The Killing Zone Summary

The Vietnam War that commenced on November 1, 1955, and ended on April 30, 1975, took the soldiers through a devastating experience. Many lost their lives while others maimed as the war unfolded into its full magnitude. The book Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam by Bernard Edelman presents a series of letters written by the soldiers to their loved ones and families narrating the ordeals and experiences in the Warfield. In the book, Edelman presents the narrations of over 200 letters reflecting the soldiers’ experiences on the battlefield. While the letters were written many decades ago, they hold great significance as they can mirror the periods and the contexts within which they were sent. This paper takes into account five letters from different timelines and analyzes them against the events that occurred in those periods vis a vis their significance. The conclusion will also have a personal opinion and observation regarding the book and its impacts.

“Everybody get down!!!” He freezes for a second and then it suddenly strikes him--his heart beats almost out of his chest, and his hands are shaking uncontrollably; this is war. This is Vietnam, a cruel war between the Americans and Vietnamese that takes place in a jungle. War is undoubtedly frightening and may seem like the number one threat for the soldiers, but it is not; it is not remotely close. The true threat at a time of war, especially in a place such as Vietnam is isolation. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien illustrates the danger of isolation and why it is the greatest danger in Vietnam. Soldiers are aware that they are detached from society; this continuously haunts them, and as a result, they damage themselves emotionally.

Wars are a difficult place to be. “THE VIETNAM WAR transformed a generation” (Roberts 1). With all that happened during the war such as exposure to

The Vietnam war was an absolutely brutal time in American history. The war lasted for the majority of the 1960s and left many young men dead. The short story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien and the film Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam give us just a glance into the war by giving using the three themes of fear, pressures, and blame/guilt to embody the concept of war and how it absolutely changes a person. War not only destroys countries, but it destroys people.

Richard Perry was a young seventeen-year-old black boy from Harlem. He did not have the money at go attend college so he decided to join the military. Perry played basketball throughout his life which resulted in a knee injury, but that did not stop him. On the way to Vietnam and at the beginning of his time there, Perry did not expect the events that were about to happen. “We spent another day lying around. It seemed to be what the war was about. Hours of boredom, seconds of terror.” (Myers 132). Perry and the rest of the men in Vietnam were put into hard positions and had to go through tough things. Perry had his friend, his leader, and was put into the hospital twice. Jenkins was the first to die among Perry’s friends. After the death he was hurt, but had to continue of and fight for his country. His lieutenant was the next of his close friends to die. Everyone was devastated about the loss of their lieutenant. The war had barely began, everyone had to still fight their hardest and not leave their guard down for anything. Many questions and prayers were spoken throughout the time in Vietnam. “I really wasn't pissed, because I knew the real

In the mental setting, “search[ing] the villages, . . . kicking over jars of rice, frisking children and old men, blowing tunnels, [and] sometimes setting fires” (O’Brien, 399) along with the constant reminder that it was kill or be killed wore down and weighed heavily upon the American soldiers. “They are asked to violate social norms, [to carry] out orders to fire upon the enemy [,] (MacLean, 564)” and commit other atrocities that corrupt their moral code. However, more daunting than the mental strife is the physical challenges the soldiers must overcome. O’Brien describes how on a daily basis the men could catch disease like “malaria and dysentery . . . [and] lice and ringworm (399)” and how the monsoons and the jungle threaten them. The physical setting is perhaps a secondary antagonist, respectively following the enemy soldiers and the war. The physical setting challenges the American soldiers and attacks in ways that differs from the enemy soldiers; the monotonous, never-ending jungle and terrain drains their energy, the monsoons threaten to drown them, and the threat of disease is almost as terrifying as a gunshot wound. The physical and mental challenges in Vietnam create insurmountable burdens for the soldiers to try to cope

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

To this day the Vietnam War is still considered to be one of the most devastating wars in history and has been a topic of resentment to the American culture thirty-three years after its end. For the American public it’s marked as being the point in history where distrust in our government was at an all-time high, mainly because most of the war’s carnage was witnessed on television for the first time. For all the bloodshed American and Vietnamese soldiers suffered through, the war has left a perpetual mark not only on the United States but ultimately has left a permanent scar on the soldiers who fought and managed to survive the war. Renowned war poet, Bruce Weigl, like most young American men during the time was only nineteen when he

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.

The Vietnam War is probably the worst war that the men in America have ever had to fight. These men not only had many struggles and extreme stress brought on by the war, but when they came back home, the people of America treated them like dirt and they were not thanked for the service they did for their country. Dr. Andrew Wiest’s novel The Boys of ’67 Charlie Company’s War in Vietnam gives a first hand account on what it was actually like to be in the Vietnam War. Many men in the Charlie Company are mentioned throughout the book, which tells each of their stories that they experienced throughout the war. Each and every one of these men

Death defines life; it has the ability to reinvent the living for better or worse. “The Things They Carried”, by Tim O’Brien, provides a non-linear, semi-fictitious account of the Vietnam War that poignantly depicts the complicated relationship between life and death. His account breathes subtle vitality and realism into the lingering presence of the dead, intimating that the memories they impart have as profound an impact as the living.

The Vietnam War was a troubling time for Tim O’Brien. He battles with himself over a decision he makes, which makes him feel like a coward. He tells of a personal experience he has shared with no one not even his wife. His short story “On the Rainy River” is absolutely captivating. In this true story he uses a plethora of literary devices that leads the reader from beginning to end to visualize, feel, and sympathize with him as he tells his personal and emotional battle.

The impact of the Vietnam War upon the soldiers who fought there was huge. The experience forever changed how they would think and act for the rest of their lives. One of the main reasons for this was there was little to no understanding by the soldiers as to why they were fighting this war. They felt they were killing innocent people, farmers, poor hard working people, women, and children were among their victims. Many of the returning soldiers could not fall back in to their old life styles. First they felt guilt for surviving many of their brothers in arms. Second they were haunted by the atrocities of war. Some soldiers could not go back to the mental state of peacetime. Then there were soldiers Tim O’Brien meant while in

In the passage “Into the Death Zone” by Sean McCollum Jordan attempted to climb Mt. Everest and succeded but his father was not into the idea of her going. Jordan’s father told her that it was a dangerous idea to climb Mt. Everest because many people did not survive. There were 11,000 who attempted the climb, 220 people died, 4,500 summits, and 150 corpses still on the mountain. Mt. Everest is 29,034 feet high. Jordan only being 13 year old attempted after convincing her father being one of the youngest to do it. But what if she did not make it or became seriously injured. Her father would be extremely disappointed in her and he could do nothing but to let it go. Her father warned her and she would probably stop climbing because of her father’s

It can be hard to fully comprehend the effects the Vietnam War had on not just the veterans, but the nation as a whole. The violent battles and acts of war became all too common during the long years of the conflict. The war warped the soldiers and civilians characters and desensitized their mentalities to the cruelty seen on the battlefield. Bao Ninh and Tim O’Brien, both veterans of the war, narrate their experiences of the war and use the loss of love as a metaphor for the detrimental effects of the years of fighting.