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Recommended: Media and propaganda in Vietnam

Research Paper on TTTC and GAC (Rough Draft)
“A true war story is never moral… if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie” (66 TTTC). Tim O’Brien certainly fulfills this requirement for his two war stories, Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried. While both of these stories are fictional, they convey this true basic message of war stories. A major component in each of these books is the exploration of truth and fiction, and how they can be correlated. These stories do have an element of truth in them, seeing as they are based off of O’Brien’s own experiences in the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War was a fight between North Vietnam, who had communist allies, and South Vietnam, who had anti-communism allies such as the United States. The reason the United States intervened was that they were afraid if South Vietnam became communist, it would not be long before other countries around it became communist. When America first decided to enter the war, it was pushed as being a very patriotic movement, and so most Americans supported it. However, when the draft increased by 30,000 men in October of 1965, it was only possible for people with the financial funds to dodge the war, and so the poor young men began tearing and burning their draft notices in protest. Then, in just one week in May 1968, 562 U.S. troops were killed. Then the protests really began, as the newly televised war daily showed the young men of America and the innocents in Vietnam being killed. Because of the “love not war” movements in the 1970’s, and the regular broadcasts showing what the war was actually like, Americans began to more openly hate the war...

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...ntrol” (Magill 961), and they decide to kill him in order to regain that control. This shows the effect the lack of control has on the soldiers
Through the protagonist Paul Berlin, the author shows the parallel of the need for control
In TTTC, the platoon has an order and everyone has their own specific task, so if one of the men is unable to complete his job, then there is immediate disorder and chaos. Jorgenson is an example of a soldier who, being faced with the true nature of the war, is unable to properly treat the narrator O’Brien’s shock, and so O’Brien is removed from the front lines of the war. There is a certain amount of
Throughout Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien uses the theme of control through his exploration of burdens and through the way he organizes his novels in order to effectively show the adversity war creates.

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