Similarities Between O Brien And Brian Turner

War Books For some people war is a piece of history and for other’s it’s a piece of their lives they’ll never forget. Brian Turner and Tim O’Brien share the same topic, which was war. Both men did fight in different war, which were in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and used literature to write their experiences. Turner used the power of poetry, while O’Brien used his stories. Both author’s did capture the harsh reality of war, yet one was more effective than the other. Brian Turner made his poems’ descriptive but it touched more to his feelings rather than the war, while Tim O’Brien was able to bring his war to life by using characters in his stories In Tim O’Brien’s, The Things They Carried, he talks about his experience through the Vietnam War.

O’Brien was able to describe a scene for the readers to imagine. For example, in the chapter How to Tell a True War Story, he said, “What happened was, we crossed a muddy river and marched west into the mountain, and on the third day we took a break along a trail junction.” When he would events places like this, it brought his stories to life and I could imagine it. O’Brien even said, “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” because he wanted the readers to experience and feel what he had been through during the war. O’Brien and Turner are similar by expressing their feelings in their books. Turner used his poems’ for example, Observation Post #71, describes how he saw and thinks about what he has seen. O’Brien would write paragraphs that he believed he saw. Tim O’Brien was able to create the suspense, guilt and grief people would experience at war. He even described his friends he lost along the way. Their deaths were indescribable,

The way each character acted and behaved in the war sort of related to myself and how I think I would be like in a war. For example when a man named Jorgenson panicked when he had seen someone injured during a battle, he didn’t know what to do. Many people can relate, even myself, when Jorgenson had said, “When you got hit, I kept telling myself to move, move, but I couldn’t do it, like I was full of drugs or something.” His reaction during the war and being in shock when so many other things are happening is the result of why so many people can relate to him. Nobody is prepared to take in so much even during a war. I think the more he connected the readers to his characters, it made his story more of a reality. It was if I could put myself in their positions because I was similar to them. When the characters would react crazy or insane like Dave Jensen did in the chapter Enemies, he felt he couldn’t trust anyone, but he had to make things right. He drove himself crazy because he felt he would be attacked from his team and the real enemies. I believe that would probably happen to most people and we can all have a breaking point even O’Brien had his own. Understanding the way the characters felt and behaved helped relate myself and bring the reality of war to life. There were moments that I didn’t want to picture but I had to because I wanted to keep reading, and it was if I was there. The most important piece that