The men experience death of friends, civilians, enemies and at points loss of their rationale. In turn, the soldiers use a spectrum of methods to cope with the hardships of war, dark humor, daydreaming, and violent actions all allow an escape from the horrors of Vietnam that they experience most days.
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 Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (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.
The Things They Carried is a collection of stories about the Vietnam War, but in reality, the book centers around the relationships the men make, their connections to the world they left behind and the connections that they formed to Vietnam. The stories are not war stories, but stories about love, respect and the bonds made between men when they spend day after day fighting just to stay alive.
Every American soldier endured rigorous training to become the soldier they are today, but throughout all this training, there are a few things that a soldier can't simply learn. Training and development is treated as preparation for war situations, and much like ordinary grade school, they are tested to see how well each soldier does in each area (Huerta, 2014). Even after all this organizing and teaching, a soldier's mind is still just as human as it was before seeing action in battle. Once a soldier learns to control every situation imaginable, they are sent overseas to put all their training to use; but simulations can only get you so far. At some point, there is a moment when a soldier will step out of his or her body and truly realize how far from home they are, and that the violence of war is just a way of their new daily life. At this point "a soldier is considered dirty" (Phillips, 2014). Although for a soldier this sounds like a step in the right direction in this particular line of work, it's really a step down a dark path, and part of the soldier will never return. Now American soldiers are haunted by the negative psychological effects resulting in the harsh symptoms of PTSD (Posttraumatic stress disorder) as seen in Jarhead's main character Anthony Swofford.
As we got further and further into the Vietnam War, few lives were untouched by grief, anger and fear. The Vietnamese suffered the worst hardship; children lay dead in the street, villages remained nothing but charred ashes, and bombs destroyed thousands of innocent civilians. Soldiers were scarred emotionally as well as physically, as