Foreignness in Vietnam: The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

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Foreignness in Vietnam

When you think of what is foreign to the common soldier in the vietnam war you usually think of the vietnamese people or the terrain. In the book The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien twists the idea of what is foreign to the common soldier in Vietnam. The opposite happens too, what was so familiar not too long ago back home seems almost completely unknown to them now. O’Brien even shows similarities between the American soldiers and the Viet-Cong.

In the Vignette the “Man I Killed” Tim O’Brien relates himself to the man he killed. He makes up a life for the man who he didn’t even know. “But all he could do, he thought, was wait and pray and try not to grow up too fast.” This quote shows an assumption about the man that Tim O’Brien makes based off close to nothing. This analysis could also relate to Tim’s experience with the war too. O’Brien was hesitant to go to war in the beginning for that exact reason he assumed the Vietnamese man was. O’Brien related to the man and through this realized that the soldiers fighting each other weren’t very different aft...

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