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

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Recommended: The way o'brien portrays the vietnam war in his novel the things they carried

“I survived, but it’s not a happy ending” (O’Brien 58). A veteran’s pain does not end when they are relieved of duty and sent home. Many veterans are unsure how to deal with the horrors they experience during and after the war, and negative coping mechanisms can arise from those struggles. The novel, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, is an accurate representation of real life because the characters use negative coping mechanisms to overcome hardships during and after the Vietnam War. An increased risk of violence is a symptom of PTSD, and because of this, veterans may try to divert their pain into violence against something else. An example from The Things They Carried is when Rat Kiley’s best friend, Curt Lemon was killed. Curt and …show more content…

He was instinalty killed, because his body was blown into a nearby tree. Later that day, the Alpha Company came upon a baby buffalo, wandering alone. Not knowing how to deal with the sudden, gruesome death of his best friend, Rat took his anger out of the buffalo. Rat began to shoot bits of the baby buffalo. He shot off it’s ear, mouth, nose, tail, and parts of it’s ribs and belly. During Rat’s outburst, the men silently watched. “The whole platoon stood there watching, feeling all kinds of things, but there wasn't a great deal of pity for the baby water buffalo” (O’Brien 75). The platoon understood that violence was an “appropriate” reaction to death of Rat’s best friend. Due to his high levels of anger and sadness, violence was an easy solution. The only purpose of doing this was to take out his anger on the world for taking away his best friend. Rat felt as if having something else feel more pain than he was feeling would make his pain go away. Another way violence can be increased is the use of drugs and alcohol to suppress the …show more content…

Two years after he returned home from the war, he took his own life. The severe feeling of loneliness led Norman to feel as if there was nothing left for him. Soon after Norman returned from war, he drove around town in an endless loop. Wasting away his days, he noticed how the people of the town had changed while he was gone. “Most of Norman Bowker's friends were living in Des Moines or Sioux City, or going to school somewhere, or holding down jobs. The high school girls were mostly gone or married. Sally Kramer, whose pictures he had once carried in his wallet, was one who had married” (O’Brien 133) This shows how while at war, everyone moved on with their lives, except Norman. When he comes home and sees how he wasn’t remembered, he feels as if he is isolated and has no way of getting back to the way things used to be. According to the Centers for Disease Control, as cited by Christopher Keating, “Estimates of suicides among Vietnam veterans range from 9,000 to 100,000” (Keating). This statistic is not only alarming due to the large amount of suicides, but because the great range means it’s extremely hard to determine the cause of the veteran’s deaths. As veterans return home, it is often hard for them to find a new job and reclaim there spot in the community, due to the constant fear and reminders of war.. The fact that often times veterans feel as if the only way to eliminate their pain is to

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Norman had felt as if he had no one to talk to or relate to because no one around him had experienced war like he had. He tried to keep jobs when he was home from war, but not one of them had lasted more than 3 weeks. Since he feels he is unable to speak to anyone about war, he writes a letter to O’Brien, telling his entire war story. He soon feels as if he cannot do anything without thinking about war and hangs himself in the locker room of his town’s YMCA.

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Combat is one of those incidents, where the best and the worst of people will be shown. The effects from combat could last minutes to a lifetime and will define people for the rest of their lives. To overcome the effects, people must have coping mechanisms. In the book, The Things They Carried, a platoon of soldiers is followed in their quest to survive the Vietnam War. The soldiers developed coping mechanisms to deal with stress so they can function normally and survive the war.

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Rat shot it in the nose. He bent forward and whispered something, as if talking to a pet, then he shot it in the throat” (49). Rat went absolutely ballistic and took his anger out on a baby animal. He handled his guilt with violence.

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Coping strategies are crucial to the success of the Vietnam War troops. In The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, O’Brien conveys the experiences of War World Two soldiers, and the way soldiers cope through shifts of tone, setting, and character development. The Things They Carried, is multiple short stories put into one book that follows a group of soldiers told from the perspective of the narrator, who is also a character in the book during the time of War World One. The book is structured to reveal what the soldiers carry not just physically but also mentally.

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Rat Kiley’s immaturity is made evident his choice of “military equipment”- comic books, brandy, and M&M’s - but his behavior as well. His treatment of the baby buffalo epitomizes his frank downfall. He did not aim to kill, just “to hurt” (Page 75). He felt a need to separate himself from the graveness of war, choosing the buffalo as his outlet for his own pain. His inability to deal with own his emotions made him headstrong and naive, wa becoming but a game.

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Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in The Things They Carried During the turbulent times of the Vietnam War, thousands of young men entered the warzone and came face-to-face with unimaginable scenes of death, destruction, and turmoil. While some perished in the dense Asian jungles, others returned to American soil and were forced to confront their lingering combat trauma. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried provides distinct instances of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and reveals the psychological trauma felt by soldiers in the Vietnam War. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD for short, is the most common mental illness affecting soldiers both on and off the battlefield.

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