War Years Figurative Language

Draftees made up one third of those who fought in Vietnam and a majority came fresh out of high school or college (“The Military Draft During the Vietnam War”). In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien makes soldiers morally ambiguous through childlike qualities to create empathy for their powerlessness in war. O’Brien communicates

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”.

Andrew Jackson led his brave U.S. infantry towards the most powerful army with uncertainty of who would make it back. “The Battle of New Orleans” is about a battle that ended the War of 1812, and Johnny Horton depicts this through using figurative language.

When they arrived in America a cowboy helped them settled into their new house. He paid the rent three months ahead. Mother could not believe his generosity until Brother Quang says the American government gives sponsors money, she was even more amazed by the generosity of the American government until Brother Quang says it’s all to ease the guilt of losing the war.” Ha and her family will now have to adapt to her new surroundings because it’s different from Vietnam. Most of the things will be unfamiliar to Ha because she has to learn English. Ha then started school at first it was ruff because she was getting bullied, “They pulled my arm hair, they threw rocks at me, they promised to stomp on my chest.” It twisted inside out, for her at school. The first person she told was brother Vu, she then asked him to teach her defense. After he taught her defense her life came back again, she started to understand English much better and no longer gets

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change” (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein). War can be a drastic change for the life of a person as war can ultimately morph them into a slave of the battlefield. In the book The Things They Carried, Tim O’ Brien describes the experiences of people in the Vietnam War and how they have become changed individuals from their past lives before combat. War pummels you with things that transcend your typical escapades and the more you try to understand them, the more you get sucked into the void of combat. The increased time the characters are in the battlefield, the more they have to think about it, thus shaping who they are. Only time can determine how much war can affect you.

The Vietnam War was largely considered a failure, a waste of resources, time and precious lives. It was simply a war that did not need to be fought. But in order to combat the ever prevailing communist forces; the capitalists and in particular, America, decided that Vietnam would be the land where these differences would be disputed. Men were sent in to fight in this war and they came back with very different experiences. As seen in both perspectives held in “A Rumor of War” by Philip Caputo and in “We were soldiers once... and young” by Hal Moore and Joseph Galloway; they explore the varying perspectives and experienced seen and learnt within war. Whereas in “A Rumor of War”, it tackles the consequences of being sent into such harsh warfare, only because Philip Caputo saw the harsh reality firsthand as he was a soldier in the war. The former, “We were soldiers once... and young” tackles the glorification of war because it’s not solely a soldier’s account. A journalist was in company of these men and as such details get skewed for the public’s perception. Regardless, both these books share a telling tale of the war in Vietnam through their radically different views.

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

Karen Turner and author’s collaborator, Phan Thanh Haou, in this heartbreaking book, Even the Women Must Fight: Memories of War from North Vietnam, explore the abyss between Vietnamese and Americans cultures and examine the consequences of war in Vietnamese women through several interviews. The author offers an array of women stories with different perspectives, understanding and attempts to understand and leave an open-ended question, why “When war strikes close to home, even women must fight.” Turner feels these women’s stories sincerely. She is an active participant in these conversations and she is willing to grow with them, as a woman.

This chapter covers the transition of Mary Anne Bell, of how she changed from being a normal, sweet teenage girl to being one of the Green Berets, filled with enthusiasm for the war and intrigued with the culture of Vietnam. This message is about how the innocence of women is consumed by the war and how once they begin to learn more about it, they are hopelessly entranced by it, far from returning to their usual selves. Rat talks about how, “Anne made you think about those girls back home, how they'll never understand any of this, not in a billion years. Try and tell them about it, they’ll just stare at you with those big round candy eyes. They won't understand zip.”(O’Brien 108), and this shows that women won’t understand what Vietnam really is like, they have to experience it themselves. Women also won’t understand the grueling mental pain that soldiers experience in the war.

I think that the colonists fired first because they felt threatened.The redcoats were approaching them, and they got scared and maybe one fired. "...concluded not to be discovered, nor meddle or make with said Regular Troops(if they should approach)unless they should insult or molest us; and upon their sudden Approach, I immediately ordered our Militia to disperse, and not to fire:-Immediately said troops made their appearance and rushed furiously, fired upon, and killed eight of our party..."(Resource Sheet #1)This shows how maybe the colonists fired because they felt threatened by the soldiers.I also think that Resource Sheet #2 is a lie because it's the only one out of the 5 that says anything remotely like it.The text states, "...who rode up to us, mounted and armed, each having a pistol in his hand, and after putting pistols to our breasts, and seizing the bridles of our horses, they swore, that if we stirred another step, we should all be dead men, upon which we surrendered ourselves.They detained us until Two o'clock the next morning, in which they searched and greatly abused us..."(Resource Sheet #2)I also think that the last resource isn't entirely true.The text states,"...she was surprised by the firing of the king's troops and our people, on their return from Concord. She being weak and unable to go out of her house, in order to secure herself and family, they all retired into the kitchen, in the back part of the house. She soon found the house surrounded with the

Writing 5 Theme: Immigration, Child Soldiers In this book, the themes, Immigration, Child soldiers, relate because while reading this book there has been a lot of immigration, as in officers taking children away from their parents and sending to a camp or far away from them. Making them prepare for war, being slaves for really low money, or even tho when the soldiers arrived at his hometown Cambodia, Arn was just a kid, dancing to rock ‘n’ roll, hustling for spare change, and selling ice cream with his brother. But after the soldiers march the entire population into the countryside, his life is changed forever.

A coming age story involves the journey of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood which includes all the events that arise in the process. It can also be regarded as a journey that moves a young person from naïve to astute and from an idealist to a realist. The novel The Wars by Timothy Findley presents the life of a young man who is transformed by the warring of events that occur in his life. He hails from a family where the father conflicts with life and abandons them to consequential disasters that make the family’s life miserable. However, the misery acts as a transition point for the boy to advance into the adult life. Furthermore, the author emphasizes the survival

The Vietnam War divided the country and led to several americans searching for not only their identity and morals, but the morals of the nation as a whole. Many people questioned what good the fighting was for and saw more and more news coverage about the horrible failures of the War leading to a mistrust in the U.S. government. In Bobbie Ann Mason’s book, In Country: The Story of an American Family, Bobbie Ann Mason tells a coming of age story about Samantha Hughes who searches for understanding and meaning in a War that has affected her family and country greatly. Using dialogue and plot construction, Mason successfully examines the changes in morality towards violence and war.

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.

When most people of think of war, they generally think of the glorified aspects. Love and violence. Or perhaps their minds are drawn to an image of a soldier’s homecoming: A father embracing his son, crying tears of joy, all while the solider relays his experiences of the war among celebratory decorations. He is now considered a hero. But what difficulties has he faced to get there? This is the side of war that many of us don’t recognize. In the memoir, A Long Way Gone, author and protagonist, Ishmael Beah, experiences civil war and its effects first hand when he is forced into becoming a child soldier in the poor third world country of Sierra Leone. As the novel progresses, Ishmael becomes increasingly addicted to drugs,