Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
The effects of war in the society
War and its impact on society
The effects of war in the society
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
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 …show more content…
Philip was not much of a student failing and dropping out of his university and later joined a community college. So one day when the military came to his school and he enlisted himself to serve under the Marine Corp hoping to feed is hunger of adventure. First, Philip was sent to training camp where he learned the history of the marines, different war tactics and their basic weaponry functions. At this point Philip was very much egger to into the jungle and “fight for America”. After his basic training his time to enter the war came around he was sent to Okinawa where his group was stationed at. The days there grow long and dreadful as not action was seen for and long period of time but now just a couple of weeks after his group would be stepping into the war field. The group was given basic information of the war. Although it was more exciting then their train camp it wasn 't the war they were expecting, simply protecting their base camp for any enemy that tried to gain access to. This task didn 't last to long until one day another group got …show more content…
The war had a lot of emotional toll on people it destroyed their personal identity, their moral/humanity, the passion to live was lost and the PDS they will suffer post war, resulting in the soldiers to understand what war is really about and what is covered up. There are scenes that support the thesis about the war like "As for the rest, they are now just names without faces or faces without names." Chapter 2, p. 27 which show how the soldiers have emotional detached themselves from life. Also, when the novel says “I saw their living mouths moving in conversation and their dead mouths grinning the taut-drawn grins of corpses. Their living eyes I saw, and their dead eyes still-staring. Had it not been for the fear that I was going crazy, I would have found it an interesting experience, a trip such as no drug could possibly produce. Asleep and dreaming, I saw dead men living; awake, I saw living men dead.” Which to me again shows how the soldiers are change throughout the war losing the moral and humanity. Lastly what he says “ I’m not scared of death anymore and don 't care whether I live of die” is the point where I notice Phillips change in
To write a true war story that causes the readers to feel the way the author felt during the war, one must utilize happening-truth as well as story-truth. The chapter “Good Form” begins with Tim O’Brien telling the audience that he’s forty-three years old, and he was once a soldier in the Vietnam War. He continues by informing the readers that everything else within The Things They Carried is made up, but immediately after this declaration he tells the readers that even that statement is false. As the chapter continues O’Brien further describes the difference between happening-truth and story-truth and why he chooses to utilize story-truth throughout the novel. He utilizes logical, ethical, and emotional appeals throughout the novel to demonstrate the importance of each type of truth. By focusing on the use of emotional appeals, O’Brien highlights the differences between story-truth and happening-truth and how story-truth can be more important and truer than the happening-truth.
A Rumor of War gives a first hand account of what really happened during wartime in Vietnam. It is told in first person as the author Philip Caputo was a young marine serving during the time of war. This book describes the time from his ambitious young ego to later when he realizes the harshness of war. He describes the story from him sitting at a desk at training to exhilarating battles. He even goes into describing the aftermath that war can place on a person. He tells this story through his own eyes and thoughts.
Life for the soldiers in the beginning is a dramatic one as they are ordered up to the frontline to wire fences. The frontline makes Paul feel immediately different as described here. "As if something is inside us, in our blood, has been switched on." The front makes Paul more aware and switched on as if his senses and reactions are sharpened. I think Paul and his friends are frightened when they are near the front line. After they wire the fences and they are heading to the barracks their group start to be fired at by the enemy. They manage to get through the shelling unscathed but they hear a horse that has been shot. The horse makes a terrible noise of anguish and is in terrible pain and it has been shot as the author describes here. "The belly of one of the horses has been ripped open and it guts are trailing out." This shows that there are not just human casualties of war; the innocent lives of animals can be affected as much as humans who fight in wars. Detering-one soldier in Pauls group-says." It is the most despicable thing of all to drag animals into a war." I agree with Detering, as animals had no choice about going to war. On the way back to the trucks that would take them back to the barracks Paul Baumers company are hit again by heavy shelling and they have to take cover in a military graveyard. The shells blow huge holes in the graveyard and create large...
A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo, is an exceptional autobiography on a man's first-hand experiences during the Vietnam War. Philip Caputo is a Lieutenant during the Vietnam War and illustrates the harsh reality of what war really is. Caputo's in-depth details of his experience during the war are enough to make one cringe, and the eventual mental despair often experienced by soldiers (including Caputo) really makes you feel for participants taking part in this dreadful war atmosphere. Giving way to the parties and the common fun associated with college kids, Caputo failed out of college and realized what he really wanted to be was a Marine. He joined the Marines and went through a lot of officer training until he eventually reached what would be known as his final rank of Lieutenant. Introduced to the Vietnam War in 1965 as a Platoon leader, Caputo walked into the war a little scared but with a lot of determination. Caputo started the war with a lot of field work including jungle expeditions and shooting escapades, and eventually was sent to keep track of the everyday deaths occurring during the war and all the paperwork associated with such a job. Later he was put back in charge of a platoon which eventually lead to his downfall following an unethical order he gave his men that resulted in the killing of a couple Vietnamese pedestrians believed to be part of the Viet Cong. Caputo was acquitted of all charges and was given a letter of reprimand from the general. About ten years later he continued his Marine endeavors as he reported to Vietnam and witnessed the surrender of the Saigon Government to the Communist North Vietnamese. Caputo's war experience was plagued by...
As the war progresses, Caputo requests to go to a line company in the middle of November. This is a change from the “office” position he currently held where he was largely responsible for counting casualties. At this point, the romanticized visions Caputo had of war have been completely shattered and he goes into this transfer being fully aware of this. This change in viewpoint becomes even more clear when compared to the beginning of the novel where Caputo was intrigued by the romance and action of war. While readers would expect more action and typical war stories in this section of the book, Philip Caputo writes anything but. Caputo writes, “It went like that for the rest of the month. It was a time of little action and endless misery…Almost every hour of every night, the radio operators chanted, ‘All secure. Situation remains the same’ (1996: 240). Caputo repeats the phrase “All secure. Situation remains the same” five times throughout this single paragraph. Because of this, readers see the dull and mundane side of war that is often not talked about. In addition, Caputo continues to comment of the large amounts of waiting throughout the autobiography. When most think of the Vietnam War, they picture the “main events”. Similar to the numerous documentaries we watched in class, some of the main points of the war include: The first Indochina War, The Gulf of Tonkin, and the Tet Offensive. These documentaries all focused on these monumental events and because of this, the public perceives this war as the sum of these events. However, what many fail to consider the large gaps in time between these events. It is in these large gaps that little action occurred and most of the soldier’s time was spent waiting as Caputo depicted in this scene. In connection with
The dramatic realization of the fact that the war will affect a member of the Chance family is apparent in this quote. The amount of sorrow and emotions felt by the Chance family, and for that matter, all families who had children, brothers, husbands, or fathers, drafted into what many felt was a needless war. The novel brings to life what heartache many Americans had to face during the Vietnam era, a heartache that few in my generation have had the ability to realize.
One of the hardest events that a soldier had to go through during the war was when one of their friends was killed. Despite their heartbreak they could not openly display their emotions. They could not cry because soldiers do not cry. Such an emotional display like crying would be sign of weakness and they didn’t want to be weak, so they created an outlet. “They were actors. When someone died, it wasn’t quite dying because in a curious way it seemed scripted”(19). Of course things were scripted especially when Ted Lavender died. It had happened unexpectedly and if they didn’t have something planned to do while they were coping they would all have broken down especially Lieutenant Cross. Cross...
Paul and his company were once aspiring youth just graduating school thinking about having a wonderful life. Sometimes things don’t always play out the way you want. The effects of war on a soldier is another big theme in the novel. Paul describes how they have changed and how death doesn’t affect them anymore. “We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defen...
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. The way the characters change emphasises the effect of war on the body and the mind. The things the boys have to do in the act of war and “the things men did or felt they had to do” 24 conflict with their morals burning the meaning of their morals with the duties they to carry out blindly. The war tears away the young’s innocence, “where a boy in a man 's body is forced to become an adult” before he is ready; with abrupt definiteness that no one could even comprehend and to fully recover from that is impossible.
... horrors of war such as, his parents who still view war as glamorous and idealistic. War takes a heavy toll on soldiers who fight in it and in these dangerous moments anybody would have gone insane. It takes a very special type of soldier to be able to handle both the psychological and physical challenges that a soldier has to face in everyday battle. A soldier such as this must be capable of handling the sight of a mutilated comrade and not immediately chatter to pieces. The author conveys this message in his extreme use of words with negative connotation such as shells, typhus, dysentery, and trenches. In this portion of the novel a great deal of emphasis is placed on the word death which is repeated several times and standing on its own it holds a great deal of negative connotations. Therefore, due to the severity of the situation and the extensive use of words with negative connotations the overall tone of the novel appeared to be very depressing or serious. This selection also demonstrates just how mythical the character of war that many individuals who have not experienced the tragedy of battle believe to be true by illustrating just how appalling and grim war is in reality.
There is a major change in the men in this novel. At first, they are excited to join the army in order to help their country. After they see the truth about war, they learn very important assets of life such as death, destruction, and suffering. These emotions are learned in places like training camp, battles, and hospitals. All the men, dead or alive, obtained knowledge on how to deal with death, which is very important to one’s life.
In the autobiography A Rumor of War, Philip Caputo shares his experiences of the Vietnam War with the world. Caputo introduces the American people into this world they had never seen. What most Americans considered a "meaningless" war, was changed by Caputos perspective and his accounts. At the time Caputo released his book, most Americans were not aware of the damage it causes every soldier on that front line. The beginning of the novel introduces us to Caputo in his early twenties. Caputo enlists in the Marine Corps because he wants to show off his "meaningless" and find an adventure to get him out of his small town life. Caputo wanted to do something that would make him a hero. Caputo dreams, of returning home as an honorable man, and being applauded for his amazing work in Vietnam as he was a hero for this country. Unknowingly, when he does return he endures kaos of people resenting him and his fello...
Unique in style and content, the novel explores the emotions of a young Civil War recruit named Henry Fleming. What is most remarkable about this classic is that the twenty-four-year-old author had never witnessed war in his life before writing this book. Crane's story developed to some degree out of his reading of war stories by Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy and the popular memoirs of Civil War veterans, yet he also deviated from these influences in his depiction of war's horror. Critics have noted that his portrait of war is an intensely psychological one, blending elements of naturalism, impressionism, and symbolism. Indeed, he broke away from his American realist contemporaries, including his mentor William Dean Howells, in his naturalistic treatment of man as an amoral creature in a deterministic world.
Fighting the Vietnam War dramatically changed the lives of everyone even remotely involved, especially the brave individuals actually fighting amidst the terror. One of the first things concerned when reading these war stories was the detail given in each case. Quotes and other specific pieces of information are given in each occurrence yet these stories were collected in 1981, over ten years following the brutal war. This definitely shows the magnitude of the war’s impact on these servicemen. These men, along with every other individual involved, went through a dramatic experience that will forever haunt their lives. Their minds are filled with scenes of exploding buildings, rape, cold-blooded killing, and bodies that resemble Swiss cheese.
...though people believe that, those on the home front have it just as a bad as the soldiers, because they have to deal with the responsibilities of their husbands, there is nothing that can compare to what these men have gone through. The war itself consumed them of their ideology of a happy life, and while some might have entered the war with the hope that they would soon return home, most men came to grips with the fact that they might never make it out alive. The biggest tragedy that follows the war is not the number of deaths and the damages done, it is the broken mindset derives from being at war. These men are all prime examples of the hardships of being out at war and the consequences, ideologies, and lifestyles that develop from it.