The Pain of War in “The Minefield” and “How to Tell a True War Story” The stories, “The Minefield” by Diane Thiel and “How to Tell a True War Story” by Tim O’Brien, have a similar theme that is horror in war. In the same way, the poem and the short story, it describes the loss of a significant other as the narrator is telling the story. As the reader, I got a view that this could be very devastating as in the story. “The Minefield” the author is telling the story about her father had mentioned her about a friend who died a horrific death during the war when both of his friend and him were young.…
The cries of war come in different shapes and sizes. While Anthony Swofford cried most of his tears through his memoir, others who served in the Marine Corps during his time had found other ways to cry. In the Swofford’s memoir, Jarhead, he illustrates how one of his former comrades at war had handled the aftermath of service in the Marines during the Gulf War. “I asked him if maybe he should talk to someone at the Veterans Administration hospital, and he declined, insisting that they could not tell him anything he didn’t already know. Before we hung up, he said, “We fired the same rifle. You have the same problems as me.”” While Swofford seemed to be in good functioning condition, his old comrade Fergus seemed to have been struggling psychologically with the aftermath effects of the war. Fergus’ psychological issues seemed to be his own cry into the world outside of the Marine Corps. Swofford and all of his crew mates experienced the horrors…
Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” and Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell A True War Story” shows it is hard for soldiers to find a job, spouse, or settle back home and that the soldiers must lie to receive attention and tell the reality of the war. Also, Hemingway and O’Brien show a physical disconnect and a mental disconnect in which both soldiers were struggling to face to get back into…
Soldiers looked for ways to communicate their experience to those who were not soldiers. O”Brien, Komunyakka, and Owen are soldiers who each wrote a text describing soldiers at war from their personal point of view. O”Brien writes to get others to understand the physical, mental, and emotional things soldiers carried during war. Komunyakka writes to get others to understand how the soldiers must face death and reality at the same time while also having emotions as any other human does. Owen writes and exhibits his frustration with the condition that the soldiers were in and the point of view of people who haven’t experienced war first hand. All three soldiers wrote to better communicate with the world the conditions and reality to those…
What is a true war story? Is it a collection of memories, pulled from the ragged and weary brain of a soldier, and stitched together to form literature? Is it a fictitious (albeit perfectly accurate) account of battle, formulated by a civilian English major for his dissertation? One might argue that a true war story cannot be defined, for it will never exist. A thorough and valid account of battle, sticking without fail to the truth of the story, will inevitably be changed by either the soldier’s aggrandizement, or the loss of memory needed to translate the brain’s images into words. This results in there being a very thin line between…
Tim O’Brien writes, “there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.” (71) Exaggeration brings feeling to a war story. The reader not only listens, the reader feels and understands the feeling the writer is giving off. A war story should make the reader feel what is read, not think what is read. Tim O’Brien says “It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.”(71) For a war story to be a true war story, the reader should be able to feel the story inside of them. The reader should react as if the experience the writer went through happened to…
A great novel about war is not one that explains detailed events of violence or gore, but, rather, one that extracts the raw emotions of all who were involved. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien achieves this perfect balance between truth, empathy, and fiction. American author, Elliot Ackerman, shares that different experiences or events can encapsulate “the war in miniature”. Composed of short stories, each chapter in The Things They Carried could be interpreted as an example of “the war in miniature”. However, the chapter that most eloquently encompasses “the war in miniature” is “How to Tell a True War Story” because it captures the sense of “overwhelming ambiguity” (78) of war, expresses how there is no moral to war, and highlights the importance of relationships made amidst war.…
A soldier’s suffering holds no refrain from anyone, no matter what title or identity they have. In both the worlds of soldiers in those in the poem entitled “losses” by Randall Jarrell and at Devon school in “A Separate Peace” by John Knowles, there are several relationships that they share. Both center around the lives of soldiers and soon to be soldiers during the cruel time of the second World War which was happening in Europe. Jarrell experiments with multiple identity in the combination of several speakers united in one, all wasted even before they could be conceded into the real experience of war. In the book World War II symbolizes many themes related to each other in the novel, from the arrival of adulthood to the triumph of the Evil…
“But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.” -Tim Obrien, Tim can never forgot the man he killed he constantly retells his traumatic event vivid dark bloody detail. Tim shows a connection to the man he killed. A moment he will forever carry with him...A war story is about re telling the past the heroic events the past the bravery the solders faced during there battles and tragic experiences that show maybe there was a reason we were there. Maybe we really did help them. Even through all the losses you know that you fellow solders did not die in vein the body you share with every one in your squad. Tim O’Brien shows this the way he felt when kert lemon died. Every one Tim saw died he gave them respect on could vividly describe what truly happened “Let the story tell itself.” Stories tell them selves you don’t listen to a story you relive the past. “By telling stories, you objectify your own experiences. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others.” in a story and in war there’s all ways some loose ends that have to be taken care…
Fatalities are part of every person’s life. To a normal citizen, death is often followed by sadness and grief. As portrayed in “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, a soldier has to deal with the situation much differently. Death is portrayed in a negative light due to the fact that soldiers are greatly fearful of it and that they are forced to be unaffected by death. In order to cope with all the deaths he witnessed, O’Brien uses the retelling of war stories to heal from these traumatic events.…
Many authors have written war stories and about the effects of war on a person. Two of these writers are Tim O'Brian and Ernest Hemingway. O'Brian wrote "How to Tell a True War Story"; and Hemingway wrote a short story called "Soldier's Home". Both of these stories illustrate to the reader just what war can do to an average person and what, during war, made the person change. The stories are alike in many respects due to the fact that both authors served time in the army; O'Brian in the Vietnam War and Hemingway in WWI. However, the stories do have differences due to the slightly different themes and also the different writing techniques of the authors.…
The video of School girl attacks identifies an attack on school girls in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Zahira, who is a 13-year-old, is interviewed by NBC told her story about the attack. Zahira, who always showed excitement about attending school, lost her joy after the attack on her and five other girls. The attack took place during the girls walk from school.…
With so much going on back in 1850’s, especially the biggest issue was slavery. We tend to only think that adults were only slaves but forgot that children who were African American were also slaves too that were being put to work just like their parents. Anthony S. Parent, Jr. and Susan Brown Wallace both teamed up to collaborate studying the issue of children and slavery which is the untold story of the children during the times on slavery and their knowledge of sex. After reading the studies of their work, it was very shocking and surprising that little attention was brought up among the children during the slavery time. It was devastating to hear such treatment happening to poor innocent children who were born into slavery. The purpose was to expose the truth about how much children as slaves knew about sex and things related to the issue. Which proved that children who grew up as slaves knew very little about the matter and never had a clue about things of that nature.…
Eg. The short story “Young Man in Vietnam” by Charles Coe paints a dark picture of an American soldier’s experience during the Vietnam War.…
In this research, the objective are to determine the effect of concentration of KOH to yield…