Dear America Letters Home From Vietnam Analysis

Emotional effects of war can be damaging and life-changing for veterans as well as their friends and family. The Vietnam war was very difficult for the soldiers to live through. Soldiers often worried about Guerillas because they were willing to sacrifice their life for the war which is something the U.S. had never seen before. Soldiers also were unfamiliar with the area and never knew if they were gonna step in a booby trap or be attacked because everybody looked the same. The most significant cost of war is the emotional effect it takes on the soldiers, friends and, family. To start having to cope with death takes a big toll when it comes to war. In the book “ Dear America: Letters home from Vietnam” a mother writes letters to her son who

In one of the letters, she explains how she talks to another mother who also had lost her child. The mother on the phone asks for help on how to fix the pain and the mother responds with “and as I sobbed I thought, how can I help her with pain when I have never completely been able to cope with my own” ( Source F ). The mother unable to subsist with the death of her son supports the idea that dealing with a death from war is not easy. Not only does it support that a death is difficult to cope with but it also proves how war takes a big emotional effect on families. In addition to the mother coping with the death of her son some soldiers in combat also have a difficult time dealing with loss. In the book, “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien he writes about how he killed a man with a grenade in My Khe. After he kills the soldier he starts to humanize him and creates this story about the soldiers’ past life and how he had a big future ahead of him that he just took away. The guilt overrides O’Brien and he can not focus on anything else but

In the book “Working-class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam” by Christian G. Appy he provides personal experiences from soldiers to fully show the impact the war had on them. The mentality of them started to weaken because the soldiers never knew what was going to happen next. Was the war gonna end? Nobody knew, for example, Appy writes, “Among the worst, of course, were the nearly constant anxieties of walking into an ambush or stepping in a landmine ... The lack of knowledge about where one was going, the kind of terrain to be encountered, and the length of time it would take” ( Source B). Under those circumstances, soldiers were always on edge. Which is the biggest role of the war because it caused a lot of problems emotionally and created problems like post-traumatic stress disorder. Being on edge all the time and being scared of what can happen next is emotionally damaging. Similarly, the song “Sam Stone” by John Prine is a song about the struggles of a veteran after the war and how his mentality causes his overdose. In the Vietnam war, it was common for soldiers to be addicted to heroin and morphine. Thus explains that the song was about a veteran in the war who is mentally unstable because the songwriter writes, “after serving conflict overseas. And the time that he served, Had shattered all his nerves And left a little shrapnel in his knees. But the morphine