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Why The Challenges At War In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

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Challenges at War Robert E. Lee once said, “What a cruel thing war is… to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors”. The novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien takes place in Vietnam. He and a handful of other men experience things only one can image and hope they will never have to experience again. They learn how death among them can greatly affect them, and many others. War is not an easy task to get through and these men all had different coping methods. O’Briens intended audience is people who have an interest in war, and uses mortality and death, along with morality to help the audience get a deeper understanding of what could possibly occur at war. First, O’Brien discusses how mortality and death greatly affected many of the men around him. In the chapter ”In the Field” Kiowa is gone and there is nothing they could do to save him. The …show more content…

These men befriend monks in need of help. After helping them they make the monks clean their weapons. “ setting up here. It's wrong. I don’t care what, it’s still a church” (O’Brien 116). Kiowa knows it is wrong to bring war into a place of peace. With this peace of mind, it shows how good of a person Kiowa is. It showed why people like him as a person. In a like manner, O’Brien discusses morality in the chapter “The Man I Killed.” In the chapter “The Man I Killed” O’Brien killed a man he felt should not have been killed. Kiowa helps O’Brien through it. “I'm serious. Nothing anybody could do. Come on, stop staring” (O’Brien 120). O’Brien feels extremely guilty for killing someone. He is not sure what to do or how to feel. O’Brien does not exactly say if he was the man who actually killed him, or if someone else did. He hints that if it was not him that killed the poor man. Death has a way of changing a

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