ipl-logo

Summary Of The Things They Carried 'By Tim O' Brien

845 Words4 Pages

In the 1990 book “The Things They Carried” By Tim O’Brien gives both the victims and survivors of the Vietnam war a voice. The soldiers, alive and dead, experienced horrific events too terrible to speak of. No one could express their emotions, causing many mental illnesses such as PTSD. How could they express how they felt if they couldn’t speak of the horrors that occurred? Tim O’Brien gave them a voice. He was able to explain what happened without exactly telling people what happened. How can you express a feeling that you’ve push down and tried to forget about? You can’t, well it’s nearly impossible. That’s exactly what happened to the living soldiers in the Vietnam war. They have so many stories to tell, but no words to tell it with. …show more content…

Many Vietnamese people who weren’t part of the war were killed. In 1968 more than 500 unarmed Vietnamese people were killed in My Lai. This event is known as the My Lai Massacre. Though this event was not mentioned in the book, innocent Vietnamese people were killed and made fun of in some of the stories that Tim O’Brien wrote. For example in the story “The Lives of the Dead” a village was attacked. The only victim of this attack was an old man they came across. This man was obviously not a part of the Vietcong and was just an innocent bystander who was caught in the crossfire. The man had had his arm blown off and the American soldiers walked by and took his other hand, shaking it and making jokes about his death. This is very similar to the My Lai Massacre because during this massacre the American soldiers would make jokes about who they were killing and how they were killing them. Many of the American soldiers regret what they did in My Lai, while others do not. This is how the American soldiers in “The Things They Carried” were like. Tim O’Brien shows us that some of the soldiers regretted what they did while some of the soldiers did not and thought it was a hilarious joke. In “The Man I Killed” He shows the Vietnamese soldier’s side of the story and even though Tim O’Brien doesn’t know exactly how that soldier

Show More
Related

How Did The Official Version Of My Lai Assault Differ From Testimonies

896 Words | 4 Pages

The official version of My Lai made the massacre sound as if it was an effective search-and-destroy mission that had killed suspected enemy soldiers of the Vietcong. “[Leader of the operation, Lieutenant Colonel Frank] Barker said to his superiors in his combat action report, noting that the ‘operation was well planned, well executed and successful.’” (Gorn et al 2010) In reality this was a massacre of over 500 innocent

Read More

Things They Carried By Tim Obrien Sparknotes

1661 Words | 7 Pages

For Veterans, war has impacted a majority of their life due to the traumatic events that they encounter, so they are left them with the last decision, which it could be drugs or suicide. In the book, The Things They Carried, Tim Obrien writes several short stories on the Vietnam War. A fictional book based on real events and how he describes the Vietnam War as the most significant event in his life because of the things he and his friends had to face. It studies the nature of young men in a time of war, and what made them do tough decisions in and after the war. The thing that is noticeable at first is how characters go into development, and how they listed the things the men had carried with the profound irony being that is not the physical thing they carried but the nonphysical thing they carried, the emotion, the experience and the guilt they encounter in Vietnam.

Read More

Michal R. Belknap's Murder At My Lai Massacre

1289 Words | 6 Pages

On March 16, 1968, US Army soldiers from the Company C of the 23rd Americal Division marched into the village of My Lai in Vietnam on a search and destroy mission. Although the US soldiers intended to conduct a “combat assault”[ Michal R. Belknap, The Vietnam war on Trial (Lawrece, Kansas: the University Press of Kansas, 2002), 57] on the village which was thought to be the location of the 48th Vietcong Battalion after a tip off, it turned into a mass-killing of hundreds of innocent civilians and noncombatants. After the slaughter at My Lai, the Americal Division deemed the event a success[ Belknap, 78], however once word got out of the massacre a year later, it was met with outrage by the public. Although the killing of civilians during

Read More

Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

1025 Words | 5 Pages

“It was very sad, he thought… The things men did or felt they had to do” (O’Brien 480). In “The Things They Carried”, Tim O’Brien (a Vietnam War veteran) details the experience of soldiers during the Vietnam War. As implied in the title, the story describes the many things soldiers carried physically. In addition, O’Brien shares the many thoughts and burdens the soldiers carried mentally during their time on the battlefield in Vietnam.

Read More

TTTC And Platoon: The Things They Carried, By Tim O Brien

773 Words | 4 Pages

This event in the story changes Tim O’Brien’s look at war and his time in Vietnam because he can’t believe that he was able to bring himself to kill another human being. It was so hard for him to accept this truth because in the beginning of the story, Tim enters the war as a scared and innocent man who felt like he would have been shamed if he didn’t enter. He was scared of dying and seeing the killing of other innocent people. Because of O’Brien’s past of being scared of war and not wanting to enter, this fueled his anger and sadness after he killed another soldier. This was not something O’Brien stood behind, and he was very ashamed of his actions.

Read More

Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

887 Words | 4 Pages

Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam War book, “The Things They Carried”, is a collection of stories set during and after the Vietnam War, from the perspectives of Tim and his comrades. One of those stories, The Man I Killed, details the aftermath of Tim’s first combat kill, switching between O’Brien’s comrades attempting to console him, and a young O’Brien creating an entire life story for his young victim, his guilt humanizing the dead man. As the narrative of this story grows, the definition of truth itself is brought into question. In war, facts alone can’t properly convey what it is like to live through such atrocities. Therefore, the survivors remember war through the emotions it produced (fear, guilt, anger, depression).

Read More

Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

1713 Words | 7 Pages

Inside The Minds of Vietnam Tim O'Brien was drafted to Vietnam when he was only 18 years old, taken from his normal everyday college life and sent to a world no American had ever seen. Where in a place so deadly you're never sure when or how you’ll die. Tim O'Brien survived Vietnam, but at home he’s still battling what he thought he had left overseas. The memories still haunt him and many other men who made it home. His novel, The Things They Carried, describes Vietnam and all the things he encountered including the people he lost.

Read More

Interpreting Connections In The Things They Carried 'By Tim O' Brien

521 Words | 3 Pages

In the story The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien was shot in the butt during the war and was sent to a base camp to recover. He says, “I felt something shift inside me. It was anger, partly, but it was also a sense of pure and total loss. I didn’t fit anymore. They were soldiers, I wasn’t.”

Read More

Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

1423 Words | 6 Pages

He then begins to speak about the difference between “real truth” and “story truth.” Sometimes story truth is more true than real truth due to the emotions that the reader experiences. O’Brien’s goal was for the readers to believe these experiences were true down to the very last detail. This makes the audience grasp a better understanding of what these soldiers actually experienced in battle. In “How to Tell a True War Story” Mitchell Sanders shares a story with Tim about when a troop is on an operation in the mountains for an operation.

Read More

Chapter Analysis: The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

783 Words | 4 Pages

O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York, NY: Houghton, 1990. Print. 233 pages. The Things

Read More

Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

495 Words | 2 Pages

Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” is a novel dedicated to recounting the lives and existence of the soldiers during the Vietnam War. The author writes his novel in the form of a personal narrative written from the point of view of an infantryman during the war, with the purpose of relaying emotional and long-term impact both the tangible and intangible things had on the soldiers. By appealing to the reader’s emotions through the use of narrative, O’Brien is able to convey his purpose. In “The Things They Carried” Tim O’Brien utilizes multiple perspectives and events during the Vietnam War to illustrate the permanence of memories and emotional baggage the soldiers had to and still do carry with them. O’Brien uses personal anecdotes in his narrative to illustrate the significant impact of remembrance and memories on a person's life.

Read More

How The Vietnam War Revealed In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

764 Words | 4 Pages

In the "Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien, Tim O'Brien, Norman Bowker, and the young boy whose name was never revealed are all examples of soldiers who couldn't or at least had a hard time talking about their expiriences in war. In the NPR interview with Tim O'Brien one caller who happened to be a Vietnam soldier said he “couldn’t tell anybody what [he] had witnessed”. Many of the soliders who served in Vietnam had a hard time talking about their experiences of the war. The soldiers felt as if nobody cared about how they felt because they were supposed to be strong-minded individuals. If they had someone to talk to often times bringing up memories of the horrifying scenes of the war made their situation worse.

Read More

Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

1119 Words | 5 Pages

The Viet Cong soldier appeared to be a “slim, young, dainty man,” which distracts the reader from the destruction the bomb has caused . His focus on these physical characteristics, rather than on his own feelings, betrayed

Read More

Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

1043 Words | 5 Pages

One reason that he does this is because he believes that telling stories about someone makes it seem that they are still alive, even if their names have been changed. He could reinvent the soldiers that he served with, and make them heroic. “I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave.

Read More

Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

1206 Words | 5 Pages

By doing so, he ironically constructs a poignant set of truths. The significance of his is that it shows his experiences before, during, and after the war. But it also showed something far larger than his experiences. This book shows the nature of storytelling, truth, memory, and imagination in general. Going to this war questioned his own motives, and this is how we truly see what this man went through.

Read More

More about Summary Of The Things They Carried 'By Tim O' Brien

Open Document