Halberstam's Background Analysis

For example, in “A Time to Say No”, Michael Ferber is able to express why many Americans choose to defy the draft (197-199). However, while these individuals have their ethical reasons for not joining the army, they are unable to give eye-witness accounts to the atrocities preventing them from going. When Herr tells fellow journalist Sean Flynn “about the colonel who had threatened to court-martial a spec 4 for refusing to cut out the heart of a dead Viet Cong and feed it to a dog”, readers have a greater idea of the sacrifices that soldiers must make while on tour and why people would avoid the draft (204). While there were many other correspondents also covering from the ground in Vietnam, Herr’s tale is different because it becomes in the form of memoirs, not as a news report or magazine article covering factual information surrounding the war. Herr is not only able to cover the war from the journalistic standpoint, but is also able to add color and a behind-the-scenes view to his commentary. For instance, Herr describes Colonel David Lownds by saying, “His professed ignorance of Dien Bien Phu drove correspondents crazy, but it was a dodge. Lownds knew very well about Dien Bien Phu and what happened there, knew more about it than most of the interviewers” (144). With members of the military actively trying to control media perception, it becomes easy to see how the war quickly became distorted in the eyes of the American public. Through Herr’s unique insight, Dispatches ultimately becomes an important tool in understanding the realities of the Vietnam

Sampson, George, and Rameck were three kids from the ghetto of Newark, New Jersey. They came from low-income families, and grew up without father figures. All three of them always did well in school, but others around them made a lot of bad choices. This caused many events that them caused them to go to jail. When they met each other in University High School, the three doctors decided to promise to each other that they would all go to college and become doctors. After they made the pact, there were a few problems, but these incidents never stopped them from pursuing their dream of becoming doctors. Today, Dr. Hunt is a Board certified internist at University Medical Center at Princeton

child his parents decided to send him to New York so he could fulfill a more prestigious education. He had also

When drafted into the military, O’Brien had “earned his BA in Political Science from Macalester College, where he was student body president, in 1968. Upon completing his tour of duty, O'Brien went on to graduate school at Harvard University and received an internship at the Washington Post.”(1) O’Brien later went on to creating a writing career for

Tim O'Brien originally struggled to restore the certainty of his safety by attempting to cross the border in order to protect himself from participating in the war,but he chose . An example of his struggles

In the text’s earliest stages, O’Brien feebly muses on the ideas formed from both his pre- and post-college life, demonstrating a socially unacceptable unsureness brought forth from the desire to conform to both ideologies, which consumes him until he reflects on it in the 1980s. Soon after the brief description of O’Brien’s ideas of moral behavior and courage unfold, O’Brien’s novel jumps from his small-town American life to a place where O’Brien first began to develop ideas separate from his parents’ ridged ideals: college. Falling alongside many other students in the ‘60s, O’Brien is exposed to the idea of the war being unfounded and begins to tentatively form his ideas, taking a “stand against the war”. However, he does “nothing radical…just ringing a few doorbells for Gene McCarthy” (O’Brien 173). While aligning with the principles associated with the movement in a tentative manner, O’Brien makes the suggestion that these ideas were a governing principle when dealing with the war’s justification. However, he then echoes the other side’s rhetoric, stating he “could not claim to be opposed to war as a matter of general principle” especially when it was needed to stop a true evil, for then he “would’ve willingly marched off to battle” (O’Brien 175). Through the inclusion of these two contrasting ideas side by side in the novel, one can gather O’Brien seeks

Amongst the plethora of great minds and influences that powered the 19th Century, such as business moogle J.D. Rockefeller and revolutionary industrialist Andrew Carnegie, only a select few can compare to the enormous legacy left behind by the charismatic and philanthropic Dr. Russell Herman Conwell. Considered as one of the most brilliant thinkers and passionate orators of his time; Russell Conwell became quite an admirable man because of his modest beginnings as a farmer in Massachusetts, who then transcended himself into the foremost educational entrepreneur of the Gilded Age. The documents and sources provided by Temple University’s Library to preserve Russell Conwell’s history are sufficient enough to bestow insight in regard to this great man’s life, nonetheless, many of the facts relative to Conwell’s personal life and military service are still shrouded in mystery despite the collection offered by the exhibit.

Clancy contrived a glorious amount of anecdotes to share with Congress back in 1924. As Clancy explains, “I learned more of the spirit of American history at my mother’s knee than I ever learned in my four years of high school study of American history and in my five and a half years of study at the great University of Michigan” (Clancy, 3). Clancy presented this personal experience to explain the “un-Americanism” of Americans with little to no foreign descent. He continuously points out the Americanism of Americans of foreign descent. According to statistics, Clancy lists percentages of Italian-Americans affected by war, showing that they, too, are

The Capraras were an Italian family, friends of the Marks’s. Mr. and Mrs. Caprara had each lost a brother in World War II and like so many others, they were particularly sensitive about the war. The American people did not really understand why their sons were forced to fight in a war which was not their own and which they were not winning conclusively, to “fight against Communism”, when it was obvious that in the end they would have to withdraw, which in fact occurred years later, during the government of President Nixon. Even though the war acted as a bond between generations—as I was told by Mr. Caprara, who had been the driver of a general in wartime, and when peace came had given the general a job in his thriving business—American society

The decision to go to war is not a decision that is taken lightly. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien faces cultural, social and political push factors that end up leading him to forgo his plan to dodge the draft, and to report as instructed, a mere yards away from his destination of Canada. In Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Rocky and Tayo, two young Native American men, experience cultural, social and political pull factors that draw them into the Army, fighting the Second World War for a country that considers them less than human. The stories of these characters are not unique, they are stories that are representative of the stories of young American men at the time, that faced cultural, social, and political push and pull factors during both conflicts. The purpose of this inquiry essay is to determine what those push and pull factors were, and why they lead these men to willingly engage in two of the most destructive conflicts in human history.

Tim O’Brien spoke to the Lovett Upper School in a very grim and upfront manner, careful to not “sugarcoat” any of the harsh realities from the War, which veterans have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. In a sense, O’Brien’s rash visualization of his brutal war stories was a necessary evil in explaining the war to a group of uninformed individuals. He spoke to show the confusion of the war, sharing many stories of despair and triumph in the jungles and fields of Vietnam. In many ways, the student body represents what was at the time of the war the American civilian population. While draftees were thrown into battle, the people in the United States were oblivious to the treacherous nature of combat. There seemingly was no preparation for a

George Browne was one of the soldiers who crossed the Atlantic and was proud to be one of the first to serve in France. In the course book on page 712, it mentions that when Browne returned home, he married Martha and they were eager to get on with there lives the like the rest of the country. I did some research and found that there is a collection of Browne’s letters titled, “An American Soldier in World War”. In his letters he describes his experiences during the war. There were several factors that led to the conservative reaction in American politics after World War I. When three million soldiers returned home, unemployment soared and inflation went sky-high leading to labor strikes. Labor strike was one of the factors that led

In Soldier’s Home, Ernest Hemingway depicts Harold Krebs return home from World War I and the problems he faces when dealing with his homecoming and transition back towards a normal life. After the fighting overseas commenced, it took Krebs a year to finally leave Europe and return to his family in Oklahoma. Once home, he found it hard to talk about all he had seen in his tour of duty overseas, which should be attributed to the fact that he saw action in some of the bloodiest, most crucial battles towards the culmination of the war. Therefore, Krebs difficulty in acknowledging his past is because he was indeed a “good soldier” (139), whose efforts in order to survive “The Great War,” were not

How they combined their own unique interests with their desire to serve. I knew that although interesting, becoming a doctor is a long and hard road. One that requires serious personal investigation and hardened commitment.

Secondly the article highlights on Alpert's complex involvement in particular tensions that existed in the mid-century US