The Vietnam War, or also known as the American War to the Vietnamese people, is a catastrophic battle that has left both nations reeling with the casualties and the irreversible emotional, physical, and mental destruction for civilians and soldiers alike. Spanning over two decades, the war has taken away not only the lives of its soldiers, but also the souls of its survivors. Aware of its impact, artists, writers, and filmmakers from both sides have attempted to capture the post-war memories and sentiments through the perspectives of the few surviving soldiers and their loved ones, hoping to bring to light the unfiltered descriptions of the war and the raw emotions that it has left on its brave victims. Originally written by a veteran of …show more content…
Due to the indoctrination of the war by the U.S government, many veterans returned believing that they have accomplished a patriotic deed, while others returned shell-shocked and stripped of its illusions. The destructive legacy of the war is shared by both the American and the North Vietnamese veterans and both sides responded to troubling memories in similar ways. To many, the most devastating effects of the war didn’t begin until its ending, mainly through the form of PTSD, Agent Orange, and other excruciating traumas. In The Sorrow of War, Kien recalls the daylight hours where he had smelled the rotten meat in the midst of the busy street, and how the scent had triggered the vividly unsettling memories of crossing Hamburger Hill and walking over strewn corpses. He also remembers startled onlookers who stared at him as he froze, held his nose, and struggled to fight his own consciousness as he cope with his own memory of the war (Ninh 46). At night, the sound of his ceiling fan brings back memories of the sound of helicopters attack overhead. It reminded him of the dreaded “whump-whump-whump of the rotor blades, the vapor-streak, and the howling of their rockets” (Ninh 46). Kien also exhibits obvious signs of survivor guilt, an extremely common psychological affliction that plague millions of veterans in the postwar
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.
The rambunctious behavior of the soldier’s triumphant victory is a strong message visually for the viewer. These soldiers struggle to find their identity and once the war ends, the identity they’ve build at war vanishes, (McCutcheon, 2007). As a result, they essentially lose a part of them selves, (McCutcheon, 2007). When they return home, many soldiers struggle with psychological issues that prevent them from resuming their once regular lives, (McCutcheon, 2007). The images of soldiers celebrating at the end of war give the viewer a taste of this problem. This also allows the viewer insight to the deeper issues surrounding an American soldier’s mental stability and mentality. Through this image, along with many others throughout the film, the viewer is able to dig deeper and truly analyze what they are seeing.
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
Imagine one day you receive a mail from the government that you been draft to go a war at a different country. How would you feel if you know that purpose of this war is unreasonable in any senses? Angry, anxious or even confused. Vietnam War was “a personal failure on a national scale” (Hochgesang). There are many videos, documents and movies about the Vietnam War that show different angles of the Vietnam veterans’ experience and how the war really changes their life. In “The Things They Carried” written by Tim O’Brien, he argues about how the Vietnam War affect the soldiers in many ways, not only physically, but more important is the psychological effects before, during and after the war.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
With the Vietnam War fresh in Le’s memory, recurring themes of the war are vivid throughout his work. As Le was growing up in California at a young age, he had little exposure to his Vietnamese culture which was eventually fed to him through American popular culture rather than his own experiences. This caused him to disassociate whether
Starting with Tim O’Brien’s short story he immerses the reader in the experience of fighting in the Vietnam War through the use of imagery, parallelism, and figurative language. Tim O’Brien describes an event that occurred in the middle of his Vietnam experience. He catalogs variety of things his fellow soldiers in the Alpha Company brought on their missions.
According to Freud, ‘the mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water’ . Through the psychological lens that looks at the submerged part of the ‘iceberg’, one understands that repressed fear and trauma never cease to exist in the war participants’ lives. The novels present to readers not only the gruesomeness in Vietnam’s combat zones, but also the internal battle that the soldiers and veterans keep fighting days, months and years after the immediate traumatic experience. To them, the war indeed never ends.
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.