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Important Quotes From The Things They Carried

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Soldiers receiving a draft letter for war is typically a very hard and stressful time in their lives, especially the draft for Vietnam, the only draft America has had so far. Most of the men being drafted were young and unexperienced in war, making them hate it even more. They were taken and dropped into some of the worst circumstances the U.S. military has ever seen and expected to fight alongside people they had never even met before. As the war went on, the platoon members would bond, and have to watch their new friends get injured or die right in front of them, and wonder why they didn’t die as well. The harshness of the war made the soldiers look for any kind of escape from reality or way to make war easier, and they found drugs to be …show more content…

After getting hooked on the stress-relieving effects of the drugs administered to them, then looked to marijuana to help even more. Once the marijuana period wore off, soldiers began taking heroin which really caused issues after coming back home. Statistics show that at one point or another around the time of the war, at least 20% of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam were on one or both of these drugs. Even in the book, The Things
They Carried, one man always carried “a hefty amount of marijuana with him” (O’Brien).
However, once he died, his fellow platoon members that had never previously been mentioned of doing drugs smoked all of his weed while waiting on the helicopter to arrive just because of the sheer harshness of watching their buddy get shot and drop dead.
Upon returning home from war, most soldiers that had been on drugs ended up addicted to them and suffered from PTSD, and once again looked to drugs as an escape, only to find out that PTSD is enhanced by the use of drugs. Most of the soldiers that had started these drugs during the war had trouble getting off of them at the end or after returning home. And it was

Carpenter 3 because of the heavy drug use that returning soldiers experienced more PTSD than did any

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The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien, illustrates the experiences of a man and his comrades throughout the war in Vietnam. Tim O’Brien actually served in the war, so he had a phenomenal background when it came to telling the true story about the war. In his novel, Tim O’Brien uses imagery to portray every necessary detail about the war and provide the reader with a true depiction of the war in Vietnam. O’Brien starts out the book by describing everything he and his comrades carry around with them during the war. Immediately once the book starts, so does his use of imagery.

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Figurative Language In The Things They Carried

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O'Brien's tour of duty was 1969-70.”(Goodreads) He mentions that everyone handles the war differently. For example in The Things They Carried, O’Brien states that Ted Lavender carries marijuana and tranquilizers to calm himself down because he is always nervous, Kiowa who is religious carries an illustrated New Testament, which was a gift from his father and others just carry things in the most “physical sense”, for instance mosquito repellent and marijuana, pocket knives and chewing gum. O’Briens said that his true goal was to write a true war story, for people to know what to expect when going into the

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Psychological Warfare In Tim O 'Brien's The Things They Carried'

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Vietnam War Literary Criticism

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O’Brien and Kaplan make it painfully obvious, the only thing certain in regards to the Vietnam War, is uncertainty. The feeling of uncertainty is carried within these men. All soldiers wanted one thing, “Ultimately, trying to stay alive long enough to return home in one piece was the only thing that made any sense to them”. (Kaplan 1/8) In, The Things They Carried, O’Brien explains that all soldiers carried much more than equipment.

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