Caused In Tim O 'Brien's' The Things They Carried

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Imagine finding yourself sitting in a trench that you dug yourself early in the morning so that you could have a place to sleep at night. Imagine being in the freezing cold as rain drops on your face and you have nothing to cover yourself with. Imagine fighting for your life every day for months while trying to avoid booby-traps and so called “enemies” from shooting you down. Imagine standing face to face with someone and the only thing separating the two of you are guns and who ever pulls the trigger first determines who will be able to continue the “game” of survival. Would you be able to pull trigger and live with killing another human being? Imagine coming home having to deal with post-traumatic stress (PTSD) from a war that lasted for …show more content…

In this chapter O’Brien talks about a young Vietnamese soldier who he had killed with a grenade. He mentions the weight of guilt he carried with him after the event that to took place the day he killed his first man. He opens the chapter with describing the dead corps by saying, “He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay with one leg bent beneath him, his jaw in his throat, his face neither expressive nor inexpressive. One eye was shut. The other was a star-shaped hole.” Throughout the text it is implied that O’Brien cannot stop staring at the dead body as he continues to think of how the dead Vietnamese soldier lay and what the young man’s life was like and what it could have been before he had become the soldier he was. He states, in one of the interpretation of the young Vietnamese man’s life, “He liked books. He wanted someday to be a teacher of mathematics.” O’Brien Talks about the Vietnamese soldier as if he knew him and experienced the soldier’s life himself. It’s possible that O’Brien could have talked about the dead Vietnamese life as a reference or to fantasize about his own life, and how he wish his life could’ve been if he didn’t go into war himself. O’Brien could have also thought of the young soldier’s life because of the guilt and the regret he was feeling from killing him, and …show more content…

Not only are both writings about war, but both writings express what one endures while going through the war and what happens after war. Both writings are told through the eyes of solider as the experience the dangers of war, losing close friends, and having to fight for survival. Even though After the Lost War is a fictional narrative, both The Things They Carried and After the Lost War, characters are based on real human beings. Both O’Brien and Hudgins coincide with one another’s when expressing their interpretations on war and how it physically, emotionally, and mentally affected the characters in the two authors’ books. In After the Lost War, Hudgins mentions in the chapter, Burial Detail, about the physically draining day to day routines that the soldiers had to undergo while baring the soldiers lost due to the war. Hudgins says, “Then, my knees gave. I dropped my shovel and pitched, face first, into the half- filled trench. I woke almost immediately, and stood on someone’s chest while tired hands pulled me out.” Hudgins expresses in this chapter how soldiers would work twenty-four/seven in any kind of weather and pass out from exhaustion or die from being overworked. In The Things They Carried, O’Brien talks about the mental and emotional impact that war has on soldiers. He mentions these states of beings in the chapter The Ghost Soldiers. He states

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