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If I Die In A Combat Zone By Tim O Brien

852 Words4 Pages

In If I Die in a Combat Zone, the author Tim O’Brien argues his disagreement with the Vietnam War through his beliefs of the injustice of war by depicting the arrogance of the war itself and his experiences of brutality as a soldier in Vietnam. This story is developed very differently from any other book written about the War of Vietnam, O’Brien added fiction to his real life experiences to express his true belief on the war and expose the injustice of it. Throughout the book O’Brien mentions his thoughts against the war and involvement in Vietnam and even conflicted over it with the Chaplain during his basic training. To him he explains his values and understanding of the pursuit of happiness and argues that as a human his obligation is to …show more content…

From killing man, woman, children, and even elders with the idea that it was acceptable because it was for his homeland his perspective of the war being biased continued to grow. At some point he compares the war to lightning or to the bombing on a silent Hiroshima as a way to demonstrate the level of impact that the war is known to cause (O'Brien, 110). As a soldier in combat he explains his definition of what courageous actually is and we learn that to him courage is all about wisdom, a characteristic that as a new young soldier he seems to confine and it becomes a personal challenge to …show more content…

The everyday life in the forests of Vietnam are always a battle, from village to village the Alpha Company lived and committed atrocities with the power of warfare. Although O’Brien seems to dislike the forms of force used against the Vietnamese he is aware that any Vietnamese in sight becomes an enemy. Despite that he is scarred with everything he lives as a soldier from shooting someone with an M-16 to his own unit members thrown into pieces by a grenade. War life like it is presented by O’Brien is not like any kind of life: from the successful ambushes, to losing half of the unit, or not knowing who would or wouldn't come back became a fear that because they were soldiers they were forced to cover. And many times they covered it through showing their “masculinity” by taking advantage of woman from the villages taking them by force or from canteens. In the story, O’Brien exposes various forces of brutality from the soldiers, the main source of war, with the purpose of portraying a real and honest image of what war really is like in order for others to reflect on the cruelty of

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More specifically, the novel depicts the adverse effects war has on soldiers during the war and after the war. O’Brien quickly shows the crippling effects of war through himself. He has been ripped from everything he knows and placed into a foreign land, in which, his life is constantly at risk. As the story progresses there begins to be a shift from the war, to life after it. It is again immediately apparent how difficult it was for soldiers to adjust back to normal life.

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O’Brien hits the reader with a dark reality of war stories, “There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.” This is something that O’Brien gets from talking to Rat Kiley’s experiences with writing to his beloved. The guy started out as innocent but comes back jaded and angry. This is a symptom of the truth, it’s not pretty and anyone telling you there is something to be gained from learning about them is wrong.

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Although the soldier he killed was an enemy soldier, instead of vilifying him he was able to humanize the man. O’Brien was able to describe the physical appearance of the soldier and imagine her life before war. The author was able to portray an emotional connection and made the line between friend and enemy almost vanish. This was able to reveal the natural beauty of shared humanity even in the context of war’s horror. O’Brien is able to find the beauty in the midst of this tragic and horrible event.

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The moral of this novel is unfolded extremely well. The character O’Brien plays in the novel, Tim, is a writer that, years later, chronicles the stories of the men and the entire novel is parallel to a flashback. Many of the stories of the hardships that the men went through, and brought home memories of, are almost unbelievable. In response to this, O’Brien writes, “In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical.

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But as O’Brien evolved as a soldier in Vietnam, he constantly struggled to identify and define what it meant to be courageous in Vietnam. Therefore, throughout the novel, O’Brien eventually discovered that

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(page 68). This is why Tim O’Brien writes the way he does. He wants the reader to believe his story and get a sense of what war is truly

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The Vietnam war was one of many crusades the United States carried throughout the 20th century, the Cold War era. The domino theory was one of many terms used in this stage of political hostility where if a nation falls under the communist regime, the rest of its neighboring countries would undergo the same events. Although the war gained immense publicity, it was also victorious in achieving the objection of many through its atrocities. In the book, If I Die in a Combat Zone, the author Tim O’Brien transmitted to the reader his personal experiences and beliefs during his recruitment in the Vietnam war by communicating the cruel, lethal circumstances servicemen encountered, exposing the intrusion on Vietnamese civilian lives and property, and

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The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien, illustrates the experiences of a man and his comrades throughout the war in Vietnam. Tim O’Brien actually served in the war, so he had a phenomenal background when it came to telling the true story about the war. In his novel, Tim O’Brien uses imagery to portray every necessary detail about the war and provide the reader with a true depiction of the war in Vietnam. O’Brien starts out the book by describing everything he and his comrades carry around with them during the war. Immediately once the book starts, so does his use of imagery.

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Periodically, he would speak about his nights of watch, where his mind would run away with him. But, the scariest aspect of these seemingly outrageous pictures of death and ambush by Viets in the night is that they were not far from the reaches of reality. In the dead of night, O’Brien said that he couldn’t help but think that “we were fooling ourselves to think that we remained the hunters, in control of the war and our destinies” and that “all the enemy need do was steal up on our rear” (95). More than once, he mentions that his sense of courage was a sort of lost cause, and that hope for bravery was pointless in such a place so devoid of mercy. Even now, after all that he endured, Tim seems to have learned something from war: “it may not make a man of you, but it teaches you that manhood is not something to scoff”

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The words “courage” and “bravery” are commonly misused in today's world, however, Tim O’Brien successfully differentiates the difference between weak and strong. O’Brien “manages to redefine masculinity, make cowardice understandable, and replace the contemporary definition of courage with one” (Mahajani 253). He does this by highlighting the significance of Bowker's service to his country and emphasizing that one mistake does not define a soldier as a coward. O’Brien supports Bowker's embarrassment and guilt by saying, “Norman did not experience a nerve failure that night. He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor” (O’Brien 103).

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Like all wars the Vietnam War had Physical and Psychologial scars. Fifty-eight thousand people were killed, two thousand captured, and three hundred thousand wounded. I could talk more about the physical trauma, but I want to talk about the psychological damages the war caused O’Brien and other soldiers. O’Brien was a part of the war and through the story you can see his bitterness and how the war affected his mind. Like loosing his best friend Ted Lavender, the chapter I chose to do is On the Rainy River.

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O’Brien goes into great depth in this small quote on how loss of innocence and war can affect people in the war. The quote “Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t” shows how war is so different from what any human experiences at home. After that small quote he follows it up by bringing up how you have to use normal stuff to show how crazy these things are and how much of a pole it can have on somebody during a war. The way that war is treated for many is mostly the mental part that is struggling. But for many "War is hell, but that's not half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love.

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O’brien explains that the behavior of these soldiers show just how brutal war can be. True war stories do not “instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor

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War was so much more than just war to O’Brien and he able to share this through his writing. " But this is true: stories can save us. ... in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world." (page

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The soldiers in the Vietnams war were there for different reasons, some soldiers were forced against their will and some were there by choice. Because of that, each soldier has their own thoughts about the war, O’Brien has interpreted that “The twenty –six men were very quiet: some of them excited by the adventure, some of them afraid”. This clearly shows how the men

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