Survivor's Guilt In The Vietnam War By Boo Kien

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.

In her book The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990, author Marilyn Young examines the series of political and military struggles between the United States and Vietnam, a nation that has been distinctively separated as the South and the North. Young chooses to express the daily, weekly, monthly progresses of the affairs collectively called the Vietnam Wars, focusing on the American interventions in the foreign soil. She seeks to provide an answer to a question that has haunted the world for years: What was the reason behind the United States interfering in the internal affairs of a foreign country in which it had no claims at all? Young discloses the overt as well as covert actions undertaken by the U.S. government officials regarding the foreign affairs with Vietnam and the true nature of the multifaceted objectives of each and every person that’s involved had.

Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War is a novel that is a personal view of the Vietnam War from the perspective of a Vietnamese soldier. Like the American novel “The things they carried”, this novel brings about the effects of war on people, and especially how it defeats the human capacity for things such as love and hope. Bao Ninh offers this realistic picture of the Vietnam War’s impact on the individual Vietnamese soldier through use of a series of reminiscences or flashbacks, jumping backwards and forwards in time between the events most salient in memory, events which take on a different theme each time they are examined. His main protagonist Kien, who is basically Bao himself, looks back not just at his ten years at

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,

Movies are a fun and modern source for entertainment that often try to depict events that took place in real life. Many films based on real life events are often criticized for being inaccurate or altering much of the storyline. Others are also praised for being as accurate as possible and portraying the character’s traits in the best way. The 2013 American war film “Lone Survivor” is one of those movies that did a little of both. This is not necessarily a negative thing as I really enjoyed the movie and thought it was overall a good film and a great depiction of the events that happened in the operation in which the U.S. navy SEALs we involved. There are many war films out there that probably give us a better depiction of what war really looks

Many of the wives talked about the letter their husband/boyfriend sent home, and their inability to talk about anything other than the "weather". One particular wife stood out though for her husband's story. She said he husband left her a simple note that read “I love you sweetheart, but I can't take the flashbacks", before he went in to the garage and killed himself. In this case, it is obvious that whatever the soldier witnessed in Vietnam greatly affected him. He was unable to take seeing the atrocities that he witnessed in Vietnam anymore, he was willing to go to the extreme of taking his own life- dismantling not only his own life, but also his whole families- just to avoid seeing the visions anymore. This would lead many to assume that events the soldiers saw were horrific, and continued to affect them even after they had already returned home. One soldiers wife said "he lost his soul in Vietnam but it took 7 years for his body to catch up", soldiers were dehumanized by the things they had to in Vietnam and this cause them to "die" even though their hearts were still technically beating.

Due to the effects of war, Ha and her family were faced with countless challenges, turning their former lives and everything they had known “inside out.” The most significant of such effects can be seen through Ha’s father, who had left home to serve in the Vietnam war and never returned. Ha stated, “Father left home on a navy mission...He was captured...That’s all we know.” (Page 12) Ha lost her father to the war, and despite the brevity in which she had known him; it influenced her greatly. Growing up without her father left her lonely

Just as many stories, both action and adventure, or comedy and crime, Beah’s narrative is created through his personal journey. In his journey he encounters many events and people. Out of those events are the negative and the positive ones. Thus, his journey revolves around the abstract idea of war and how neither him or his fellow villagers would come to a general understanding of what the refugees migrating to their village had perceived because it was too terrific and unpredictable. The three major events that took place in the main character’s life was changing from innocent young boy, to savage solider and again to a normal adult.

The narrator states, “ Then he walked in a citizenly way to the end of the car, where he pulled the emergency cord.”

Bao Ninh's portrayal of postwar Vietnam also fosters a more objective viewpoint of the war. After the war, the Americans took their twisted memories back home, to an unscathed country where nearly everyone had something to go back to. For North Vietnamese soldiers, home was where the horror had been, and in many ways still was. He is plain in his message: "The recent years of war had brought enough suffering and pain to last them a thousand years." (75) Kien's slow, painful demise is brought on by the heavy sorrow of war as he is haunted by an "eternal past." (88) During the war North Vietnamese soldiers were but "insects or an ant" who

The Vietnamese history according to Jonathan Neale, have a long time battle of invasion and colonization by foreigners. Vietnam is a united nation who’s willing to fight and protect their lands and freedom from their enemy with bloods and souls. Before the Vietnam War begins, Vietnam is of one French’s colony in Southeast Asian along with Laos and Cambodia in the late 1800’s, which collectively called the Indo-China. When the French took over Vietnam, they started to change the Vietnamese’s economy by minimizing the local resistance under the “divide and strategy” rule to prevent the Vietnamese unity by creating caste system between local landlords and rice farmers. Under this rule, the landlord’s job is to take over all the lands from the

Storm clouds covered the Vietnamese sky, turning it a dark, angry gray. Lightning tore its long, bony fingers through the black fabric of the sky, stretching the tips for the earth. The light threw eerie shadows of the trees onto the ground throughout the jungle. Thunder rolled across the war-torn earth like a lion’s roar on the open African savannah. Rain relentlessly pounded every square inch of the earth.

This investigation began with the reading of Chomsky’s 1992 book, Media Control. This provocative book - in particular a short section that referred to the manipulation of people’s perception of the Vietnam War - led me to consider the relations between the media, politics and history. The subsequent development of a related topic as the subject of this investigation, included the selection of a comprehensive range of sources, allowing me to gain insight into various methods used by historians. The research also made me aware of challenges faced by historians, including the ability to select and analyze sources appropriately, in order to reach a justified conclusion.

In part 4: literature-critical study, we have been reading The Things They Carry by Tim O’Brien. The form of my Written Task one is Letters and this form is the best type text to use to express my understanding because I can tell a story about my character’s experience in the war and how he felt about the war. I wanted to explain how JJ dealt with his first mission when a young Vietnamese kid got killed while holding stick and another story when a close friend of him die in the war who was ready to go back home, then I told the story of he felt of the war at the end when he wrote to his parents and finally when the letter of his death reached his family. Through my Written Task One, I am trying to communicate how J.J, a Young kid lose his innocence

One stylistic device that O'Brien uses is repetition. O'Brien frequently repeats occasions, usually adding additional detail with each repeat. One example of this is the moment of when Kiowa died. He retold this story five times, this is the center of most of the novel's action and the motivation for most of the characters' development. The repetition is a stylistic device O'Brien adds to stretch the truth of a story by adding and subtracting detail. The effect of this for a reader is a feeling that shows O'Brien's obsession with the stories he tells, because they always run through his memories. His repetitions expose the reader to no possibility of change to the soldiers and what he sees and experiences on a daily basis. This also gives the reader a sense of confidence with the soldiers and their hellish moments in Vietnam.Tim O’Brien uses repetition so we remember and understand what the soldiers have done. In warfare it is very easy to talk about everybody as a group. Which means that repetition of names, phrases, and the things they carry makes them individuals. O’Brien frequently uses repetition to emphasize the pain of the men. “They carried” is repeated over and over again showing the hardships of the soldiers. They carried their fear, love, shame, and guilt on top of the intense weight of their gear. The memories that the soldiers carry, the emotional pain and weight, can be far more burdensome than the physical items the men carry. Tim O’Brien also keeps using