Colonel Magnus was more than aware that there were Special Operations teams watching his every move. He knew sending his own soldiers out to find them would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. He wished they had captured at least one; they might have been able to break him and find out where he was from. He was aware that the closest Special Operations units were the SEALs in Virginia and Special Forces at Fort Bragg; he wondered how they got them this far north.…
The popcorn is buttered, the soda is filled to the brim, and an elderly former drag queen settles in to watch a riot play out onscreen. Much to her dismay, none of what she remembers of that heated day in 1969 is reflected there. Director Roland Emmerich has manipulated history with his latest movie, Stonewall, released September 25th, 2015.…
The film follows the story of Sgt. Jimmy Takata who is seeing flashbacks (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) of his experiences in the war. Through his flashbacks we catch a glimpse of his participation the liberation of a French town where he met an orphaned little girl and in the rescue of the “Lost Battalion.” In the French town Jimmy suffers from a head wound caused by a bullet ricocheting off of his helmet. This causes him to be illegible to help in the rescue of the Texan Battalion, however, Jimmy and his friends get around this by sneaking out to the front lines where they join the savage attack on the Germans in an attempt to save their fellow Americans.…
The book opens with Campbell on his first day as a platoon leader. His group of men was small for a platoon at first, but Campbell soon got word that he and his platoon would be sent to Iraq in a matter of months. Due to this, tens of men were sent to him fresh out of school. The youthful Marines were newly-enlisted and inexperienced. Here, Campbell faced his first challenge: transforming these brand-new soldiers into an effective combat unit.…
The story is told by an omniscient narrator focusing mainly on the character First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross. Lieutenant Cross is in charge of a company of men who go on daily marches through Vietnam in search for the enemy, their sympathizers and supplies. He often daydreams of a college girl he is fond of back in New Jersey. Mitchell Sanders is the radio and telephone operator and known for being the ladies’ man. Kiowa is a Native American Baptist who carries an Illustrated New Testament with him. He also carries his grandfather’s old hunting hatchet given to him by his father and his grandmother’s distrust for the white man. Dan Jensen practices field hygiene by having with him a toothbrush, dental floss and bars of soap stolen from a hotel while on R&R. Henry Dobbins is a large man who carried extra rations and was excused from searching tunnels due to the size of his frame. He carries the M60, is especially fond of canned peaches, and wears his girlfriend's pantyhose around his neck as god luck. Rat Kiley is the medic, carrying a canvas satchel containing morphine, plasma, malaria pills and various medical supplies and comic books. Norman Bowker is a gentle guy, he keeps a diary with him and carries a thumb from a VC corpse that Mitchell Sanders had cut off and presented to him. Lee Strunk has a…
When America left Vietnam that South Vietnamese people were most likely feeling intimidated, scared, but at the same time relieved. In the “Doc-Lap at Last” section of the article, it states “ On April 30, 1975, columns of North Vietnamese soldiers entered Saigon, meeting little resistance for the demoralized South Vietnamese army.” The phrase, “columns of soldiers,”…
The Vietnam War was a place of death, destruction, and confusion. Not only was the war a failure, but many soldiers were forced to fight. This lead to many negative effects that I must bring to your attention in this paper. The negative effects on soldiers during and after the war were depression, regret, desensitization, insanity, and the loss of friends.…
In the Vietnam trilogy of films, Stone admits to having learnt something about the concepts of pain and suffering. Through the movies, he became in touch with his suffering on `The Platoon' as a soldier. Then, after the Vietnam experience, Stone could live through the experiences of Ron Kovic in a wheelchair and empathize with what his brother in arms went through. Finally, through Le Ly, he was able to empathize with the experience of a Vietnamese peasant girl among other innocent victims of the war. The trilogy of Vietnam films gives the director and the audience the wider picture and idea of the Vietnam War (Riordan, p. 324).…
It describes the combat in Vietnam, and ends with the return home of a soldier that appears to be suffering for the shellshock and exposure to the deadly chemical agent orange, which was sprayed over troops from aircrafts.…
The protagonist of the novel. He is a Vietnam veteran who has become a writer since returning home from the war. The stories of his platoon are told through his eyes and involve the tragedy, camaraderie, and ugliness of war.…
The author of The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien, incorporates various messages within his book. One of the most important messages within the text greatly deals with war and everything associated with it. As a veteran of the Vietnam War, O’Brien is exceedingly qualified to provide readers with an accurate depiction of what it feels like for a soldier to live in a constant state of war. The series of stories within The Things They Carried present us with the difficult choices forced upon those who have dealt with the conflicts of combat (Chen). O’Brien’s stories also show us that a war is never truly over; a great number of soldiers who survive a war must often face the damaging repercussions of warfare long after it has ended. Consequently, the message being presented in The Things They Carried by Tim O 'Brien is the notion that war has the power to transform people, altering and skewing their mental states, their principles, and their sense of morality by stripping human beings of their humanity, and instead replacing it with fear and trauma.…
In the 1950's, the United States began to send troops to Vietnam, during the following 25-year period, the ensuing war would create some of the strongest tensions in US history. Almost 3 million US men and women were sent thousands of miles to fight for what was a questionable cause. In total, it is estimated that over 2,5 million people on both sides were killed.…
Being a part of the American Dream, most people are disgusted by the use of hard drugs. But little do most Americans know that soldiers during the Vietnam War were corrupted by the conditions of the war and left with no choice but to use hard drugs such as heroin in order to cope with their pain. Looking through Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried the troops in his novel were guilty of using hard drugs in order to cope with the war. The Vietnam war was a highly disputed war in the United States many Americans were against the fact that we were participating in this war in the first place. It infuriated the American population because their men were going to be stripped from them in order to fight in a War, they had no business being in. At first it was thought that drug use in Vietnam derived from the inability to withstand the temptation of an easily accessible drug. But when analyzing the behaviors and actions…
Lieutenant Jimmy Cross is a young man who joins the war because its what everyone else is doing. He is the leader of his group and takes responsibility for all of their lives. In the beginning he is easily distracted by the thought of a girl in his college named Martha but when these thoughts cost the life of a solider named Ted Lavender he changes completely. He burns all memories of Martha to give his complete attention to his men and the war.…
Mitchell Sanders - Sanders is one of the most likeable soldiers in the platoon, and the one who makes the greatest impression on the narrator. Sanders is kind, devoted to his fellow soldiers, and possesses a keen sense of justice. He makes his impression on O'Brien by serving as the platoon's chief storyteller and story critic. As such, Sanders is a kind of father figure in the book, guiding the narrator towards his own revelations about memory and writing.…