His humor is shown when he mails lice to his Ohio draft board. He gets very upset when others don’t tell stories “correctly” as when they tell them too slow or without enough details. He is an experienced soldier who operates the company’s
The Civil War is seen as disastrous, upsetting, and a new start for America. In Across Five Aprils, written by Irene Hunt, she shows all of those feelings. The Civil War was a hard time for many families. Their son’s are going to war, they still have to work, and they need someone to protect the family. You worry for your safety, and your children’s.
Throught this powerful essay it is clear that MacArthur is passionate about his Country and the military who serves it. Being very vivid in the descriptions of the world at war, was a way that this essay provokes emotion. Stating “...many a weary march from dripping dusk to to drizzling dawn,slogging ankle-deep through the mire of shell-shocked roads, to form grimly for the attack,blue-lipped, covered with sludge and mud, chilled by the wind and rain, driving home to their objective…” Those striking words hit the audience like an arrow piercing the hearts of those in attendance. This diction drives home the the point through the use of the audience's emotions keeping their feeling on the surface to be further affected by the speaker's words.
Since humans romanticize war, Death can strike any family. This is demonstrated in Luis Valdez, in the 1969 play,”The Buck Private” demonstrates that. Valdez supports hi argument by illustrating stock characters, by using death as a main character, and flashbacks show Johnny’s, the protagonist,reasons for enlisting to earn respect, and the consequences of his enlistment; his death. Valdez’s purpose is to entertain the audience and protest the Vietnam War so that the audience stops glamorizing war and starts recognizing its dangers. Valdez writes in a satirical tone for young adults.
This chapter “The Ghost Soldiers”, showed us how Tim O’Brien and the other soldiers were dealing with the war both physically and psychologically. It also shows us how the Tim O'Brien behaved and felt when he was shot, wounded and had a bacteria infection on his butt and how the war changed the way he thought, and viewed the other soldiers around him. This chapter also contain a lot of psychological lens. From the way Tim O’Brien felt when he was shot and separated from his unit to a new unit to when he wanted revenge on Bobby Jorgenson for almost “killing” him.
Throughout life we experience hardships, and we use these past experiences to help us make future decisions that overall grow as human beings. In Tim O ‘ Brien’s novel “The Things They Carried,” the characters not only carry physical baggage but emotional ones as well. They are forced to feel the effects of war such as guilt, burdens, and other factors that come with being a soldier. Soldiers going into the war often went in with immense pride that they were serving their country however in doing this they didn’t know they would lose their innocence and see the world in a new perspective when they returned. “My hometown was a conservative little spot on the prairie, a place where tradition counted” (O’Brien 38) shows where O’Brien lived in a place where things like the draft were taken very seriously.
Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is a collection of essays, all centered on anecdotes of American soldiers during the Vietnam War. The seemingly straightforward recollections slowly reveal dense layers of personal and metaphorical meanings upon closer inspection, with the exploration of the characters’ emotions and the underlying motif of love creating the opportunity to trace how war changes a person in the realm of his emotions. The Vietnam warfare acts as a catalyst for all of the unsettling changes in the soldiers’ minds, raising the question whether the battlefield is actively responsible for this result or merely accelerating the inevitable manifestation of these personal issues, inherent in every person. In the collection of essays
While the effort of America was important in winning the war, there was a lot of discrimination and prejudice against blacks, Native Americans, women, and homosexuals within the military. The men who fought in the war saw terrible conditions and many had mental breakdowns. This chapter in the book explains the deaths that many soldiers witnessed and how many men became separated from humanity. This caused many soldiers to become insane. The final two chapters in the book talk about changes in the American society throughout the war and the results from the war.
Hidden somewhere within the blurred lines of fiction and reality, lies a great war story trapped in the mind of a veteran. On a day to day basis, most are not willing to murder someone, but in the Vietnam War, America’s youth population was forced to after being pulled in by the draft. Author Tim O’Brien expertly blends the lines between fiction, reality, and their effects on psychological viewpoints in the series of short stories embedded within his novel, The Things They Carried. He forces the reader to rethink the purpose of storytelling and breaks down not only what it means to be human, but how mortality and experience influence the way we see our world. In general, he attempts to question why we choose to tell the stories in the way
David McLean’s short story “Marine Corps Issue” includes a beautifully vivid scene of Sergeant Bowen, the narrator Johnny’s father, “sitting on the edge of our elevated garden, black ashes from a distant fire falling lightly like snow around him” (620). While this scene is powerful by itself, it can be appreciated even more by understanding the symbolism and allusions embedded in it, as well as the psychological state of the father as he sits “on the edge of the garden with his head down and his eyes closed as if in prayer” (634). This is why McLean’s readers should use literary criticism: it enhances their appreciation for the story’s impact. Prior to the climax, Johnny has spent weeks researching the Vietnam War. The location in which he
Brief Background: My great-grandma, Ruth Trumble, is 87 years old and suffers from minor alzheimer's disease. Her responses to the questions I asked her would sometimes vary and often led to a fair amount of confusion. With the assignment of this project I began to think about the fact that in just a few years time, these personal interviews won’t be possible. With that in mind, I took down my great-grandma's words with the goal of learning about how the war affected her while she is still capable of providing me with the information.
In Jane Brody’s alarming article, “War Wounds That Time Alone Can’t Heal” Brody describes the intense and devastating pain some soldiers go through on a daily basis. These soldiers come home from a tragic time during war or, have vivid memories of unimaginable sufferings they began to experience in the battle field. As a result these soldiers suffer from, “emotional agony and self-destructive aftermath of moral injury…” (Brody). Moral injury has caused much emotional and physical pain for men and women from the war.
At Fredericksburg and Petersburg, Inman witnesses casualties, inflicts wounds, and receives injuries. Not only was close combat immensely painful, but one could distinguish the characteristics of the enemy. Men fought with, and against, young boys. Emotions brew, but since it was unmasculine to display those of weakness, some men struggle with inner thoughts provoked by Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
The True Weight of War “The Things They Carried,” by Tim O’Brien, brings to light the psychological impact of what soldiers go through during times of war. We learn that the effects of traumatic events weigh heavier on the minds of men than all of the provisions and equipment they shouldered. Wartime truly tests the human body and and mind, to the point where some men return home completely destroyed. Some soldiers have been driven to the point of mentally altering reality in order to survive day to day. An indefinite number of men became numb to the deaths of their comrades, and yet secretly desired to die and bring a conclusion to their misery.
The story “Soldier’s Home” by Ernest Hemmingway depicts the wounding and post-traumatic experience of the First World War of the main character Harold Krebs and his family. Like most soldiers’ experience of the war, upon return to their lives back home, their lives virtually had no more meaning to them. Krebs presents a painful realization in this manner in which he interacts with his mother. She tries to think of her son as a hero and make him feel like one by encouraging him to re-tell his tales from the war. Krebs knows that the impressions his mother is making are not authentic and she, just like the rest of his fellow town folk are tired of hearing and reading the same stories from the war (De Baerdemaeker 24).
