Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien Essay

In “Saigon Is Gone”, the main character, Ha, uses words that help us understand the havoc that was caused on the day North Vietnam emerged victorious. Ha and her family are fleeing South Vietnam after the Communists have won the Vietnamese War. They have boarded a navy ship taking a river passage out to sea, but are still not safe. While on the boat, Ha tells us, “The commander has ordered everyone below deck even though he has chosen a safe river route” (Lai 67). Because of the chaotic life and death situation Ha and her family are in, the commander has not asked, but ordered and forced everyone to head below deck. Furthermore, Ha remarks, “...The Communists are dropping all the bombs they have left” (Lai 67). The word dropping tells us that the North Vietnamese have no specific target and instead are hoping to kill as many departing Vietnamese as possible before they are out of reach. This only adds to the mess and confusion. Ha’s description of the fall of Saigon displays the true panic of the Vietnamese as they tried to escape.

     Through meeting Li Van Hgoc the reader learns the “true enemy” in the novel. According to Li Van Hgoc, “The land is your true enemy.” He mentions that the soldier is the representative of the land and the land is also fighting a battle. Through listening to Li Van Hgoc at the “tea party” the platoon realizes the land actually is the enemy and notices the natural defenses: the tunnels, dangerous trails, the land mines, the hedges and paddies, and the jungle itself. The platoon thought that their enemy were the Vietcong, but they began to come to the realization that the Vietcong used the land; what they were protecting, why they were fighting, how they were fighting, to destroy foreign troops sent there. Li Van Hgoc telling the platoon of “Xa,” meaning community, soil, home, that “a man’s spirit is in the land, where his ancestors rest and where the rice grows,” helped show that the land was the “true enemy.”

The Time in Between by David Bergen tries to show a different kind of cultural understand than is usually shown within the Vietnam war narrative. Bergen tries to highlight the cultural similarities instead of the cultural differences, where there is a sense of cultural appreciation. During the Vietnam war there has often been a stigmatization towards the Vietnamese that associates them as the enemy, they are seen as the opposing other. There is often an Eurocentric view of the Vietnam war that tells the story of the white male American solider and very rarely has another perspective been represented through media and literature. The attempt to acknowledge the war from the other perspective through the Vietnamese solider is used in The Time in Between. The trauma that is often associated with the Vietnam war is seen through the lens of the white male solider, often forgetting the the symptoms of trauma were experienced by both sides. The trauma from the war becomes a bridge between the two cultures and subverts the stereotypes of the Vietnamese as being the cultural “others”.

The Viet Nam War has been the most reviled conflict in United States history for many reasons, but it has produced some great literature. For some reason the emotion and depredation of war kindle in some people the ability to express themselves in a way that they may not have been able to do otherwise. Movies of the time period are great, but they are not able to elicit, seeing the extremely limited time crunch, the same images and charge that a well-written book can. In writing of this war, Tim O'Brien put himself and his memories in the forefront of the experiences his characters go through, and his writing is better for it. He produced a great work of art not only because he experienced the war first hand, but because he is able to convey the lives around him in such vivid detail. He writes a group of fictional works that have a great deal of truth mixed in with them. This style of writing and certain aspects of the book are the topics of this reflective paper.

Thousands of soldiers and other military assets were moved to the isolated base of Khe Sanh, away from arguably more useful bases throughout the rest of the country. When viewed on its own, the strategic military advantages of a victory at Khe Sanh were relatively inconsequential. “Khe Sanh had little impact on the outcome of the Vietnam War. Seen in this context, and given the intentions of the participants at the beginning, Khe Sanh was an overall failure for both sides” (“The Battle of Khe Sanh”). The true significance of the battle at Khe Sanh is the fact that it laid the groundwork for the Tet Offensive, and thus for the psychological turning point of the war.

There were several events during the Vietnam War that can be considered “turning points”, which can be described as the occurrence of an event that changed the course of history. One such event was the Buddhist crisis in 1963. The Buddhists of South Vietnam had experienced decades of religious persecution during French colonialism that continued with the Catholic government, which was backed by the United States (Toong, 2008). The demonstrations, protests and self-immolations that followed as a result of this religious persecution and the media coverage it generated encouraged the Kennedy administration to back a coup d’état against Ngo

This novel features fifteen short stories each about Vietnamese immigrants living in the United States. Their stories are experiences of the war, the effects it had on them and their families, or their lives after moving to a new country. As a reader of Louisiana literature, at first glance, this book did not seem to identify with this subset of literature. Butler surprises his readers with these different short stories bout the Vietnamese people. The blend of Vietnamese folklore and traditional American realities, create this overlapping. Not only does he show another voice in Louisiana literature, but one that would not normally be considered a voice to be heard. Tobey C. Herzog asked Butler, “What is your chief asset as a writer?” Butler’s

Ultimately, this novel is not about Vietnam--in fact, it is not about war at all. It is about the narrator 's attempt to find a place where the erosion of time will have no effect. By working through the "threads" of this novel, O 'Brien 's intentions become obvious: He is fighting to preserve the physical against deterioration, and by extension, to preserve life by immortalizing it in fiction. He is not writing as a result of neurosis or as a form of therapy; he does this since

   Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War is a contrapuntal reading to American literature on the Vietnam War. But rather than stand in stark contrast to Tim O' Brien's The Things They Carried, The Sorrow of War is strangely similar, yet different at the same time. From a post-colonialist standpoint, one must take in account both works to get an accurate image of the war. The Sorrow of War is an excellent counterpoint because it is truthful. Tim O' Brien writes: ". . . you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil." (O' Brien, 42) Bao Ninh succeeds in this respect. And it was for this reason that the Vietnamese

Berlin talks as if death and destruction is just another thing on a long list of things that need to be done. Killing is the business of Paul Berlin and his outfit of soldier s in Vietnam. In the

However, students are taught about Cambodia in class, its different reading the words of a survivor who lost everything. Him’s family began their journey in the middle of the madness, bombing flooded the skies at night and she wondered what would come of her once peaceful life. After bombing became more than a bad dream, the Vietnamese began flooding Cambodia in hopes of surviving, “Even though I am only nine, my mind constantly chants the Buddhist wish, something only adults do. But I've watched, listened to them, and learned…I chant the wish again and again: ‘If the enemy comes before you, make it pass over. If it comes behind, make it vanish’"

The history of recent years in the Indochina conflict has been an eventful one. It will exhibit to the eyes of the future student some of the most remarkable instances of a ruthlessness and indifference to common humanity. Moreover, it will, I believe, demonstrate that North Vietnam has, for a long time, steadily pursued a communist regime which was deliberately designed to produce a subjugation of other countries by the threat of communism.

Important Aspects in the Novel In the Lake of The Woods and The Vietnam in Me by Tim O’Brien

Bao Ninh, a Vietnamese novelist is known as a legend for serving in the Vietnam War, and choosing to write his first novel on what he experienced. This novel was wrote in 1990 which tells a story of a soldier’s involvement in the Vietnam War. The main reason this novel was written is to educate readers on what it was like in the Vietnam War. This novel touched many individuals hearts and provided much needed information on what happened in the Vietnam War. Many people felt as if it was too descriptive. While others enjoyed how realistic it is.This novel was the first to really illustrate what went on in the Vietnam War. Throughout the novel The Sorrow Of War, Bao references many horrific experiences. He does this through numerous amounts of literary devices. The use of figurative language used in this novel sustains the fact that the war was eerie.

On the morning of June 11th 1963, in the Vietnamese town of Saigon, a Buddhist monk by the name of Thich Quang Duc engaged himself in one of the most famous cases of self immolation in modern history. Photographer Malcolm Browne captured Duc’s final moments in his iconic photo that earned him a Pulitzer prize as the World Press Photo of the Year in 1963, and forever changed the way the American public viewed the escalating crisis between the Vietnamese communists and the Buddhist monks (Browne 179). Former President Kennedy said, regarding this photograph, that “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one” (Browne 175). This quote certainly sums up the impact of Duc’s final push against the oppressive Vietnamese regime, and explains why this photograph is still praised today.