O Brien Rhetorical Analysis

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
The weights are a critical part to the text to help compare physical, emotional and mental weight. O”Brien starts off by describing something as small as a letter from a women name Martha in which First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried. O”Brien uses this letter as a way to give others a visual thought of how something so light can be heavy. He continued to say that soldiers carried things that were determined by necessity which weighted between fifteen and twenty pounds. The transition from light weight to a heavier weight allows readers to project an image that will enable them to compare the different weights. Although the soldiers carried guns and explosives the weight of those things didn’t amount to the mental weight of the things carried in their mind. Among the things the men carried, they also carried “all the emotional baggage of men who might die.”(O”Brien 348) The soldiers had to carry emotions and fear of the thought that other soldiers would die; this weighed on the soldiers mentally. While completing a mission Lieutenant Jimmy mind was clogged with thoughts of Martha as he “gazed at the tunnel,” but his mind wasn’t there and Ted Lavender was killed. While Lieutenant Jimmy was fighting a war physically, he also was fighting a war mentally trying to erase the thoughts of Martha. O”brien states “Lieutenant burned the photos of Martha and the letters she sent, although he felt that he couldn’t burn the blame.” O”Brein wants readers to grasp what emotional weight feels