Am Literature Tarriq Hansrajh
06/07/05 4th
Entry #1:
In my pockets:
Cell phone – 5oz
Keys – 2oz
Wallet – 3oz
In my backpack:
Spanish book – 5lbs
Trig book – 9lbs
4 1 inch binders – 12lbs
USHAP notebook – 1lb
Other misc. items – 1.5lbs
Total Weight: 29lbs 10oz
This estimate does not surprise me at all because when I think about all the work that we have to do I remember all the textbooks that we have to carry around. In addition sometimes I come home with my back aching, but that’s usually only when I carry my USHAP notebook with me as well
Am Literature Tarriq Hansrajh
06/07/05 4th
Entry #2:
“Rat” Kiley was born Bob Kiley on April 7 1939 in Albany, New York to Marie and Charlie Kiley. At age 11 Bob was given the nickname “Rat” by one of his friends when they were walking home from school one day when apparently Bob fell into a large open dumpster and when he emerged he had a few strings of spaghetti sticking out of the back of his pants. The nickname stuck with him all the way to his adulthood. Rat graduated from Creekside High School in 1957. He did not want to attend college right away but wanted to work in one of the factories in his home town to earn some money to pay for college. Even then his co-workers called him “Rat”. Two years later he had managed to save ten thousand dollar to put toward his college tuition but unfortunately he was drafted just like the rest of the men his age who were not attending college. When he was in Vietnam Rat encountered many terrible situations and was faced with severe heart ache when his best friend Curt Lemon is killed by a landmine. Rat was devastated by this terrible event and felt an extreme sense of loneliness especially when he wrote a letter to Curt’s sister and she never responded. Rat fought through the rest of the war seeing too many tragedies that are too horrible to mention here and when he returned to his family in 1973, two years before the war ended they found his behavior very strange. They found that he was not the same person that he was before and eventually the found that he had gone completely insane. Rat would mumble things to himself and would scream as if he saw his friend Curt being killed right in front of him.
Tim O'Brien, a Vietnam war vet, had similar experiences as the soldier above. Even though O'Brien didn't die, the war still took away his life because a part of him will never be the same. Even in 1995, almost thirty years after the war, O'Brien wrote, "Last night suicide was on my mind. Not whether, but how. Tonight it will be on my mind again... I sit in my underwear at this unblinking fool of a computer and try to wrap words around a few horrid truths" (Vietnam 560). 1 think that O'Brien is still suffering from what he experienced in Vietnam and he uses his writing to help him deal with his conflicts. In order to deal with war or other traumatic experiences, you sometimes just have to relive the experiences over and over. This is what O'Brien does with his writing; he expresses his emotional truths even if it means he has to change the facts of the literal truth.
Tim O'Brien's The Things they Carried put both my logic and emotions to great test. As it is a novel composed of war stories, one may automatically assume that reading The Things They Carried would be an enlightening endeavor, and an educational experience. However, I never thought that a book could captivate me the way that the stories in this novel have.
...of the struggle over how the war would be remembered. Blanketed by the discourse of disability, the struggle over the memory of veterans and the country alike would be waged with such obliquity as to surpass even the most veiled operations of Nixon’s minions. While Nixon’s plumbers were wrenching together the Gainesville case against VVAW in the spring of 1972, mental health and news-media professionals were cobbling together the figure of the mentally incapacitated Vietnam veteran. More than any other, this image is the one that would stick in the minds of the American people. The psychologically damaged veteran raised a question that demanded an answer: what happened to our boys that was so traumatic that they were never the same again? As it came to be told, the story of what happened to them had less to do with the war itself than with the war against the war.
Tim O’Brien shows that the effects of the Vietnam War can differ depending on the person. For Rat, those effects meant loosing his innocence and his exposure to death sent him into a sad mental state. For Azar, it can be concluded that the effects of the war and his exposure to death made him realize that not everything was a joke and that it is not always best to be cruel and bitter. These soldiers experienced turning points, ultimately shaping them into different men with different personalities.
The things they carried, by Tim O'Brien. "Oh man, you fuckin' trashed the fucker. You scrambled his sorry self, look at that, you did, you laid him out like fuckin' Shredded Wheat." I chose to start off my essay with this particular extract from the book because I think that it very much represents the story in itself. Azar said this, after Tim (supposedly) killed a Vietnamese soldier with a hand grenade. It shows that in times of war, how callous men can become. However, callousness varies, whether they choose to be apathetic, like Tim shows us after his grenade episode.
When people think of the military, they often think about the time they spend over in another country, hoping they make it back alive. No one has ever considered the possibility that they may have died inside. Soldiers are reborn through war, often seeing through the eyes of someone else. In “Soldier’s home” by Ernest Hemingway, the author illustrates how a person who has been through war can change dramatically if enough time has passed. This story tells of a man named Harold (nick name: Krebs) who joined the marines and has finally come back after two years. Krebs is a lost man who feels it’s too complicated to adjust to the normal way of living and is pressured by his parents.
The United States became frustrated with the death of wounded prisoners in Vietnam War. This is so deleterious John F Kennedy sends a warning to the west. Tim O’Brien Story about Vietnam could have been a biography because he played a role and it is based on a somewhat a true Story. O’Brien didn’t go through with this because of what he wrote is what he did see, what could have happened, and what he kept from being told. In the book simple themes guilt, shame, and innocence play a vital role in the soldier’s life.
July of 1933 was a very eventful month for me and the rest of Machine Gun Kelly’s gang. My name is John Hand, notoriously known as “Hand Gun Johnny”, a name Kelly gave me as I rose to the ranks of his right hand man. Kelly had made a name for him robbing small banks, and bootlegging alcohol but he always wanted more, or his wife wanted more. Me and the boys always joked about how Kelly’s wife Kathryn Kelly, had always been the brains behind all of our schemes to rob and bootleg. This scheme whether Kelly plotted it or Katherine plotted it was like no other thing we had done before.
War changes people, with some changes being very dramatic and very quick. This is evident in the behavior of Norman Bowker, Bob “Rat” Kiley, and Tim O’Brien. These changes affected each person differently, but they all had dramatic changes to their personalities. These changes had very severe effects on each
Many individuals look at soldiers for hope and therefore, add load to them. Those that cannot rationally overcome these difficulties may create Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Tragically, some resort to suicide to get away from their insecurities. Troops, notwithstanding, are not by any means the only ones influenced by wars; relatives likewise encounter mental hardships when their friends and family are sent to war. Timothy Findley precisely depicts the critical impact wars have on people in his novel by showing how after-war characters are not what they were at the beginning.
Wallace Terry has collected a wide range of stories told by twenty black Vietnam veterans. The stories are varied based on each experience; from the horrific to the heart breaking and to the glorified image of Vietnam depicted by Hollywood. Wallace Terry does not insinuate his opinion into any of the stories so that the audience can feel as if they are having a conversation with the Vietnam Veteran himself. Terry introduces the purpose of the book by stating, “ Among the 20 men who portray their war and postwar experiences in this book. I sought a representative cross section of the black combat force.”(p. XV) Although the stories in this book were not told in any specific order, many themes became prominent throughout the novel such as religion, social, and health.
Envision a man that sat on a grimy concrete block, as nightfall began to crystallize before his eyes. His hair, charcoal-grey, was matted and straggly, as if he had ever known the pleasure of a hot shower or comb except when he was in the war. His once shimmering brown eyes were know hollow and cold. His eyes, that were once filled with the upmost blissfulness, now sagged like the bulky bags underneath his eyes, consumed by the loneliness and despair he felt for himself, for his lack of purpose in life. This man did not bare a smile, only crinkles where one used to be. He wore his only faded blue jacket with a tan shirt tucked underneath it. He wore cruddy worn out jeans that barely seized his thin waist and boney legs. His only pair of shoes that were once white, we're now grungy. His finger nails were bitten and dirty. This man, like many other homeless veterans, struggle everyday of their lives.
The novel The Thing They Carried is a compilation of short stories that share underlying themes and characters. One of the stories is called “How to tell a True War Story”. In this story the narrator expands on a central theme of the distinction between truth and fiction when writing a war story. The story, like most of the other stories in the novel jumps erratically between events, which oftentimes creates confusion and a sense of the surreal in the story. Throughout the story the narrator repeatedly shows that when writing a war story the “story truth is truer sometimes than happening truth.”(O’Brien pg. 171) This quotation encompasses the theme and supports it. The narrator’s use of stylistic devices coupled with stories such as “How to Tell a True War Story” and “Good Form” exemplifies how fiction can fully represent the truth whilst the facts fall miserably short.
In Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, numerous themes are illustrated by the author. Through the portrayal of a number of characters, Tim O’Brien suggests that to adapt to Vietnam is not always more difficult than to revert back to the lives they once knew. Correspondingly the theme of change is omnipresent throughout the novel, specifically in the depiction of numerous characters.
Otis sat at his tattered corner booth, the pale pink and teal upholstery ripped and worn by all those who had rested there before him. His charcoal-grey hair was oily and unkept as if he hadn’t known the pleasure of a shower or a comb since his early days in the war. His once green army jacket, faded to a light grey, covered the untucked, torn, and sweat-stained Goodwill T-shirt under it. He wore an old pair of denim blue jeans that were shredded in the knees and rested three inches above his boney ankles; exposing the charity he depended upon. His eyes, filled with loneliness and despair as if he had realized a lack of purpose in his life, were set in bags of black and purple rings two layers deep. His long, slender nose was set above a full crooked mouth with little lines at the corners giving his face the character of someone who used to smile often, but the firm set of his square jaw revealed a portrait of a man who knew only failure.