The Band Of Brother In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

The Band of Brothers: Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried

Tim uses his novel to express a version of the truth that an individual may experience during the harsh Vietnam War. He has written at least five books over war because he needed an outlet for the things he had seen. Therefor the books were cathartic and allowed him to write ¨nonfictional fiction¨. Thus he cannot write nonfiction because he cannot capture the internal struggle. Tim felt that the only way to capture the true meaning of war was to capture the stories from each individual soldier. The American Novelist Tim O'brien uses the aspects of his true life, during the Vietnam War to explain war, brotherhood of soldiers, and the aftermath of the war.

Tim had spent most of his

“War is hell” but that is not the half of it in the true meaning of war. All though war may be hell the other half of it is not much prettier. The endurance these men also had to have to deal with the terrain, climate, and wildlife of the country was a struggle for any average man. “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die grief, terror, love, longing-these were intangibles, but intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight (“The Things They Carried”). These men did not have the right equipment to deal with this rugged terrain but still had to endure the scenery they were in. American soldiers were better armed and better equipped with more extensive training than Viet-Cong. The horrible terrain started to take a toll on these men with the horrible climate and humidity. U.S. soldiers became very weary of their surroundings of this terrible war. “They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself-Vietnam, and the place, the soil-a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity (“The Things They Carried”). This led soldiers to the

This love is built by standing for one another and watching “your brother”die for one another. “All the things we still carried through our lives spread out across the kitchen table were maybe a hundred old photographs”...”It was something that would never go away” (“Love”). For these men to be this close they can no longer be judgemental to one another and to learn each other like the back of their own hand. These soldiers may be working on two totally different things but when push comes to shove they still work together to help each other survive. Soldiers are not just men who die fighting, they are men who die fighting for freedom of many and one another. “They also carried their reputations they carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing men killed, and died because they were embarrassed not to” (“The Things They Carried”). The bond that soldiers have created lasted through their entire life. This life bond exist due to the fact that other warriors are the only ones that can understand what has occurred mentally, physically, and socially during times of