A film by award-winning South Korean director Park Chan-wook, Joint Security Area centers around four Korean soldiers serving in the DMZ: Sergeant Lee and Private Nam from South Korea, and Sergeant Oh and Private Jeong from North Korea. The four soldiers have become friends though the friendship is politically incorrect. All four of them are involved in a fatal shooting incident, where Private Jeong and a North Korean officer are killed. Though the scene of the shooting incident is tense and seems disorganized, all four soldiers’ reactions can be comprehended consciously.
In the movie, Private Jeong from North Korea draws his gun and points at his South Korean friends first. Two major reasons attribute to Jeong’s behavior. On one hand, Jeong is young and completely panicked at the time, therefore, his instinct as a soldier is to follow orders
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When the North Korean officer attempts to reach for his pager, Private Nam picks up his gun and kills the officer. His actions are out of self-defense; he believes that the officer is reaching for his gun to shoot down Sergeant Lee and himself. After the officer is shot, Private Jeong draws his gun out. Private Nam then shoots at Private Jeong and continues shooting at his body after Jeong is already dead. In my opinion, Private Nam is furious at the fact that Private Jeong has betrayed their friendship by pointing his gun at Sergeant Lee twice. His action is again out of instinctive protection for his companion and himself; his anger has taken over his conscience at that moment, so he cannot think cautiously about shooting his North Korean friend, Private Jeong. Interestingly, Private Name points his gun at Sergeant Oh but puts it down shortly because he realizes that Sergeant Oh has not betrayed him. In Private Nam’s case, although he is the one who begins the tragic shooting incident, he has not completely betrayed his friendship with the two North Korean
...ut perfect warrior; "he did not feel a sense of vengeance... [he] did not even feel angry... [he] did not feel anything at all." The Vietcong loses his compassion; they want to take his life by any means necessary and to that end, he reciprocates.
The United States vows to protect the democratic South Korea. American forces defend South Korea but are almost pushed on the peninsula . Douglas Mccarthur is in charge of the American forces. He stages an impressive counter attack that pushes the North Koreans all the way back to China. This is when China enters the warand pushes American forces back to the 38Th parallel. In 1953 , the war ended In a stalemate. (document C)
The foreign team visited North Korea in an attempt to complete 1,000 surgeries for people with cataracts, which causes mild to extreme blindness. They had “minders” with them for the extent of their mission. A minder is a North Korean government official whose role is to monitor and make sure the team is doing everything as planned. They make sure everything is going the way they want it to. The minders are so serious about their job, that one of them threatened to kick the photographer out of the country for laying down to get a full shot of the giant statue of Kim Il-Sung. He explained that no one can lay down in front of the founder of North Korea, as, it is very disrespectful. Minders also act as a guide, translator and guard for the team.
The incident is described by social psychologist Herbert C. Kelman and sociologist V. Lee Hamilton in the article “The My Lai Massacre: a Crime of Obedience.” Lt. William Calley, charged with 102 killings, claims to have followed orders from his superiors, only accomplishing his duty, which is also a theme throughout the movie, A Few Good Men. After presented with a request from William Santiago, a marine on his base, to be transferred, Jessup refuses. The film depicts, through Colonel Jessup's authority, the refusal to obey a reasonable request as well as the pride one possesses when fulfilling his duty and baring superiority.
The “Man I Killed” takes us into the Vietnam War and tell us about a soldiers first time of killing another individual. The author describes a Viet Cong soldier that he has killed, using vivid, physical detail with clear descriptions of the dead mans’ fatal wounds. O'Brien envisions the biography of this man and envisions the individual history of the dead Vietnamese soldier starting with his birthplace moving through his life, and finished with him enrolling in the Vietnamese Army. O'Brien also describes some of the dead soldiers’ hopes and dreams. The author uses this history in an attempt to make the dead man more realistic to the reader
With this in mind, Korean Armistice talks started on July 10 of 1951 with Charles Joy primarily representing South Korea and the United States of America, while Nam II represented North Korea and the communist forces. These talks of Korean Armistice which occurred regularly in the city of Kaesong made a vast amount of progress to a point where Joy and Nam forged an agenda. Unfortunately, these talks were delayed on August 23, 1951, since North Korea claimed that Kaesong was bombed and proceeded to demand that the United Nations Command perform an investigation. In spite of these events, the investigation did not play a major role in the talks of Armistice due to China’s active resistance of an investigation conducted by the United Nations Command. As a result, the United States of America and South Korea believed North Korea fabricated the claim thus postponing Armistice talks as a result of rising tensions. Eventually, Armistice talks emerged again in October 1951 at the village of Panmunjom. Even though Armistice talks were progressing at this time there was further conflict associated with the content of the Korean Armistice Agreement. As a result, the Korean Armistice Agreement almost failed, due to the issue of how each country would release their prisoners of war. President Rhee of South Korea almost prolonged the war by ordering
One of the more remarkable counterpoints of Kien/Boa Ninh's war experience is his view of American soldiers. For him, they were horrific, powerful, and inhuman. To American soldiers, the war was a journey into a strange world where snipers hid behind every bush. North Vietnamese soldiers had already fought for fifteen years and seen the country ripped apart. Now they were to go up against hundreds of thousands of fresh troops from the world's technological superpower. A little more frightening. This historical aspect is reflected in the text. For Bao Ninh, the enemy was not always a man that could only kill other men. "The diamond-shaped grass clearing was piled high with bodies killed by helicopter gunships. Broken bodies, bodies blown apart, bodies vaporized." (Ninh, 5) How...
The Hurt Locker is a war film that is set in Iraq during the Iraq War and fits in the adventure and action genre. The plot is about a three man bomb defusal team consisting of James, Sanborn, and Elridge finding themselves is extreme, life-threatening situations where they must defuse explosives over the violent conflicts. The director, Kathryn Bigelow, has done a good job with the mise-en-scene, making the setting overall extremely believable, giving a sense of realism in the film. The film’s mise-en-scene creates a believable Iraq War settings with the use costumes, weaponry, and all the grime and dirt present in places which sells the idea. Sounds and symbolism is used to show heavy tension amongst the soldiers .The film also contrasts James’s time in Iraq and his life back in America using the Supermarket scene. The idea portrayed in this film is the addiction to war which can be seen in James.
Some people can not fathom how the United States military could engage in such an action. However “Experts cite an absence of discipline and experience among the Americans, who had been badly shocked by the North Korean assault,” (Thompson, par. 7) as an explanation of why this could happen. This is not an uncommon theme when speaking of the soldier of the Korean War. Rudy Tomedi cites several examples of people who were never in the infantry being forced to become an infantryman. He uses the example of Bob Roy who states “Nine months before I’d been in the Military Police. M Company was originally an MP unit. Then one day they came around and said, ‘All right, you’re all in the infantry’” (Tomedi, 3). If this type of assignment was not uncommon during the Korean War, it is highly possible that those at No Gun Ri were just as unprepared to fight as Bob Roy was. If they were unprepared it is also quite possible that the soldiers panicked. General Ridgeway, who rose to be in command of the entire UN forces, claims that the United States’ forces were outnumbered, with low morale, and spread extremely thin. He claims “Every command post I visited game me the same sense of lost confidence and lack of spirit…It was not their doing that had brought them far understrength to this unfortunate country with major shortages in weaponry and insufficient clothing…” (Ridgeway, 87). With a military force in such bad shape the possibilities of it acting irrationally is very high.
...eased soldier, Tung, whom Kien has forgotten. “ ‘Maybe it was Tung. What do you think, Kien?’ ‘Tung who?’ asked Kien. ‘Crazy Tung. The guardsman, don’t you remember?’” (Ninh, 97). Yet, after the war, Kien cannot quit remembering all that died. “He mistook her first for a jungle girl named Hoa…Then, horribly, for a naked girl at Saigon airport on 30 April 1975.” (Ninh, 113). Kien returned to his pre-war culture of remembering the dead.
Created during the Cold War, the People’s Army had abandoned their traditions to follow those of the Soviets (Tertitskiy, par. 5). After turning 17, all North Koreans who pass a health check join the military. Usually, unless an enlistee gives the military mobilization department a bribe, he or she does not have the option of where to serve (par. 16). North Korean soldiers are forced to serve a decade, so working in a desired department would be greatly appreciated (par. 10). The ten years of service can be very grueling to a soldier. Soldiers are regularly frustrated because they are often used for building city projects—not fighting for their country (par. 24). Since soldiers are not allowed to see their families for the entire decade of service-even for funerals- and junior soldiers cannot have relationships, many soldiers can vent their frustrations only through their actions (par. 23). There have been many cases of soldiers attacking officers, as well as stealing from civilians (par. 21-22). Hostile enlistees create an especially hostile area for women. A female soldier can be threatened to have sex with their commander (par. 21). Not doing so would result in not being allowed to join the party, negating her many years of training (par. 21). Mandatory military service has failed in North Korea. Although soldiers are
The soldiers feel that the only people they can talk to about the war are their “brothers”, the other men who experienced the Vietnam War. The friendship and kinship that grew in the jungles of Vietnam survived and lived on here in the United States. By talking to each other, the soldiers help to sort out the incidents that happened in the War and to put these incidents behind them. “The thing to do, we decided, was to forget the coffee and switch to gin, which improved the mood, and not much later we were laughing at some of the craziness that used to go on” (O’Brien, 29).
Neil Sheehan has used this novel to tell the story of the Vietnam conflict utilizing the perspective of one of its most respected characters. This is the story of John P. Vann who first came to Vietnam as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army and later returned as a civilian official. It is the story of his life from the beginning to the end. It is also Vietnam's story; it offers clear reasons for the conflict, and why it was such a disaster for all those involved.
Usually when someone is murdered, people expect the murderer to feel culpable. This though, is not the case in war. When in war, a soldier is taught that the enemy deserves to die, for no other reason than that they are the nation’s enemy. When Tim O’Brien kills a man during the Vietnam War, he is shocked that the man is not the buff, wicked, and terrifying enemy he was expecting. This realization overwhelms him in guilt. O’Brien’s guilt has him so fixated on the life of his victim that his own presence in the story—as protagonist and narrator—fades to the black. Since he doesn’t use the first person to explain his guilt and confusion, he negotiates his feelings by operating in fantasy—by imagining an entire life for his victim, from his boyhood and his family to his feeling about the war and about the Americans. In The Man I Killed, Tim O’Brien explores the truth of The Vietnam War by vividly describing the dead body and the imagined life of the man he has killed to question the morality of killing in a war that seems to have no point to him.
In Vietnam, friendly fire was common. The United States soldiers often shot innocent civilians. When the U.S viewed the brutality of the war and the torture of countless Vietnamese citizens through journalism, the President knew the public’s reaction was to such a point that he would never get re-elected, therefore he didn’t run, and his party lost the election.