Short Story On A Stormy Night

“Forgotten Ship: A Daring Rescue As Saigon Fell” is an emotional and factual account of the devastation caused after North Vietnam defeated the South. Similar to Ha’s story,

Tim O’Brien has his friend, Norman Bowker, tell the story of his friend Kiowa dying because he was so astonished at what he just watched happen that words couldn’t come out of his mouth. One of Tim O’Brien and Norman Bowker’s friends’, Kiowa, was hit by a mortar and begin to sink in the quicksand-like mud of the battlefield. Tim O’Brien tried to hold on to his friends boot and pull him out of the muddy waters, but there was mud in his nose and eyes, the sounds of flares and explosions filled his head, and he couldn’t take it any longer so he let go. This man watched his friend sink into the battlefield, helpless. Tim feels guilty for letting his friend slip right through his hands and slowly sink beneath the mud. He knew that if the things going on around him weren’t there that he could’ve saved his friend, but he couldn’t. “In Vietnam, too, we had ways of making the dead seem not quite so dead, by acting, we pretended it was not the terrible thing it was, we kept the dead alive with stories” (O’Brien 225-226). Even though he felt guilt for letting his friend slip right through his hands and sink into the mud, he can still live on through stories. The memories that were kept and the stories told about Kiowa’s character and personality are what will keep his memory

Going through an era when the Vietnam War was a smash hit in your town, many high school senior boys would be drafted out if their number was on the list of people. The men drafted had to leave behind their families and aspirations. Tim O’Brien uses different perspectives in The Things They Carried to show if something tragic happens in life, consequently dealing with it may be hard. Moving on will help in the future.

In the story titled “The Man I Killed” O’Brien reflects on the events leading to and following his killing of a Vietnamese soldier via a grenade. He goes on to tell the reactions of his platoon mates as well as his own. The explosion of the grenade left the Vietnamese soldier’s face burned and unrecognizable. This symbolizes the life of so many of the thousands of dead Vietnamese soldiers that too were killed and consequently buried. These dead soldiers went unidentified and failed to bring their respective families closure. O’Brien struggles to cope with

Two weeks later he got a letter in the mail, he read the letter is quickly turned into a bad one,he was drafted into the United States Air Force. As he walked inside, it was like there was a boulder on his shoulders. And his wife the bad news, and she cried into his shoulder.Thoughts were racing through his head, what if I die? My wife is expecting, what if my child grows up with no father like me?two weeks later taxi picked him up and drove him to the airport where he would go to train for the U.S. Air

This shows that Vietnam changes people. The land was so different, and so were the people, which both influenced craziness. The soldiers had to withstand all hardships and mental distractions while fighting for their country.

Sitting next to his fellow soldiers in his jungle jacket, jungle trousers and his M1 helmet with two ammo belts laid across his shoulders and an m60 in his hands on a very humid and rainy afternoon in Southern Vietnam while surveying the land before they advance forward. He had a lot on his shoulders as a 19 year old kid that is halfway across the world from his family and risking his life for the betterment of our country and our lives. There he sits scared of what to come while he does not know what is in store for his future but not able to show it because if he does it could cost him his life. The Vietnam War has tremendously affected U.S. veterans and Gary Bjornberg has experienced this first hand. Starting with basic training for months on end preparing you to fight and protect yourself, then

Billy Budd sat silently in the hard wooden chair as the ship creaked back and forth. He had been sitting there for what seemed like an eternity. No one understood that all of it was an accident, that he had just hit the man out of anger, and that it had mistakenly become the death blow. Drifting back and forth from daydreams, Billy contemplated his whole life with an emotionless expression painted on his face. The chaplain slowly peeked in from behind the worn door. Through the dim and dreary light of the faint candle, he strained to make out a solemn figure staring off into the endless sea. As the chaplain closed the door with a gentle squeak and carefully made his way to Billy, the weary sailor did not even breath.

June 1968, a month after Tim had graduated from college, he was drafted to fight the Vietnam war. He hated that war. The draft notice arrived on June 17,1968. He first opened the letter, read the first few lines and started feeling some type of rush. Blood going “thick behind his eyes” thinking “he's too smart, and too good”. He thought about staying for the war or leaving for Canada for a couple of days. Then one day he left a note for his parents, got in his car, and drove almost five hundred

Although Bob Layher was only five years old when the war began he noticed the considerable impact the battle had already inflicted. Bob recalled, “Brothers and sisters to friends I knew either came back or never made it back.” Ronnie WIlliams, a helicopter door gunner, never returned to spend time with the people, including Bob, he once shared a classroom with as an innocent boy. Reminiscing on the tragic past

He also had a bottle of beer that he had purchased. He showed me what was inside and explained why he didn’t drink it. In the inside of the bottle there was dirt pieces of glass and debri. He said the vietnamese would sell this in hopes to make the soldiers sick and die. Some of the Vietnamese people went to the extent of digging holes and put bamboo in the hole, then they would cover it up with leaves, twigs and branches. Bill said that when a soldier would step or fall in the hole the bamboo would impel their calf and legs depending on how they fell, and to make sure the soldiers died they put poison in the hole, so that the poison would enter the soldier's system and kill them. Hearing these stories has made a big impact on me. I am so glad that Bill was able to tell me the stories of the war. I wish they were only stories. It saddens me to know that it was a reality and that the soldiers had to go through and scars it left on their lives. Having to watch their every move so they wouldn’t fall to their death, to not knowing who to trust caused many soldiers to have permanent scars in their minds that still trouble them

A woman's happiness and success during this era is often dependant on the male or husband of the marriage. During this era, Chopin displays to us in both her short stories "The Storm" and "The Story of an Hour" of how reliant women are in their relationship and lives. Women during this era were heavily looked down upon. They were looked so down upon that even the women themselves would look down on themselves resulting in more reliant on the men for their success in life. The women during this time era would be so reliant on men they would do much for the men despite whether they had loved him or not. Chopin many times wrote her short stories with women in marriage with men just for the benefits of living and success rather than love; a “vignettte exploring female desires that cannot be fulfilled in marriage, a common theme for Chopin.” (Brantley 1). During the 19th century, both men and women weren't seen as equal at all. Another push to being reliant on men is government rules and policies of men being the more stronger party of the marriage, relationship, or family. Men were seen as the “better” sex so then women were more reliant. Women had to depend on men to supply them in order to live a healthy lifestyle. Kate Chopin displays this highly in her two short stories as the two women seem really reliant on their male counterpart. The two women shows signs of weakness while their male counterpart were away.

Bao Ninh’s novel The Sorrow of War tells a very realistic and explicit story of Kien, a North Vietnamese soldier and writer, during the Vietnam War. Kien manages to survive, usually by luck, through battles and

“True… but he told me the real heroes are buried in the delta and the jungle. He told me about Vietnamese woman. The young prostitutes were the friendliest. After the battle, he liked to visit the whorehouses. His friends teased him by telling him if he died the women in Saigon would never smile again.”

It was three o’clock in the morning. Outside the window, the sky was still dark. There were barely any stars in the sky, and no cloud cluttered. The sky was painfully dark and motionless. Except for the faint light from the moon, everything seems lifeless. In a dark room, there was a girl sitting up on the bed, leaning on the wall beside her. She was looking out the window. Through the window, the girl can see the sky and the top of some buildings, however, nothing special or attractive. But, the girl has been staring at it for almost an hour now, silently and peacefully.