“Make plain to them the excellence of killing / And a field where a thousand corpses lie” (Crane 21-22). The poem “War is Kind” shows that the soldiers are brainwashed to believe that it is a good thing to kill, but in contrast, many soldiers return from war scarred from the mentally exhausting tasks that they endure. Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, is a collection of short stories that expresses the experiences and feelings of a platoon of American soldiers facing combat in the jungles of Vietnam. The characters endure heartbreak and hardships that change them as people and will carry with themselves after the war. In the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, O’Brien reveals how the mindset of soldiers changes when guilt, …show more content…
They carry emotional burdens of guilt, fear, and morality throughout their lives due to the insanity of the Vietnam War. The guilt that Jimmy Cross and Norman Bowker endure during combat and after fill the men’s lives with regret. Moreover, fear is instilled into the minds of the soldiers before, during, and after the war. O’Brien experiences fear before the war because he does not want to die or embarrass himself. Along with fear before the war, the soldiers endure fear amidst the combat in Vietnam. Curt Lemon experiences fear of the dentist, and many men feel fear and PTSD after the war finishes. Lastly, the men in combat face their morals when the fine line of what is right and wrong gets blurred. O’Brien’s morals slowly disappear after he kills a young enemy and feels ashamed. In contrast, Azar begins gaining morals throughout his time in Vietnam when he realizes that life is more fragile than it seems and jokes about dead bodies is not appropriate. In conclusion, the excellence of killing during the Vietnam war physically murdered many people, but it left every survivor mentally damaged in exchange for their unexplainable