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Families Bring Comfort And Conflict In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

722 Words3 Pages

Over two million people lost their life to the Vietnam War. Two million, wives,husbands, mothers, fathers, children, and siblings gone; and what do we have to show for it. The Novel, “The Things They Carried” is written by, Tim O’Brien. The book takes place in the vietnam war and shares some stories of the brutal and hard times the narrator and his platoon went through, and the even harder battles they will face after they’re home “safe”. I have picked out two characters that stood out because they relate to our topics, “Families Bring Comfort and Conflict”, and “Defining Moments and Finding My Way.” The first character i have chosen is First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross. He is the leader of the platoon. He wanted to be a lieutenant because his …show more content…

He is a character based on the author but is not actually him. Tim is the narrator of the whole novel and throughout the book shows his connections to our two units. There are plenty of instances where Tim shows his connections but one of them really hit it home to connect with both units. In the chapter “The Man I Killed”, Tim tells about the horrifying first, and only time he had to kill someone. This relates to the “Comfort and Conflict topic” very well because his platoon is his family and they helped him through this hard time coping with the stress that came with killing someone. They comforted him and assured him it was a clean kill, and that he did everything exactly right. With comfort always conflict. His platoons started making harmless jokes, but Tim was already at war with himself thinking about all the the things this soldier he killed could’ve been, saying things like, “He liked books. He someday wanted to become a teacher of mathematics” ,and that it’s his fault that his family will never see him again. Which really put a tole on Tim’s mental health and he will probably never will get over it. This same event related the “Defining Moments” in which killing this soldier was Tim’s defining moment because it showed who he really was. He wasn’t a soldier, he was a normal human beings with morales and knew he did not like killing people and he had a lot of remorse. I think this is important because some soldiers

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Since he opposes the war originally, Tim has to alter his ideologies completely. He is forced to do something he once thought unfathomable, in order to become a soldier, and “take aim at another human being” (175). By doing this just to avoid “patriotic ridicule” (186) Tim goes against everything he believes in solely to ensure people do not judge him. Tim chooses to make tremendous sacrifices of not only his own life but is forced to live with the blood of those he will have to kill. Even if he does survive the war, he will never be the same due to what he sees or does while in Vietnam.

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I went to the war.” (last paragraph 58) This helps us understand that going to war was not an accomplishment for Tim. He regretted not running away and hated that he went.

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