Of the 58,148 killed in Vietnam, sixty-one percent were under the age of 21. Mark Wright had just turned 20 the day he was killed. A land mine turned his beautiful face into a mess of brain matter and skull fragments and his once strong body into nothing but indiscernible pieces. I watched him die the first week we got to Vietnam. He was my best friend. We grew up together, went to school together, we went to war together, and we almost died together. Religion and superstition weren't really my thing until I was drafted. I found God in those short days before I left. Day in and day out I prayed. I prayed for me, I prayed for Mark, I prayed for anything to stop that God forsaken war before I had any participation in it. My research hadn’t …show more content…
My body shook so much on the bus trip to the base camp that it could’ve been mistaken for convulsions. I had never been the emotional type, yet for some reason every emotion that I was capable of feeling came to the surface. Mark sat perfectly still next to me. A visage of composure and patriotism, he stared blankly out the window humming a familiar tune from Civil War times. I later learned he was humming “Last Letter Home,” a song about a brave man dying from wounds too severe to be aided by pain medicine. The upbeat inflection of his voice and the grim meaning behind the lyrics was a mirror of sorts to his true feelings. The outside never truly matched what was within. His upbeat demeanor only covered his fear. He was as scared as I was, but he figured one of us had to be …show more content…
A description of “physically inept” would contain my picture in the dictionary. Physical strength and endurance have never been my strong suits. I tried to match the rest of my platoon’s stamina, but it was no use, I simply wasn’t strong enough. Of course, that didn’t deter my service. On August 10, 1970, I left my home country for a hot, humid, and wet one. As we did in kindergarten, Mark and I stepped foot onto new territory, scared and on the verge of wetting our pants. My newfound belief encouraged me to carry a rosary, I made note to hold it whenever I got scared. That proved to be all the time. He carried the baseball card I got him for his seventh birthday. It was generic, some unpopular baseball player graced the front but I suspect it was the writing on the back he kept it for. That card was a description of our youth: carefree, unashamed, void of fear. “You’re the bestest friend a pal can have.” And he was
After opening the front door all fell silent. The reality of where I was about to go washed over me, and I would be lying if I said I wasn't absolutely terrified. You couldn't only see, but feel, the demeanor of the “veterans” change as well. After a loud buzz the first cold, heavy door unlocked so we could begin our journey to the community room where the girls were waiting for us. As we approached every new door down the countless hallways the cameras were watching us and we’d hear a “buzz”. We finally reached the last door, took a deep breath and heard
Imagine yourself as a nineteen year old boy headed off to Vietnam. It’s the late 60s and you were drafted into the Vietnam War. You watch as some of your friends flee the chance of fighting in a war where they have no idea what their fighting for. You watch as thousands of your countrymen die, too young to have been there. Imagine fighting an enemy that you can’t even see.
After an event of large magnitude, it still began to take its toll on the protagonist as they often “carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die” during the war (O’Brien 1187). The travesties that occurred with the brutality of war did not subside and began to affect those involved in a deeply emotional way. The multitude of disastrous happenings influenced the narrator to develop a psychological handicap to death by being “afraid of dying” although being “even more afraid to show it” (O’Brien 1187). The burden caused by the war creates fear inside the protagonist’s mind, yet if he were to display his sense of distress it would cause a deeper fear for those around him, thus making the thought of exposing the fear even more frightening. The emotional battle taking place in the psyche of the narrator is directly repressed by the war.
In the excerpt “The War Escalates” by Paul Boyer, the author clearly shows how war influences the self by utilizing the descriptive literary devices tone and mood. Throughout the excerpt, Boyer informs the audience on the situation of the Vietnamese war. Boyer mentions the experience of a nurse who worked in the military aiding injured soldiers. Using the voice of the nurse, Boyer includes her experience, “‘We really saw the worse of it, because the nurses never saw any of the victories. If the Army took a hill, we saw what was left over. I remember one boy who was brought in missing two legs and an arm, and his eyes were bandaged. A general came in later and pinned a Purple Heart on the boy’s hospital gown, and the horror of it all was so amazing that it just took my breath away. You thought, was this supposed to be an even trade?’” (Boyer 2). The author expresses his tone by adding the memoir of the nurse. The nurses of the Vietnam War suffered after effects of the sights of war. This particular memoir exhibits the change in the nurse’s mentality after having to watch the horrors of injured people and deaths. The post-war devastations negatively affected ...
“Home. I want to go home,” the story begins of a Confederate prisoner of war. A friend’s grandmother, age 76 and a worker at the historic society, tells a story of Point Lookout. During the Civil War, the Union had a prison for captured Confederate soldiers near Point Lookout. With a warm and friendly voice that shows the sign of age, the storyteller joyfully recollects the story. She has the tale in book, but recalls it from memory. She knows the story so well that one could hardly tell it was not being read word for word. When speaking the voice of the ghost, she softens her voice, making the voice sound afraid and evoking sympathy for the unfortunate boy.
I found this story not only good but, it was also a little disturbing because, the connection between the text and my own personal life is I remember when my father came home after the war was over suffering from Post-Traumatic Disorder. He did not return the same man that had left to go off to war. We lived in the backwoods of a small town and he would always be staring at the tree line waiting for Charlie to make his presence known. I thought that this story would go along nicely with the movie Full Metal Jacket because, that movie was the most realistic war movie ever made about how they trained the people that was being sent to
The Vietnam War was the longest war in the United States history. Whether they volunteered or were drafted, one out of ten soldiers did not survive the war. With the average age of the men being just twenty-one, they were not grown up enough nor mature enough to deal with such tragedy, and grotesque, unspeakable encounters. During the span of the twenty-four years that the U.S. helped fight in the Vietnam War; 58,148 men and women died in action. Families, friends, and neighbors all fought for the same cause and each had their own story. Although some of the war stories sound similar, each holds a different meaning and the personal feelings of the individual.
When the platoon was in the jungle, Tim O’brien talked about the following regarding the platoon. “It turned us into a platoon of believers. You don’t dispute facts”(118). O’brien shows how American soldiers order their experience by superstition rather than by rationality. To the soldiers in Vietnam, superstition became a kind of religion.
"Ok, Ms. Holst! You've been pushing for an hour and Kai is still yet to make his debut", explained Dr. Wright. "I know we discussed the fact that he is face up, making it a little more difficult for him to come out. What we are going to have to do is go ahead and prep you for a cesarean section." The sudden news caused my eyes to protrude out of my head. No words escaped my lips, but my mind was racing a mile a minute. I thought, "Why? No! I have been due for a natural birth for the past 4 months, and now I have to get a C-section?" I was beyond terrified! What if something goes wrong, I can die on the table!" Only then did I realize what I had gotten myself into.
In Brian Turner’s poem “Jundee Ameriki” (American soldier), he gives gruesome details of a situation that triggered posttraumatic stress disorder in a soldier of war. The poem, written in 2009, addresses a suicide bombing which occurred during the War on Iraq in November of 2005. At first the poem shares the events of his doctor’s visit. While getting the shrapnel fragments removed, the soldier is quickly reminded of the horrific events that led to the injury. The poem then begins to describe the emotional effects of posttraumatic stress disorder. The narrator uses symbolism and the structure of the poem to demonstrate how the emotional pain of posttraumatic stress disorder is much greater than the physical pain it causes (even if the emotional
Thesis Statement: Through multiple stylistic elements including similes and metaphors as well as extreme scenes of gore, Thomas Keneally shows how a war experience can bring out extreme emotion and create bonds that will never be broken between humans.
“Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...” ― Richard Wright, Black Boy this is a quote from the famous Richard Wright an African American author. This quote means that no matter what was placed in his way or what he lacked that others had he hung on to what he had and did what he could. And the more he read about the world, the more he longed to see it and make a permanent break from the Jim Crow South. "I want my life to count for something," he told a friend. Richard Wright wanted to make a difference in the world and a difference he did make. Richard Wright was an important figure in American History because he stood astride the midsection of his time period as a battering ram, paving the way for many black writers who followed him, these writers were Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, John Williams. In some ways he helped change the American society.
It felt so dragged out because all I wanted was to see him and tell him the news. Our connection felt different, phone calls were made shorter and they weren’t as frequent. I missed him. Two nights had gone by without a phone call or even a message. This wasn’t typical of Luke. I was becoming increasingly worried. I tried to distract myself from the situation and went to Atlanta to visit my parent’s for the weekend. This provided a distraction from my despair. When I arrived home, the flat fell silent. I sat aimlessly on the sofa, starring at the telephone, hoping that maybe it would ring. I tried turning my television on but I was oblivious to anything around me. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I knew something was wrong. Fifty-five minutes passed, as I stared at the phone. That was when I heard it
Otis sat at his tattered corner booth, the pale pink and teal upholstery ripped and worn by all those who had rested there before him. His charcoal-grey hair was oily and unkept as if he hadn’t known the pleasure of a shower or a comb since his early days in the war. His once green army jacket, faded to a light grey, covered the untucked, torn, and sweat-stained Goodwill T-shirt under it. He wore an old pair of denim blue jeans that were shredded in the knees and rested three inches above his boney ankles; exposing the charity he depended upon. His eyes, filled with loneliness and despair as if he had realized a lack of purpose in his life, were set in bags of black and purple rings two layers deep. His long, slender nose was set above a full crooked mouth with little lines at the corners giving his face the character of someone who used to smile often, but the firm set of his square jaw revealed a portrait of a man who knew only failure.
As we got further and further into the Vietnam War, few lives were untouched by grief, anger and fear. The Vietnamese suffered the worst hardship; children lay dead in the street, villages remained nothing but charred ashes, and bombs destroyed thousands of innocent civilians. Soldiers were scarred emotionally as well as physically, as