The Vietnam War In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

In “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brian, the author discusses distinct items the soldiers carry with them during the Vietnam war. He explores weapons and equipment, but also talks about emotions and feelings the men frequently are approached by. The title of the novel is used to highlight the heavy emotional burden the soldiers had to carry during and after the war. In many cases, a soldier felt responsible for the death of one of his closest comrades.

In the book,” The Things They Carried,” by Tim O’Brien, an American novelist who is best known for his works of fiction which depict his experiences in the Vietnam War, he suggests to the audience how the Vietnam War was like to him and to the company he was in during the war. Through the use of his characters to show what they carried with them throughout the war and in the peace after the war, he uses sensory details to illustrate how it felt to be in Vietnam, he uses symbolism to depict certain points of the war, his use of irony to depict something which suggests but means something opposite, and his use of themes through the story. Tim O’Brien focuses on the characters, sensory details, symbolism, irony, and themes throughout the story

The decision of Lyndon B Johnson in refusing to call his troops during the Vietnam war even though he certainly has the power to do so was really controversial. Different scholars have different opinions and theories on why president Johnson decided to let the war continued and escalated it. The two scholarly sources that will be evaluated and examined during this paper is Indomitable Will: LBJ In The Presidency by Mark K. Updegrove (2012) and Dereliction of Duty by H. R. McMaster (1997). The origin of Indomitable Will: LBJ In The Presidency is 2012 and its author Mark K. Updegrove is an historian, an American author and the Lyndon Baines Johnson library and museum director.

In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien exemplifies a central question in the book. The central question is, “Is war more good or bad?” To an extent, O’Brien answered that question. The answer is almost clear. O’Brien’s book on some his experiences in the Vietnam War captures nearly every detail need to answer the central question.

Westmoreland Strategy of Attrition One of the most controversial topics in American history today is still the Vietnam War. Some would argue that the fall of Saigon to the communist North was one of our country’s greatest failure. From 1950 to 1975, the United States was deeply involved in stopping the spread of communism in Vietnam. As North Vietnam increases hostility against South Vietnam, the US intensified its air and ground operations in Vietnam.

In A Viet Cong Memoir, we receive excellent first hands accounts of events that unfolded in Vietnam during the Vietnam War from the author of this autobiography: Truong Nhu Tang. Truong was Vietnamese at heart, growing up in Saigon, but he studied in Paris for a time where he met and learned from the future leader Ho Chi Minh. Truong was able to learn from Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary ideas and gain a great political perspective of the conflicts arising in Vietnam during the war. His autobiography shows the readers the perspective of the average Vietnamese citizen (especially those involved with the NLF) and the attitudes towards war with the United States. In the book, Truong exclaims that although many people may say the Americans never lost on the battlefield in Vietnam — it is irrelevant.

Through his stories, O’Brien doesn’t say outright: “War is bad” or “War is good,” he simply tells the truth. His painfully blunt manner of writing holds no rose-colored lenses over reader’s eyes, regarding any subject. O’Brien tackles viewpoints from many characters in The Things They Carried to better display the experiences of the individual in Vietnam. Though these characters all have different experiences, different backstories, and all behave in different ways, they all share the struggle of the soul at war. O’Brien uses various

SIGNIFICANT ROADBLOCKS FOR THE UNITED STATES IN THE VIETNAM WAR In Philip Caputo’s book he describes the difficulties that faced the United States Marine Corps in fighting a foreign war in the jungles of Vietnam. The most significant roadblock to success was a fighting force unprepared for Guerilla warfare in the jungles of Vietnam. The other major roadblock was a mental one, which was the mental toll the war took on a military trying to overcome an unfamiliar type of warfare where the enemy was difficult to locate and identify. The lack of a clearly defined path to victory was another psychological impediment for the Americans.

Three decades of American policy in Vietnam had failed. According to Michael Lind, he concludes in his book, Vietnam: The Necessary War, “the United States may have won tactically in the Tet Offensive, but the excessive costs of winning badly by means of an ill-conceived attrition strategy in South Vietnam made a U.S. withdrawal as a result of domestic pressure inevitable.” The threat of Tet helped define and limit America’s international behavior.

In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the author retells the chilling, and oftentimes gruesome, experiences of the Vietnam war. He utilizes many anecdotes and other rhetorical devices in his stories to paint the image of what war is really like to people who have never experienced it. In the short stories “Spin,” “The Man I Killed,” and “ ,” O’Brien gives reader the perfect understanding of the Vietnam by placing them directly into the war itself. In “Spin,” O’Brien expresses the general theme of war being boring and unpredictable, as well as the soldiers being young and unpredictable.

In The Things They Carried, O’Brien reveals his view on war through telling his readers how the Vietnam War had no point, was emotionally devastating, and displaying that there is no purpose in war unless the soldiers know what they are fighting for. O’Brien shows the pointlessness of war by

In the novel, If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me, the author, Tim O’Brien, takes the reader through his own personal experience as a soldier during the Vietnam War. Not only did O’Brien describe the disturbing and horrific incidents he encountered in Vietnam, but he also gave his opinion about the war. He strongly believed that the war was both immoral and unjust. “The war, I thought, was wrongly conceived and poorly justified”(O’Brien 1975, 18). Though he believed the war was unjust, O’Brien still served his duty in Vietnam.

The Vietnam War began in the year 1957 and did not conclude till the year 1975. However, the United States did not enter the war till 1965, and left by 1973 (Skinner 1). When the U.S. made the decision to go to war, not everyone in the country was pleased. The country was divided over the idea of the U.S. getting involved in a foreign-affair war. Some believed that the U.S. had a responsibility to assist South Vietnam, a U.S. ally.

War is testament of military strength and a symbol of national identity, but it is also a testament of human cruelty. War is about casualties, objectives, enemies, and the narrations of people who were directly or indirectly involved with the conflict. War itself is complicated and it only gets more complicated from that point on with the involvement of politics, politicians, the media and the general public. There is no other war in American history that better exemplifies the above other than the Vietnam War. In fact, there was no other war that have caused Americans to reexamine the role and behavior of their country as much as the Vietnam War.

In, The Tet Offensive Intelligence Failure in War, written in 1991, James J. Wirtz claims, Tet had important optimistic implications for Hanoi as it revealed that the massive U.S. military presence had not been able to stop the North Vietnamese Army infiltration into the South. One of the many questions about the Vietnam War that remains to be settled is why the North Vietnamese decided to launch the Tet Offensive and the question is intriguing because the communist offensive was both a dismal military failure and a brilliant political success. Wirtz references Richard Betts claim that, “Tet did not end the war for the communists, but it created the necessary conditions for political victory.” Wirtz’s two explanations of communist objectives are as follows, the first maintains that the shift created in