The Illinois countryside was sweltering in July. The flat earth invited the harsh, dusty winds that hummed a lonely tune. The sky never took on a hue of blue but instead was always soaked in reddish yellow as if the sun was bleeding into it. There was a worn out house that stood wearily in the middle of a desolate plain. It wasn’t beautiful. The windows were covered in a veil of dry, brown dust, suggestive of its detachment from human contact for years. The roof had a gild of fading red paint that would have once looked pretty and bright. The uncleanness of the house paralleled the harsh surrounding environment that seemed to be engulfed in sporadic dust storms. The complete lack of rain in these godforsaken rural areas left the soil wrinkled with cracks of mud and sand. It wasn’t beautiful. Joe Callan was the perfect loner. Now sixty-five, he was living in that unsightly house. He owned a small barn nearby, which housed a few animals for personal sustenance. It was a quiet life, largely divorced from human contact. The only sound was of sleepy fowls and cattle. This sort of life, of course, did not suit him in the least. Callan was a war veteran who served in Vietnam. Like for most other soldiers who survived, Vietnam had changed him; it changed him to the core. Now, he was living alone in the house, trying his best to live the life of a cattle farmer. Of course, this was just a way of denying his past, rejecting who he had permanently become. The blood that he had shed penetrated to his soul; he just knew that he already had a one-way ticket to hell. All this peace and quiet was but a moment’s delusion that afforded him a short escape from the nightmares that haunted him day after day. He desperately wished for some return of... ... middle of paper ... ... his pigs. He was no better than them. He reflected back at all the mistakes he had made. What kind of person he was. He stared at the sky. It was clear. The sun was setting and gave a bright beautiful red colour to the sky and kept the world going. He could faintly hear the police siren or perhaps it was ambulance. Callan could not believe he just shot down the kid. He was a worthless punk, sure, but he was just a kid! He was barely in his twenties. He didn’t know any better. He was young and stupid. He had all the potential to become someone useful to the world. He had family and friends who liked him. And now he was dead. And it was all too easy killing him. Callan held his rifle tight. Loaded another bullet he had in his pocket. He put the gun up to his temple. Then slowly, as life ticked away, he pulled the trigger. It was, as it always had been, too easy.
The setting takes place in April at a funeral. There was a “gardenia on the smooth brown wood” (Holczer 1). They have been “wandering across the great state of California” (2). The setting moves to Grace's grandma’s house. It was “two stories with attic windows”, “sky-blue paint with white trim”, “ and a wood porch” (19). There were “two chairs covered in yellowed plastic and pine needles” (19). There was a gently sloped driveway. Inside the house there were “piles of Tupperware and glass dishes” (19). Outside there was a shed, garden, trees, and
Within the novel Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, the character Billy Pilgrim claims to have come “unstuck” in time. Having survived through being a Prisoner of War and the destruction of Dresden during World War II, and having been a prisoner used to clear away debris of the destruction, there can be little doubt that Pilgrim’s mental state was unstable. Furthermore, it may be concluded that Pilgrim, due to the effects of having been a Prisoner of War, and having been witness to the full magnitude of destruction, suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which caused him to review the events over and over during the course of his life. In order to understand how these factors, the destruction of Dresden and ‘PTSD’, came to make Billy Pilgrim “unstuck” in time, one must review over the circumstances surrounding those events.
As a teenager, Bud had to milk cows, in the morning and in the evening. They had about 36 milking cows. Bud’s favorite subject in school was music class and choir. He attended Yale high school, and Eastern Michigan University. The one family tradition Bud participated in was going to church every Sunday morning. Bud had a curfew of about 10 o’clock p.m., but it got a little later as he got older. He lived and worked on his family’s dairy farm. It was in the countryside of Yale, Michigan. Bud was in college when the Vietnam War was taking place and because of the fact he did not want to be drafted he was motivated to stay in school.
John Wade left America a human being, yet came back a human killer. His months in Vietnam were filled with bloodshed and human atrocity, and from this, no man could feasibly return the same person. Yet beneath what John endured throughout the war, he suffered many unkindness’ and tragedies that shaped him into adulthood. It was not only the war that made John Wade, but it was John Wade’s existence; his whole life that made him who he was.
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.
“War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead,” (80). In the fiction novel The Things They Carried, the author Tim O’Brien reminisces fighting in the Vietnam War and the aftermath of the war with his platoon mates through short stories and memories. He goes in depth about the emotional trauma and physical battles they face, what they carry, and how Vietnam and war has changed them forever. O’Brien’s stories describe the harsh nature of the Vietnam War, and how it causes soldiers to lose their innocence, to become guilt-ridden and regretful, and to transform into a paranoid shell of who they were before the war.
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.
...ome the dream of attainment slowly became a nightmare. His house has been abandoned, it is empty and dark, the entryway or doors are locked. The sign of age, rust comes off in his hands. His body is cold, and he has deteriorated physically & emotionally. He is weathered just like his house and life. He is damaged poor, homeless, and the abandoned one.
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 house is 10 feet by 10 feet, and it is built completely of corrugated paper. The roof is peaked, the walls are tacked to a wooden frame. The dirt floor is swept clean, and along the irrigation ditch or in the muddy river...." " ...and the family possesses three old quilts and soggy, lumpy mattress. With the first rain the carefully built house will slop down into a brown, pulpy mush." (27-28)
The author, Tim O'Brien, is writing about an experience of a tour in the Vietnam conflict. This short story deals with inner conflicts of some individual soldiers and how they chose to deal with the realities of the Vietnam conflict, each in their own individual way as men, as soldiers.
“And then one morning, all alone, Mary Anne walked off into the mountains and did not come back” (110). Tim O’Brien’s short story “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” presents an all-American girl who has been held back by social and behavioral norms – grasping for an identity she has been deprived the ability to develop. The water of the Song Tra Bong removes Mary Anne’s former notion of being as she, “stopped for a swim” (92). With her roles being erased Mary Anne becomes obsessed with the land and mystery of Vietnam and is allowed to discover herself. Through the lenses of Mark Fossie and the men in the Alpha Company, Mary Anne becomes an animal and is completely unrecognizable by the end of the story. Mary Anne, however, states she is happy and self-aware. The men of the Alpha Company argue for virtue in that Mary Anne was “gone” (107) and that what she was becoming “was dangerous… ready for the kill” (112). They did not want to accept a woman becoming something different from what women always were. In “How Tell to a True War Story” we are told that a true war story “does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior” (65). Mary Anne did not truly become ‘dark’, because to her this is not a story about war; this is a story about a woman attempting to overcome gender roles and the inability of men to accept it.
...ar, O’Brien was able to turn his pain into a life purpose by immortalizing his loved ones. On the other hand, Bowker was not able to cope and resorted to taking his own life. In high-pressure environments such as war, instinct is the dominating force behind one’s actions. It is something inherent and extremely difficult to change for it corresponds with the person’s deepest desires. Therefore, instinctive reactions are accurate portrayals of a person’s inner identity and character. The cases of Bowker and O’Brien prove that it is the discovery of oneself during war, and not war itself, that has a profound impact on the human spirit.
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.
The sunset was not spectacular that day. The vivid ruby and tangerine streaks that so often caressed the blue brow of the sky were sleeping, hidden behind the heavy mists. There are some days when the sunlight seems to dance, to weave and frolic with tongues of fire between the blades of grass. Not on that day. That evening, the yellow light was sickly. It diffused softly through the gray curtains with a shrouded light that just failed to illuminate. High up in the treetops, the leaves swayed, but on the ground, the grass was silent, limp and unmoving. The sun set and the earth waited.