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The Things They Carried: Poem Analysis

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The Things They Carried: Poem Analysis
Personal Response

“If you travel with fraud, you reach your destination, but are unable to return” (Ghanaian proverb). What are the assumptions underlying this quote? How possible is it to undo the bad we do?

This proverb describes one of the significant themes in The Things They Carried. It describes the mental and emotional burden the soldiers are forced to carry throughout their lives as a result of the atrocities they committed during the Vietnamese War. This proverb is assuming that the soldiers had in fact committed crimes against their moral code. However, if these soldiers were able to justify these crimes by their own standard of morality, then they would be able to move on. Another evident assumption is that the soldiers

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