Rough Draft: The Things They Carried

Rough Draft: The Things They Carried

The Vietnam War, was a nightmarish place. It caused paranoia, and made some soldiers insane. Death could come at any moment in any place leaving men in constant fear knowing they could be next. Some men feared it so much they would self inflict wounds in hopes of getting discharged, and others would change their viewpoints on the war and change their actions completely.

Rat Kelly, one of the soldiers talked about in the book, begins going mad when his platoon starts only traveling at night and sleeps during the day because it causes strain and exhaustion, at first he becomes very quiet but gradually begins to feel nervous and jumpy. It gets to a point where he open the soars of bug bites and sees visions,

“Ultimately, trying to stay alive long enough to return home in one piece was the only thing that made any sense at all.” This quote shows that most soldiers had people and loved ones waiting for them at home and making it out of this war alive was really the only goal of the war entirely, dying would be to leave everything and everyone you know behind. Sometimes soldiers begin to fear death so much that they leave their platoons to try and escape the war, while there are others that fear death to the point they don’t want to move at all knowing that there are landmines, snipers, boobytraps and ambushes pretty much everywhere. “When a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause, you can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.” To me O’brien uses this quote to explain that Vietnam was a pointless war that our country entered and because of that they must live with the deaths of every soldier there, the only goal of the Vietnam war was to survive. The fear of death got so intense that men ultimately thought death was the only way to escape. Death wasn’t only feared in a scared way, sometimes it was in a way that made men evil, Mitchell Sanders tells Alpha Company a story of a man who fled from his platoon to go and sleep with a Red Cross nurse only to return days later, excited more than ever about being back in combat because everything else was to peaceful and he wanted to hurt people again.

Nightmares are feared by many people in society today but we have a way to escape and still live our lives. What happens when you live in your nightmare like every man in Vietnam did, not knowing when or how death was going to come for you, and knowing the only way of escaping that hell was to kill whatever stood in your way, to be wounded severely, or to give up life