Personal Narrative: Therill As A Weapon Of War

Within the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story,” O’Brien writes about a story that Mitchell Sanders recounts to be true. The surrealist part is when Sanders talks about how they heard noises within the forests of Nam. Sanders says, “...but after a while they start hearing -you won’t believe this- they hear chamber music… Then after a while they hear gook opera and a glee club…” (Pg. 71). When he says this he is really adding details to pad the story up. Like when Sanders say, “The whole country. Vietnam. The place talks. It talks. Understand? Nam - it truly talks.” (Pg. 71). He means to say that he added those things that they heard because there were sounds they heard that couldn’t be explained. Later on he says that those things they heard

     According to the author Tim O’Brien, people tend to readily accept the ‘facts’ presented of what happened during a war. People do not consider the existence of fallacies regarding the actual stories of what happens in wars, few consider that the ‘facts’ of an incident often change through people’s words. The film ‘Saving the Private Ryan’ by Steven Spielberg features both facts and seemingness part of the war story. Since it is so difficult to fully describe a war using human language, Spielberg ended up revising his stories to make sense out of it. Spielberg included parts that did not occur or exclude parts that did occur in order to make their stories seem more credible. According

The short story that will be discussed, evaluated, and analyzed in this paper is a very emotionally and morally challenging short story to read. Michael Meyer, author of the college text The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature, states that the author of How to Tell a True War Story, Tim O’Brien, “was drafted into the Vietnam War and received a Purple Heart” (472). His experiences from the Vietnam War have stayed with him, and he writes about them in this short story. The purpose of this literary analysis is to critically analyze this short story by explaining O’Brien’s writing techniques, by discussing his intended message and how it is displayed, by providing my own reaction,

After the war was over the family left the internment camp and came home and everything changed. “When we came back after the war it was fall and the house was still ours. The trees on the streets were taller than we remembered, and the cars more run down, and the rosebush our mother had once planted alongside the narrow gravel path they led up to the front steps of our house was no longer there” (Otsuka 106). This describes how during the years they were gone the entire street changed. When the family entered the house it smelled really bad. “We did not care. The paint was peeling away from the walls and the window frames were black with rot. Shreds of lace curtain dangled in front of the soot-covered panes and the floor was littered with

Whether it be the sea or land, nearly every expanse of the world is dominated by humanity, but there exists one stretch that only dreams can reach in full: the sky. Greek mythology expresses this idea of its unattainable power as home of the gods and realm of the King of the Gods Zeus, but there is one example that solidifies it as the one unreachable territory. That example is Ovid’s story of mortal Daedalus and Icarus, father and son, who with their tinkered wax wings made their attempt at escape from their exile through flight, only for one to succeed and the other to fall in a reckless soar to the searing sun. Naturally, with the universal dream to fly and the tragedy within it, the tale resonates deeply with everyone who reads it, and even today it is clear how impactful the story is to so many with the dozens of poems written in inspiration. One of these poems is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,

They turned; and flashing forth, as it were, in a sheet of flame, the fiend-worshippers were seen; the smile of welcome gleamed darkly on every visage.

It was mid-October and in the twenties, because it was October as was I am finishing my route. As I biked the town seemed so beautiful. I like this job because it helps me get away. I had woken up with Abelard screaming about friends lost in the war. Jacob had to come over help him. Jacob was a friend of the family and was also referred as an hyphenated American. The two had been bullied at the start of the Great War long before it came to America.

Plenty of people were talking about what had happened, from the soldiers and leadership of 1st Armored Division, to the families waiting for us back in Friedberg, Germany. The incident had even been reported on in the Middle Eastern edition of the Stars and Stripes newspaper, being referred to as a showdown. But not everyone was there. And if it were not for my squads training, cohesiveness, and diligent house search during a mission to check and clear supposedly empty houses in the north eastern sector in the Iraqi town of Tal Afar, it could have been that no one would have ever even known about the guy in the hole in the wall. As it turned out, though, the first house we entered to gain access to the roof in order to pull security for

Cornered, Terrified, and feeling the despair of the situation creeping in, I was numb. Staring at Drew and trying to grasp the situation, a flash of rage overpowers my anguish as I suddenly have a flashback of Drew welcoming me into the squad with open arms. The warmth of that time would be heaven compared to this agonizing heat and sand blasting into my face. Now though, here he is in my arms, with his pulse slowly fading. I get snapped out of it by gunshots followed by hoarse screams. We were being subdued, I had to think fast. My heart was racing out of my chest, wanting to escape this hell but my eyes scanned the situation. For a split second, everything seemed to be in slow motion and I sensed danger and instinctively ducked. Something grazed my hair, I look up to see a bullet zoom on by. With nowhere to run and location found out, I had to plant my feet and fight.

‘Well then you will know. You have just seen what is for all time. The light you first saw is divine intelligence, which contains everything, including the archetypes of all beings. The gloom into which you were plunged is the material world where men of earth live. But the fire which you saw flame forth from the depths, is the Divine Word, God is the Father, the Word is the Son, their union is Life.’

Today we finally beat the British in battle, it was an amazing victory, although i must say, I really miss my long hair. Its a lot harder than I thought it would be to hide that I'm a girl, I cant go to the bathroom, and getting dressed is complete hell. I remember being called out of my deep slumber after Paul Rever saw the British coming. As we were all standing waiting for the British soldiers at around five a.m. I heard the shouting, “The lobster backs are down the road!” Led by Major John Pitcairn, the British troops approached Lexington. As we were lined up, preparing for battle, we were told to not fire unless we were fired upon. Our leader Captain Parker called for us to back down after seeing how many soldiers the British had and

Only the most ancient of us remember the wind on our face and the smell of damp earth after the rain. Now we toil within mountains lit by the molten blood of the world. Our faces black with soot from the hell forges, we slave far from the light we placed in the sky.

She used this knowledge to scare her guard into keeping quiet about what she was doing. She threatened to turn him into a toad if he spoke of her creations, and it worked he never spoke a word to anyone.

"As they flew, the dragons had, through Umaroth, poured memory after memory into Eragon and Saphira: a cascade of experiences—battles won and battles lost, loves, hates, spells, events witnessed throughout the land, regrets, realizations, and ponderings concerning the workings of the world. The dragons possessed thousands of years of knowledge, and they seemed driven to share every last bit.

Whether it be the sea or land, nearly every expanse of the world is dominated by humanity rather than the animals built for millennia to do so, but there exists one stretch that only dreams can reach in full: the sky, realm of the birds. Greek mythology expresses this idea of its unattainable power as a home of the gods and realm of the King of the Gods Zeus, but there is one example that solidifies it as the one unreachable territory. That is Ovid’s story of mortal Daedalus and Icarus, father and son, who with their tinkered wax wings made their attempt at escape from their exile through a flight, only for one to succeed and the other to fall in a reckless ascent to the searing sun. Naturally, with the universal dream to fly and the tragedy within it, the tale resonates deeply with everyone who reads it, and even today it is clear how impactful the story is to so many with the dozens of poems written in inspiration. One of these poems is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, written by William Carlos Williams in his wonder of what the reaction of the world to