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

773 Words4 Pages

Micaela Tracey English 12 Derosa Per. 2 5/21/24 TTTC and Platoon Essay The Vietnam War was a very gruesome, and unsettling time for many soldiers who went to fight in the war. Being a soldier in the Vietnam War could turn an innocent man into someone who ended up killing many opposing soldiers. The Vietnam War was no joke and many soldiers were faced with that reality the longer they spent in their platoons. The soldiers in both the movie Platoon, by Oliver Stone and the book The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, were faced with many challenging events that will change the way they look at the world for the rest of their lives. A point of reoccurrence that was seen by the characters in both the movie and the book was the soldiers loss of innocence. …show more content…

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. Even though the other soldiers around him also have killed opposing soldiers, he still is filled with shame and regret for his actions. O’Brien lost his innocence at that moment because he no longer would be able to call himself an innocent man. He now in his mind was a cold blooded

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Tim Obrien is famous for his staunch anti-war stance and his stories revealing the harsh realities of war. His works often detail recounts of his or her’s experiences during Vietnam. One of his works, “The Things They Carried,” describes the brutalities of the Vietnam war in two main ways: the droning of day-to-day orders and the weight of the things they carried physically and mentally. One of the brutalities O’Brien details in his work is the soulless droning of day-to-day orders. O’Brien demonstrates this soulless nature in his work by saying “it was not battle, it was just the endless march, village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost” (35).

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Out of the approximately 58,100 American casualties of the Vietnam War, Tim O’Brien managed to be one of the lucky foot soldiers that avoided brutal Viet Cong assault, countless hidden land mines, and deadly booby-traps. After the war, O’Brien conjured up a very emotional and eye-opening novel about his experiences in Vietnam and titled it, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me up and Ship Me Home. Author Tim O’Brien argued that the Vietnam War was unjustified through his depictions of exquisite brutality, mistreatment of Vietnam civilians, and soldier’s experiences of guerrilla warfare. The ways in which O’Brien demonstrates to the audience the exquisite brutality of the Viet Cong and American soldiers during the Vietnam War, are scattered throughout the entirety of the book and really help to strengthen his claim for the lack of justification for the War.

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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).

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