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Effects of war on family and society
Conflict theory and gender
The effect of war on family and society
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Rat Kiley is soldier in the Vietnam war and he and a few others were recruited to the medical field/base. Rat is writing about one of his men Mark. Mark has a girlfriend at home and he goes through this whole process to bring her to the war zone. After coming here Marry changed dramatically. Mary experienced the war and adapted to it. When Mary first showed up she was a high class rich woman. As said in the story,She was wearing white and had a few suitcases. After a few weeks she was wearing camouflage and tanktops. She was dressing just like the rest of the soldiers. When she first arrived she was wearing heels and now she doesn’t wear shoes at all. As said in the story Mary started touching and shooting a gun. Mary then started to explore
The story in its simplest form involves two main characters and the storyteller, Rat Kiley, a well-known truth stretcher. The main people that your interest in this story is concerned with are Mark Fossie, a solider with the team of medics that Rat was with, and his girlfriend Mary Anne Belle, a young woman of barely 17 years of age.
participation as a soldier in the Vietnam War. The narrator offers different tales in which he
Mark Atwood Lawrence’s The Vietnam War: A Concise International History shows readers an international affair involving many nations and how the conflict progressed throughout its rather large existence. Lawrence starts his book in a time before America was involved in the war. It starts out with the French trying to colonize the nation of Vietnam. Soon the United States gets involved and struggles to get its point across in the jungles of Indo-China. Much of the book focuses on the American participation in helping South Vietnam vie for freedom to combine the country as a whole not under Communist rule. Without seeing many results, the war drug on for quite some time with neither side giving up. This resulted in problems in Vietnam and the U.S.
Mary Boykin Chesnut was born on her grandparents' estate at Mount Pleasant, South Carolina on March 31, 1823. She learned early about the workings of a plantation by observing her grandmother. Grandmother Miller rose early to assign the cleaning and cooking duties for her servants. Besides keeping the mansion clean and prepared for the frequent guests, Mary's grandmother also took charge of making and mending clothing for the slaves on the plantation. She spent whole days cutting out clothing for the children and assigning sewing to her nine seamstresses. Her grandmother worked with the servants and sewing crew so easily and effectively that Mary was nearly nine years old before she became aware that her grandmother's coworkers were slaves. Having learned to respect these workers, she thought of them as near equals.
... platoon member’s everyday lives. Also it shows how relative the Vietnam war is to modern day war conflicts. The fact that Tim O’Brien lived through those events taking place in the Vietnam War, help guide him to go farther in than most other authors to describe in first person detail of what occurred during that war, and how the Vietnam War is in relation to current wars.
Although this interpretation of the metaphor is not one that many adhere to when they first read the story, it is one that deserves some attention. The story can be seen as this transformation of the soldier while serving in Vietnam. This story explains some of the smaller battles that the soldiers went through. They fought for their own identity, killing, and survival. All these battles can be seen through Mary Anne and her trails while in Vietnam. The story of Mary Anne ends with her going to the jungles of Vietnam never to be seen again, and this happens to the soldiers, they will always have Vietnam in them.
The dramatic realization of the fact that the war will affect a member of the Chance family is apparent in this quote. The amount of sorrow and emotions felt by the Chance family, and for that matter, all families who had children, brothers, husbands, or fathers, drafted into what many felt was a needless war. The novel brings to life what heartache many Americans had to face during the Vietnam era, a heartache that few in my generation have had the ability to realize.
Mary Anne was smuggled into Vietnam by her boyfriend Mark Fossie to visit him, her arrival in Vietnam brought a touch of home to everyone. She was a beautiful, innocent 17 year-old American blonde, she had on “white culottes and a sexy pink sweater” (O’Brian 91). Her bubbly personality, joyful smile, and good looks not only pleased Mark but also a good morale of all the other soldiers. For the first two weeks, the two love birds were stuck together like as if they needed each other to breathe. “Mary Anne and Fossie had been sweethearts since grammar school and since sixth grade on they had known for a fact that someday they would get marr...
into the story of a seemingly misplaced girl in Vietnam. The role of Rat Kiley
In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the readers follow the Alpha Company’s experiences during the Vietnam War through the telling’s of the main character and narrator, Tim. At the beginning of the story, Tim describes the things that each character carries, also revealing certain aspects of the characters as can be interpreted by the audience. The book delineates what kind of person each character is throughout the chapters. As the novel progresses, the characters’ personalities change due to certain events of the war. The novel shows that due to these experiences during the Vietnam War, there is always a turning point for each soldier, especially as shown with Bob “Rat” Kiley and Azar. With this turning point also comes the loss of innocence for these soldiers. O’Brien covers certain stages of grief and self-blame associated with these events in these stories as well in order to articulate just how those involved felt so that the reader can imagine what the effects of these events would be like for them had they been a part of it.
Robert S. McNamara's book, In Retrospect, tells the story of one man's journey throughout the trials and tribulations of what seems to be the United States utmost fatality; the Vietnam War. McNamara's personal encounters gives an inside perspective never before heard of, and exposes the truth behind the administration.
In “The Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong,” Rat Kiley recounts the time when Mark Fossie brought in his girlfriend, Mary Anne Bell, from Ohio to Nam. Mary Anne is a curious and very friendly seventeen-year- old girl who just graduated from high school. She constantly asks questions about the war. Tension grows between Mary Anne and Mark when Mary Anne starts to become more involved in the war. She helps with taking care of the injured soldiers and learns how to operate an M-16. Mark suggests that the two of them go back home, but Mary Anne refuses. She begins to return to the camp late at night, or not at all. One day in the early morning, Mark cannot find Mary Anne and panics, only to discover that she is out on an ambush with the Green Berets. Mark has a talk with Mary Anne in which they make plans to get married. However, over the next several weeks, an undeniable tension grows between the two. Mary Anne suddenly disappears after Mark starts to make plans for her return home. After about three weeks, Mary Anne returns to the camp and disappears into the Special Forces area, and Mark waits for her there. He hears a woman, Mary Anne, chanting along with strange music and bursts into the hootch to confront her. O’Brien uses disturbing imagery to emphasize how the war takes away one’s innocence and changes one forever.
The story of “Bloody Mary” was told to me by a twenty year old male. He is a current student at a University, studying accountancy. He has very conservative beliefs regarding politics. His father is an insurance broker and his mother stays at home. This story was collected on March 18, 2006, at his residence. This is the story as he told it to me:
Further more, it just goes to show that soldiers not only carry physical things like guns, food or good luck charms. They can carry the emotions that come with war such as: being away from home, being forced into war and not knowing if they will make it back alive. The soldiers also carry the changes of war. They were sent off young and innocent only to come back completely different, just like the case of Mary Anne. War is more then just a battle between waring nations, it's a psychological battle. People back in the states had no clue what the soldiers had to do and what effect it had on them. The Things They Carried is a great insight into what these soldiers experienced and how they dealt with the challenges are the Vietnam war.
Mary Anne Bell, a civilian and one of the soldier’s girlfriend, for example, struggles with coping after witnessing, first hand, the horrors of the war. For her, Vietnam had the effect of a “powerful drug,” and, as a result, she “wanted more, she wanted to penetrate deeper into the mystery of herself, and after a time the wanting became needing, which turned into craving” (). As a civilian, Mary Anne Bell was not used to seeing cadavers, blood, or even as much violence. Consequently, when placed in a war zone, isolated from family and friends, she had to adapt. Although she transformed into a soldier-like figure, and was therefore better suited for these distressing situations, it appears as though everything simply became too overwhelming, resulting in her delving into the “mystery of herself” (). Seeking comfort, she internalized the situation and isolated herself, unable to come to terms with the deaths surrounding her. Although Mary Anne could be considered an inaccurate representation of a soldier coping with loss as she was brought to Vietnam to visit her boyfriend, Tim O’Brien, in “The Man I Killed,” clearly reflects how deeply soldiers are affected by loss, essentially demonstrating what internalization can be like. After killing a young Vietnamese man walking on a trail, Tim shuts down, unable to deal with the flood of emotions taking over him. Later,