Sense Of Disorientation In The Things They Carried

Telling war stories is something Americans do on a regular basis, sometimes all true and other times all untrue. War stories from Vietnam are far different than the war stories told about the European campaign in both World Wars because the enemy we fought was in a vastly different situation. These Vietnam war stories depict a time in American history where we failed as a military and as a nation. Tim O’Brien, author of “The Things They Carried”, a book full of Vietnam war stories that he claimed as ‘fictional’. However, by comparing O’Brien’s book with primary sources from “Thinking Through the Past” by John Hollitz and “A Place for Stories” by William Cronon, fictional war stories are equally important as factual war stories because emotions

The way the book is crafted, chapter seem to jump around in narrative and in time frame, one chapter talked about the war then the next about his child twenty years later. Sense of disorientation is always present page by page, begging the question as to why O’Brien chose to confuse his readers. O’Brien distills confusion to the reader when he said, “I was a coward. I went to the war” (O’Brien, 61). This is a conundrum because American culture does not see how going to war made O’Brien a coward. The real kicker though is O’Brien explains what he means nine pages before he calls himself a coward, "My conscience told me to run, but some irrational and powerful force was resisting, like a weight pushing me toward the war. What it came down to, stupidly, was a sense of shame” (O’Brien, 52). Through counter intuitive phrases of cowardice and war along with the backwards placement of the explanation before the main theme, O’Brien gave the reader a sense of disorientation and

McNamara recalls one of the actions of President Johnson made, “Johnson initiated bombing of North Vietnam and committed U.S. ground forces…All of this occurred without adequate public disclosure or debate” (Hollitz, 291). From Johnson’s actions, no one really knew what was happening in Vietnam thus creating mass confusion. By comparing O’Brien and McNamara words, O’Brien seems too poetic and McNamara is cold and harsh but factual. However, by combining the two as one, a clear image of confusion became present; O’Brien sets the scene of emotion with confusion followed by McNamara shining a spot light on the truth. Confusion is not the only reason O’Brien, courage plays an important role in the fight for life or