Summary Of If I Die In A Combat Zone By Tim O Brien

Against The War

To someone that doesn’t know much about the Vietnam War, they might think it was nothing but an awesome war that America won just because it could. Obviously, there is much more to this war than a Huey flying over an enemy village dropping bombs while blasting Fortunate Son. The Vietnam war was a major internal conflict of Vietnam that had many layers and consequences that could have been avoided using diplomacy and by simply not splitting a divided country into two parts, but because of this war a man named Tim O’Brien was drafted, lived, and came out of the war to tell his story about the bloodshed and the experiences that would change his life forever. The author, Tim O'Brien, of “If I Die in a Combat Zone,” argued that the

O’Brien experiences took place in Vietnam’s horrible jungles as well as the strict training camps of Fort Lewis that would keep O’Brien in a constant state of alert, and he conveys this by saying that his drill sergeant Blyton would constantly tease, threaten, and humiliate him and his other mates. This nature of training was nothing compared to what O’Brien would experience but the whole point of boot camp would be to prepare them for it. Therefore, the sergarents that oversee the bootcamp have to be horrible people towards the troops to show and prepare them for an upcoming life that would treat them like the replaceable maggots they were seen as. Along with that, O’Brien suffers out in the war zone due to the constant state of battle having to deal with “search

For example, at times the company would be pinned down in a fox hole and they were bombarded by charlie, and most of the boys just began to giggle and hoot in reaction to almost being killed, and it wouldn’t even be the first time for that day. This shows how the soldiers were completely unaffected by what has been going on in their life’s for the past months or even years for some. The desensitization caused by the war has made them in a way a much better machine of the government than boot camp ever could, but that shouldn’t be a good thing, that’s just one reason why anyone in a good state of mind would be opposed to such an unnecessary war. Additionally, when Mad Mark sat with the company and showed them all the hunk of fresh human ear that he had earlier cut out of a person’s head and the reaction of most of the company was to giggled at what he had done truly just presents the mental state of the company to laugh at someone cutting an ear off of someone’s head (pg. 89). Although, at that time O’Brien was just a bystander, he merely watched and gave his 2 cents on the matter as the other men murmured and were even impressed with the action’s of Mad Mark. That was just another example of the side effects of the war, a tainted