My Life As A Foreign Country Analysis

The author, Tim O'Brien, is writing about an experience of a tour in the Vietnam conflict. This short story deals with inner conflicts of some individual soldiers and how they chose to deal with the realities of the Vietnam conflict, each in their own individual way as men, as soldiers.

Historical- This story was written in the 1970’s about war, the Vietnam War to be more specific. The reason I know it was that war is because the author himself fought in the Vietnam War. In 1968, after graduating from college, O’Brien gets a paper saying he’s being drafted. He was going to flee to the boarder of Canada but he went to war. Coming back after the war he attended Harvard and became an Award winning novelist. The text is saying briefly it was a hard period in time. There were parts where he talks about the character Paul and he says “He was pretending he was a boy again”, I’m guessing deep down he didn’t want to be there fighting.

Tim O’Brien wrote a memoir, in which he wrote about his life as a Vietnam soldier, called If I Die in a Combat Zone. Raised in Worthington, Minnesota, Tim O’Brien was influenced by wars while growing up (particularly the Korean War). Soon landing in the training facility at Fort Lewis in Washington, O’Brien’s life was about to change. In If I Die in a Combat Zone, author Tim O'Brien argued that the Vietnam War was full of courage through how the soldiers chose to stay and battle for their nation, his depictions of Plato, and through O’Brien’s experiences of his fellow soldier’s deaths.

In his novel, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Tim O’Brien attempts to discover an appropriate definition of courage by reflecting upon his comrades, philosophers, and himself. Throughout the novel, O’Brien grapples with whether to be courageous by staying and fighting even though he is fighting a war in which he deems as wrongly conceived and poorly justified, or be courageous by standing for what he believes is ethical but become a deserter. Through the influence of others and self-contemplation of the definition of courage, O’Brien exemplifies the extremity in which America viewed courage as a necessary characteristic for an American soldier to possess during the Vietnam War.

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.

Tim O'Brien is confused about the Vietnam War. He is getting drafted into it, but is also protesting it. He gets to boot camp and finds it very difficult to know that he is going off to a country far away from home and fighting a war that he didn't believe was morally right. Before O'Brien gets to Vietnam he visits a military Chaplin about his problem with the war. "O'Brien I am really surprised to hear this. You're a good kid but you are betraying you country when you say these things"(60). This says a lot about O'Brien's views on the Vietnam War. In the reading of the book, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Tim O'Brien explains his struggles in boot camp

As many have noted, O'Brien ingeniously facilitates a mood of incongruity, or disconnection, between fiction and fact in The Things They Carried through sheer structure. By blurring lines between fantasy and reality, THINGS truly becomes a contradiction of itself. As Catherine Calloway notes, one of the ways in which O'Brien achieves this blurring of lines, is to model the narrator of THINGS after himself, a drafted Vietnam war veteran, a Harvard graduate, and a writer with the same name of Tim O'Brien (para. 3). O'Brien is aware that the practiced reader knows not to confuse the narrator with the author, and yet the reader is encouraged to do just that. The purpose, of course, is to keep the reader as unbalanced, as unsure, of what we are told to be truths, as is the Vietnam soldier.

In his fictional war novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien provides several vignettes of war experiences in different perspectives and mashes them together; thus, creating a true war story. O’Brien who has a scholarship for grad studies at Harvard is drafted to the Vietnam War. Although he has no choice but to join the war, he thinks of running away; however, he eventually joins the war because he was too embarrassed not to. Specifically in this excerpt, O’Brien employs repetition, imagery, and fantastic details to convey his guilt after killing a Vietnamese man in the war.

"It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood- you give it together, you take it together." Serving in the Vietnam war was never easy for Tim O 'Brien, he had some very interesting things that happened to him.

Tim O’Brien is similar to the character ‘Tim” in the story. Both characters lived in insulated communities located in several states growing up. Tim O’Brien graduated from Macalester College before being drafted into the military during 1968. O’Brien was known to be against the war and started writing intensely after learning he was drafted. After entering the war he moved from solider to sergeant and overall took no serious injury. O’Brien went on to study at Harvard and work for The Washington Post. O’Brien wrote about the war and was published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Esquire, and Playboy. O’Brien went through many mental and emotional struggles but worked through them by writings through his

Award-winning author Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried, July, July) has incorporated his experience in Vietnam into several of his novels and short stories. Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1968, he served in the 23rd Infantry Division, also known as the Americal Division. It was a platoon from this group that had been responsible for the massacre at My Lai nearly a year before O'Brian's arrival in the same

"It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood- you give it together, you take it together." Serving in the Vietnam war was never easy for Tim O 'Brien, he had some very interesting things that happened to him.

Tim O’Brien wrote “The Things They Carried” a collection of short stories made into a book about a platoon of American soldiers in the Vietnam War. His first original work was published in 1973. “His war experience inspired his first publication, titled If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. His memoir incandescently reflects depression and misery wreaked on soldiers by Vietnam War. In fact his literary work, The Things They Carried (1990), is a blend of memoir and fictional stories” (O’Brien Famous Authors). His writing are a work of art and once he wrote one he knew many more were to come. While Tim O’Brien faces the accounts of his past in war he

“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.” Tim O’Brien, an author, is a man of many words. Many of his words come from the part of him that were forever changed and affected by his drafting in the Vietnam War. War’s impact spreads much farther than country borders with both a physical and metaphorical influence, the one on Tim O’Brien happened to flow into the form of words onto pages into the hands of readers. Langston Hughes, another man with another story yet the same culprit responsible for his words. Poem or novel, both men had stories to tell and messages to convey which they did so successfully. Tim O'Brien's opinion on the war in his inexperienced youth

“If I Die in a Combat Zone”, written by Tim O'Brien, is a thought-provoking story told from the first-person point of view of a reluctant soldier for the United States during the brink of the infamous Vietnam War. The readers are given a glimpse of just how chaotic the front lines of the battles actually were, and even the experiences before. The main character is actually the author himself, and is referred to as Private O'Brien, but we do not seem to know very much about him except his previous life before the war. The characters we do get a glimpse at are the men in the main character's company, who are extremely vocal and have a colorful personalities that show through the language used in the book, which is raw and uncensored. I am told