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O'Brien, Tim. If I Die in a Combat Zone. New York: Broadway Books, 1975. Tim O'Brien is confused about the Vietnam War. He is getting drafted into it, but is also protesting it. He gets to boot camp and finds it very difficult to know that he is going off to a country far away from home and fighting a war that he didn't believe was morally right. Before O'Brien gets to Vietnam he visits a military Chaplin about his problem with the war. "O'Brien I am really surprised to hear this. You're a good kid but you are betraying you country when you say these things"(60). This says a lot about O'Brien's views on the Vietnam War. In the reading of the book, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Tim O'Brien explains his struggles in boot camp and when he is a foot soldier in Vietnam. I've always been a fan of war books, and when it came to this project, I decided to stick with the books that interest me the most. When I heard that O'Brien wrote bestselling books from his experiences in Vietnam I deicide to do my project on him as the author. To be honest I wasn't even planning on reading If I Die in a Combat Zone at first, but as I read the first page, I see the detail and clarity of his writing, and I know it will be a great book. "Count themthat's ten times to day! Ever been shot at ten times in one day?"(2). When ever I read a line like this I am amazed, its just hard to grasp the fact that in one day his company got shot at ten plus times. Not to mention the mines they had to watch out for, and all of the VC booby-traps. I am doing my project on Tim O'Brien. So this book is a perfect fit because it is one of his great books about Vietnam. Not only is it a great fit for my project, it is also a very good book. I had no... ... middle of paper ... ...f view in this book is first person. O'Brien writes it like a journal of his experience in Vietnam, with him as the person telling the story. After reading this very dramatic book I expected a dramatic ending with, maybe, the death of one his close friends that only had a couple days left in Vietnam just like him. I was a little disappointed, but I guess it got its job done. It wrapped up the book very nice; it just wasn't as exciting as the rest of the book. If you are interested in war books that can sometimes get a little graphic I would definitely recommend this book to you. It is a really easy book to get lost in the reading; he describes everything in great detail and makes it really easy to picture what is going on in your head. If you read his book you too will find out about Tim O'Brien's struggles in boot camp and also as a foot soldier in Vietnam.
Atkinson, Rick. An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943, Volume 1 of the "Liberation Trilogy." New York: Henry Holt, 2002.
Before O’Brien was drafted into the army, he had an all American childhood. As talked about “His mother was an elementary school teacher, his father an insurance salesman and sailor in World War II” (O’Brien). He spent his tour of duty from 1969 to 1970 as a foot soldier. He was sent home when he got hit with a shrapnel in a grenade attack. O’Brien says as the narrator, “As a fiction writer, I do not write just about the world we live in, but I also write about the world we ought to live in, and could, which is a world of imagination.” (O’Brien)
Tim O'Brien especially expresses how he felt during a dire war situation. "For a long time I lay there all alone, listening to the battle, thinking I've been shot, I've been shot: all those Gene Autry movies I'd seen as a kid. In fact, I almost smiled, except then I started to think I might die." This quote helps contribute to the overall theme of the book because it demonstrates O'Brien's thought process in thinking he was about to die.
In the early stages of the story O’Brien is faced with a “moral emergency”, though the draft letter sent to him in the early summer of 1968 stirred up many more feelings than that of just a moral nature. O’Brien experienced unease within his conscience about how this particular war had no “imperative of its cause”; people were dying for reasons unknown. This news also hit him in a deeply emotional way; he became quite livid with the entire idea of
Most of this story revolves around experiences that Tim O’Brien has had. And he certainly has changed from the beginning of the story (speaking chronologically) where he was no more than a scared civilian, who would do anything to escape such a fate as the draft. He would eventually become the war-hardened slightly cocky veteran that he is now. But it is only through his experiences that he would become who he is today. Through all the things he has witnessed. Whether it be watching curt lemon be almost literally "blown to heaven" to having killed a man and making assumptions about who he truly was. He made not have been most affected by the war, but it was he who was described in the most detail, due to the fact that he was describing in first person
A true war story blurs the line between fact and fiction, where it is neither true nor false at the same time. What is true and what is not depends on how much you believe it to be. In the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story” from the novel “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, the author provides various definitions to how the validity of a war story can be judged. The entire chapter is a collection of definitions that describe the various truths to what a true war story is. Unlike O’Brien, who is a novelist and storyteller, David Finkel, the author of “The Good Soldiers”, is a journalist whose job is to report the facts. Yet in the selection that we read, chapter nine, Finkel uses the convention of storytelling, which relies heavily on the stories the combat troops tell each other or him personally. Finkel attempts to give an unbiased view of the Iraq war through the stories of the soldiers but in doing so, Finkel forfeits the use of his own experiences and his own opinions. From O’Brien’s views on what a true war story is combined with my own definitions, I believe that Finkel provides a certain truth to his war stories but not the entire truth.
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
Tim is a well educated graduating student from Macalester College and a man who sometimes gets sidetracked with his own fantasy world presented in the first paragraph “Tim O’Brien: a secret hero. The Lone Ranger. If the stakes ever become high enough-if the evil were evil enough, if the good were good enough-I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had been accumulating inside me over the years” which shows how individualistic Tim is and his wishes to be able to control his courage which he later explains “offered hope and grace”. Tim is a self-confident character, but imagining himself going to war is not in his best interest as he holds himself to the highest standard stating “I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything. It couldn’t happen. I was above it.”. Tim had experienced the outdoors and despised of it; he loved his studies and the thought of him receiving scholarships to further educate himself motivated him even more. One of the most compelling evidence that causes Tim to change his mind is when Tim is on a fishing boat with Elroy and Tim begins to see an illusion of his family, friends, his past teachers and others that have been involved in his life. Such an event caused a dramatic change in Tim as gives up his hope of going to Canada and states “And right then I submitted. I would go to war-I would kill and maybe die-because I was embarrassed not to.”. Ultimately, Tim’s decision of heading to war was meat because of his family and friends little did he know of the regret this decision would cause
Tim O’Brien is doing the best he can to stay true to the story for his fellow soldiers. Tim O’Brien believed that by writing the story of soldiers in war as he saw it brings some type of justice to soldiers in a war situation.
O’Brien shows that imagination can help us do things that could not be done in real life. According to Tobey Herzog, “O’Brien invents a soldier-author narrator, also named Tim O’Brien, to tell stories of his life and Vietnam War experiences, to relate war stories told to him by other soldiers, and to comment on the art of storytelling…” (104). Tobey Herzog is saying that O’Brien was able to invent another version of himself in the novel so he would be able to tell stories of his life and also other characters’ life stories. O’Brien tries to invent something that he has never done before. When O’Brien got drafted to the war, he did not want to go. He uses his story chara...
The impact of the Vietnam War upon the soldiers who fought there was huge. The experience forever changed how they would think and act for the rest of their lives. One of the main reasons for this was there was little to no understanding by the soldiers as to why they were fighting this war. They felt they were killing innocent people, farmers, poor hard working people, women, and children were among their victims. Many of the returning soldiers could not fall back in to their old life styles. First they felt guilt for surviving many of their brothers in arms. Second they were haunted by the atrocities of war. Some soldiers could not go back to the mental state of peacetime. Then there were soldiers Tim O’Brien meant while in the war that he wrote the book “The Things They Carried,” that showed how important the role of story telling was to soldiers. The role of stories was important because it gave them an outlet and that outlet was needed both inside and outside the war in order to keep their metal state in check.
Throughout the novel, Tim O’Brien illustrates the extreme changes that the soldiers went through. Tim O’Brien makes it apparent that although Vietnam stole the life of millions through the death, but also through the part of the person that died in the war. For Tim O’Brien, Rat Kiley, Mary Anne and Norman Bowker, Vietnam altered their being and changed what the world knew them as, into what the world could not understand.
They were essential in showing the key parts in O’Brien’s life that lead to the turning points which lead to the creation of this novel and his ability to be at peace with what had happened in Vietnam. He finally accepted what had happened and embraced it instead of avoiding it. Works Cited Novel O'Brien, Tim.
“No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and is misunderstood now” (Richard Nixon). This quote said by Richard Nixon was directed toward everyone in the United States involved in relaying the events of Vietnam back to the U.S. It showed how almost no one was able to describe any realistic detail of the event, except for Tim O’Brien. A student at Macalester College, Tim O’Brien was heavily involved in various antiwar protests, such as war protests and several peace vigils (“The Things They Carried…” 318). However, Tim O’Brien was drafted into the army, and by the time he was released, he was promoted to a captain (“O’Brien (William)…” 1). This source also goes on to say that due to his efforts, Tim O’Brien received the honorary Purple Heart (“O’Brien (William)…” 1). Another source states that, “despite being awarded the Purple Heart for wounds he received, O’Brien loathed the war and everything about it, but it would become the catalyst and continuing inspiration for his literary career” (“The Things…” 319). This quote helps to explain why Tim O’Brien’s work focuses mainly on characters dreading the war and wishing to be released home (“The Things…” 319). Due to the Vietnam War O’Brien fought in, his work focuses on fictional experiences of characters in the Vietnam War (“O’Brien (William)…” 318). Many health experts have commended O’Brien “for his insightful depiction of combat trauma” (“The Things…” 228). This source also goes as far as to say that, his stories can be compared to the Iliad, and the war stories of Ambrose Bierce (“The Things…” 228). “The Things They Carried” is considered by many, a great addition to books based on Viet...
The Vietnam War was a traumatic experience for everyone that fought on the ground. American soldiers were up close and personal with the Viet Cong (enemy) which made them live in constant fear for their lives. They never knew how they would die or when they would take their last breath, and this thought was always in the back of their minds. The Vietnam War was very brutal, and the amount of death from both sides was enormous. Tim O’Brien’s story “The Things They Carried” is an accurate description of the Vietnam War. He paints a good, yet brief, description of what the war was like for the American soldiers who fought on the front lines.