The Psychological Effects Of War In Danielle Trussoni's Falling Through The Earth

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.

In the fictional novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien vividly explains the fear and trauma the soldiers encountered during the Vietnam War. Many of these soldiers are very young and inexperienced. They begin to witness their acquaintances’ tragic demise, and kill other innocent lives on their own. Many people have a background knowledge on the basis of what soldiers face each day, but they don’t have a clear understanding of what goes through these individual’s minds when they’re at war. O’Brien gives descriptive details on the soldiers’ true character by appealing to emotions, using antithesis and imagery.

“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.

The Vietnam War was a long conflict lasting between 1955 to 1975 between the communist North and the democratic south with help from the United States. More than 3 million people, including 58,000 American troops were killed in the conflict. Tim O 'brien 's short story “The Things They Carried” follows a platoon named alpha company during the peak of the Vietnam war led by first lieutenant Jimmy Cross who is very charismatic but in his mind he is unsure how to lead his squad because his mind tends to wander to a thought of a girl back home. Throughout the story he has overcome with emotions and guilt because he believes he his the reason for some of his squadmates death. “The Things They Carried” Embodies the hardship, reality, and price/toll of war, ultimately Tim O’brien writes this masterpiece as not of a war story, but as a love story and how that love changed a man.

The Time in Between by David Bergen tries to show a different kind of cultural understand than is usually shown within the Vietnam war narrative. Bergen tries to highlight the cultural similarities instead of the cultural differences, where there is a sense of cultural appreciation. During the Vietnam war there has often been a stigmatization towards the Vietnamese that associates them as the enemy, they are seen as the opposing other. There is often an Eurocentric view of the Vietnam war that tells the story of the white male American solider and very rarely has another perspective been represented through media and literature. The attempt to acknowledge the war from the other perspective through the Vietnamese solider is used in The Time in Between. The trauma that is often associated with the Vietnam war is seen through the lens of the white male solider, often forgetting the the symptoms of trauma were experienced by both sides. The trauma from the war becomes a bridge between the two cultures and subverts the stereotypes of the Vietnamese as being the cultural “others”.

While the Vietnam War was a complex political pursuit that lasted only a few years, the impact of the war on millions of soldiers and civilians extended for many years beyond its termination. Soldiers killed or were killed; those who survived suffered from physical wounds or were plagued by PTSD from being wounded, watching their platoon mates die violently or dealing with the moral implications of their own violence on enemy fighters. Inspired by his experiences in the war, Tim O’Brien, a former soldier, wrote The Things They Carried, a collection of fictional and true war stories that embody the

Memories and stories swarming the mind and twisted by imagination are the only glimpse of humanity a man can hold on to while at war. Through stories, men at war can share their thinning humanity with one another. The deafening silence of war defeats the human spirit and moral compass, thus it is not only man against man but man against sanity. Tim O 'Brien 's “The Things They Carried” provides a narrative of soldiers in the Vietnam War holding on to the only parts of themselves through their imagination. O’Brien employs symbolic tokens, heavy characterization, and the grueling conflict of man to illustrate how soldiers create metaphorical stories to ease the burden of war.

Unlike most war stories, in Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” the war in Vietnam is not glorified and instead, the story is believable and raw. The horrors of war that Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and his squadron experience in an unfiltered, yet emotionally detached way that molds the structure and the language. This story, through its structure and techniques, displays the idea of how disillusionment and loss of innocence create unimaginable burdens for the American soldiers. O’Brien portrays the characters’ burdens with a monotonous and lulling tone through the use of flashbacks, setting, imagery, and metonymy.

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 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,

Hundreds of bodies littered the ground. Sounds of explosions and endless gunfire filled the air. Soldiers, with their uniforms splashed in crimson, fought viciously and ruthlessly. Their main objective, which was to win the battle, took a backseat to their newfound desperation to stay alive. After all, war is not a game, especially one such as the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, and left its survivors haunted by a multitude of atrocious events. Terry Erickson’s father and George Robinson, who were two fictional characters from the short stories “Stop the Sun” and “Dear America”, respectively, were veterans of the Vietnam War. The differences and similarities between Terry’s father and George Robinson are striking, and they merit rigorous scrutiny.

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.

A person with PTSD may also experience disturbing dreams or nightmares and may have difficulty sleeping. Lieutenant Dan was born into a family with a military tradition, every person in his family who Joined the arm died. So he has set in his mind he must die to, and that wasn’t the only thing his Family passed down was coping with alcohol when fighting in the war. It was also said in the movie his mother and grandmother dealt with depression after their husbands dying in the war.