O’Brien combines the techniques of anaphora, metaphor, and negative word connotation to do so. The combination of these three rhetorical techniques evokes a fearful mood for the reader, but also grabs his attention. The metaphors with the negative word connotation create detailed imagery of what O’Brien is discussing. All of these techniques together make the excerpt more intense, passionate, and consequential. Ultimately, they emphasize the overall main point of the excerpt- the horror of the Vietnam…
In Going After Cacciato, Tim O’Brien uniquely combines the gritty reality of combat with a dreamlike, or surrealistic, state. Surrealism is a mean of uniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy joins in the everyday rational world. From the beginning of the novel, the surrealistic experiences obviously occurred, but as the story continued, the story went passed surrealism and almost became delusional. The main protagonist, Paul Berlin, tells of a soldier’s journey to escape to Paris and the Third Squad’s mission to capture him. After analyzing O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato the use of surrealism depicts Paul Berlin’s need to escape from the Vietnam War.…
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…
“I am left with basically nothing. Too trapped in a war to be at peace, to damaged to be at war.” Army veteran Daniel Somers, talks about how when one is forced into war, they lose everything, including their mind, and are unable to get the peace they desire. This relates to the topic because the soldiers outlined in Tim O’Brien’s book, The Things They Carried, have gone through the feeling of being caught in a war while at the same time, dealing with psychological issues. This paper will go into detail about the soldiers struggle to retain their humanity and how specific traumatic events lead to the soldiers undoing. Events in the Vietnam War caused the soldiers immense psychological problems and forced them to give up their pre-war life.…
Tim O’Brien an author and veteran thinking about Vietnam. As Tim O’Brien recollects and presents a story about animating the dead — the scene with the toast to the dead Vietnamese — another story within that story unfolds, O'Brien recollecting the death of his childhood friend, Linda. After O’Brien’s Platoon took sniper fire from a little village, Lt. Jimmy Cross got on the radio and ordered an airstrike. “When it ended, we formed into a loose line and swept through the village. It was all wreckage. I remember the smell of burnt straw; I remember broken fences and torn up trees and heaps of stone and brick and pottery. The place was deserted- no people, no animals- and the only confirmed kill was an old man who lay face-up near a pigpen at the center of the village” (p.225-226). O’Brien’s use of concrete diction helps the reader understand the innocence of the poor old man that had nothing to do with the war but was just carrying on his day like the usual and all of a sudden these soldiers showed up and decided his death with an air strike. As the soldiers swept through the village “They proposed toasts. They lifted their canteens and drank to the old man’s family and ancestors, his many grandchildren, his newfound life after death. It was more than mockery. There was a formality to it, like a funeral without the sadness.” (p.227). As the old man sat helplessly against the fence the soldiers continues to harass the innocent old man without any emotions due to the fact that he is dead. As dusk came closer Kiowa talked to O’Brien about what the soldiers had done was wrong. “ You did a good thing today, That shaking hands crap, it isn’t decent.” (p.227) O’Brien being the new and innocent soldier of his platoon was pressured to do something he did not want to but he chose not to because of his past experience with someone dear to him.…
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…
Imagine facing the horrors of a war at the young age of 19. In the real world as well as fictional novels, the Vietnam War was considered to be a war unlike any other. Many soldiers faced untold brutal challenges, and often wondered who the enemy really was. In many depicted pieces of literature such as Fallen Angels the fictional stories cannot begin to compare to the real traumatic ones. Research has shown that the traumatic circumstances have caused soldiers mental stress. Research shows the brutality that the soldiers of the Vietnam War went through, the novel Fallen Angels and the video series “Dear America: Letters Home” are very similar in this depiction, but also have slight differences.…
The author, Tim O’Brien, is deployed into the Vietnam war when he is a young man. Throughout the novel, the effects of the war on him are shown and they are profound, he has seen death and suffering; he has he seen death but he has also been the cause of it. He describes everything in the war and the effect that it had on him personally and how it continues to affect him in the present. In the beginning of the novel, O’Brien describes everything the other soldiers carry with them. This is his way of showing that the war is personal to everyone. Based on what each of the soldiers carry with them, he is able to understand their fears and what is important to them. This concept is demonstrated when O’Brien says, “It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.” This quote exemplifies the impacts of war on a person’s individualism by saying that during strife, people only did what they thought they had to in order to remain alive. Their own thoughts and ideas mattered less than surviving. Throughout the novel, especially when the author speaks of the present day, it is clear that he is still affected by what he experienced Vietnam War. He is continually influenced by the death and horror that he experienced. His own personal trauma, including when he was shot, impacts his present life as a veteran. The effects of the war on him…
Tim O’Brien’s, The Things They Carried, contained different memoirs that truly bring the actions of war to life for the reader. Obrien’s book expresses the real feelings a solider faces while getting ready to go into war, in war, and post war. Through his vivid descriptions the reader is able to emphasize with the emotional burdens and stresses solders must go through while on duty. We are able to observe the different coping mechanisms solders must endure, including, cutting them selves off from reality and preoccupying their mind with other, sometimes meaningless, thoughts .The chapter that had the largest impact on myself was “Night Life.” For me this passage truly depicted not just the physical, but mental battle soldiers must go through; and the extreme measures taken to relive themselves from the intensity of battle.…
The nature of Vietnam, these chapters of the tell you how bad it is in Vietnam I could just tell how awful it was just by Tim describing the things they had to do and what they did just to try to stay sane. Most of these war veterans came home with PTSD and it has messed them up since. The first story tries to tell you what they been through the things they did. Just think of your best friend dying in front of your eyes and you couldn’t do anything to stop it. That’s how the war was you friend just slowly dying and you can’t stop it.” Curt lemon stepped from the shade to a bright…
When one thinks of war, the general thought is that it inspires acts of patriotism and heroism. No one really looks deeper into the topic to find that along with patriotism and heroism there are often feelings of shame and loneliness. In The Things They Carried it is clear that most of the soldiers in the war do not come back with a sense of pride or honor. Most come back wishing they had never gone at all. Tim O'Brien reveals that because Vietnam precipitated such traumatic experiences, his storytelling is a great way to cope with his shame and loneliness, emphasizing that the war experience is not one of patriotism and heroism, but one of loneliness and guilt.…
“It was no decision, no chain of ideas or reasons, that steered me into the war. It was an intellectual and physical stand-off, and I did not have the energy to see it to an end”(O’Brien 22). This nearly sums up Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. In O’Brien’s autobiographical novel of his grueling tour and duty during the Vietnam War, we constantly see him struggle with his moral and ethical beliefs while participating in a war he believes is unjust, clearly becoming the main theme of this work, along with courage and the meaning of it to Tim.…
In "How to Tell a True War Story" O'Brien explores the relationship between the events during a war and the art of telling those events. O'Brien doesn't come to a conclusion on what is a true war story. He writes that one can't generalize the story as well. According to O'Brien, war can be anything from love and beauty to the most horrid thing ever experienced. The story doesn't even have to have a meaning. Evidence of both descriptions of war leading to death and destruction being used is how O'Brien tells of Curt Lemons death. He tells it as a love story with the scenery being described as being beautiful. In addition to O'Brien referencing it to a love story he also includes the gruesome details of how Curt Lemon died. These stories not only shape the listeners perception and attitude of the war, but it also affects the one telling the story. Some stories are true and others are rather embellished. The storyteller, speaking from the point of being in the war, has usually been through the most traumatic events ever in their life. Does the storyteller even know the truths of the stories? Having to deal with such things, more times than often, the soldiers have emotionally died and their personal self has been destroyed.…
Death is something that is inevitable, It's not something humans and life in general can't run away from. It is especially something soldiers cannot walk away from. In “The Things They Carried”, Tim O’Brien’s characters suffer this reality time and time again in the Vietnam War. A war that costed the life of thousands of American servicemen. Men who suffered horrific conditions and watched their close friends die in devastating combat and treacherous terrain. It could be easy to call the men who fought in The Vietnam War the most mentally and physically damaged combat veterans in United States history. O’Brien captures this in “The Things They Carried”, a book that truly shows death and morality to be its theme.…
For some soldiers the pebble that keeps them on earth is a photograph of a loved one or many other light objects, but for theses soldiers in Vietnam from the book what keeps them alive and wanting to keep fighting every day is the memories that is the one thing they all carried in “The Things They Carried”. Of Course like in every group there are rivalries within members and these Vietnam soldiers were just like a group of children playing around in a field. These soldiers are just becoming adults between the ages of eighteen to twenty as O’Brien implies they are just kids with dreams that have no idea how to fight or why the war is even happening. Curt Lemon's death was ironic with the events that happened in “the dentist” because the previous chapter identifies Curt Lemon's relationship with a soldier Rat Kiley, the first aid responder of the platoon, as them being inseparable companions, he describes them as “best friends” but that was before Lemon died and where was this so called “best friend” when he had to face his greatest…