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War and post traumatic stress disorder
Emotional and psychological effects of war on soldiers
Essays on war literature
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The “Man I Killed” takes us into the Vietnam War and tell us about a soldiers first time of killing another individual. The author describes a Viet Cong soldier that he has killed, using vivid, physical detail with clear descriptions of the dead mans’ fatal wounds. O'Brien envisions the biography of this man and envisions the individual history of the dead Vietnamese soldier starting with his birthplace moving through his life, and finished with him enrolling in the Vietnamese Army. O'Brien also describes some of the dead soldiers’ hopes and dreams. The author uses this history in an attempt to make the dead man more realistic to the reader
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As a pacifist, I disagree with all wars in theory. I am realistic enough to comprehend that conflict is sometimes unavoidable because, of specific circumstances, understanding and accepting are two very isolated ideas. I hold on to the optimistic perspective that situations can be resolved peacefully as long as all parties are willing to contribute to a peaceful outcome. On a more personal level, my resistance towards war also stems from family members and friends who are and have
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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 Man I Killed focuses on the story of how O'Brien killed a young man. O’Brien could not deal with the act he committed. He imagines an entire life for the dead man and about how he took the dead man away from life. Other members of the troop try and fail to help pull O’Brien out of his depressing thoughts.
Tim O’Brien begins his journey as a young “politically naive” man and has recently graduated out of Macalester College in the United States of America. O’Brien’s plan for the future is steady, but this quickly changes as a call to an adventure ruins his expected path in life. In June of 1968, he receives a draft notice, sharing details about his eventual service in the Vietnam War. He is not against war, but this certain war seemed immoral and insignificant to Tim O’Brien. The “very facts were shrouded in uncertainty”, which indicates that the basis of the war isn’t well known and perceived
An interesting combination of recalled events and editorial commentary, the story is not set up like a traditional short story. One of the most interesting, and perhaps troubling, aspects of the construction of “How to Tell a True War Story” is O’Brien’s choice to create a fictional, first-person narrator who might just as well be the author himself. Because “How to Tell a True War Story” is told from a first-person perspective and O’Brien is an actual Vietnam veteran, a certain authenticity to this story is added. He, as the “expert” of war leads the reader through the story. Since O’Brien has experienced the actual war from a soldier’s point of view, he should be able to present the truth about war...
In this chapter, O’Brien contrasts the lost innocence of a young Vietnamese girl who dances in grief for her slaughtered family with that of scarred, traumatized soldiers, using unique rhetorical devices
Towards the end of the story I kind of felt just as the soldiers did, weighed down and dead tired. The second half of the story leaned toward the emotional burdens the soldiers went through besides the physical quantities.
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
The violent nature that the soldiers acquired during their tour in Vietnam is one of O'Brien's predominant themes in his novel. By consciously selecting very descriptive details that reveal the drastic change in manner within the men, O'Brien creates within the reader an understanding of the effects of war on its participants. One of the soldiers, "Norman Bowler, otherwise a very gentle person, carried a thumb. . The thumb was dark brown, rubbery to touch. . . It had been cut from a VC corpse, a boy of fifteen or sixteen"(O'Brien 13).
The Murderers Are Among Us, directed by Wolfe Gang Staudte, is the first postwar film. The film takes place in Berlin right after the war. Susan Wallner, a young women who has returned from a concentration camp, goes to her old apartment to find Hans Mertens living there. Hans took up there after returning home from war and finding out his house was destroyed. Hans would not leave, even after Susan returned home. Later on in the film we find out Hans was a former surgeon but can no longer deal with human suffering because of his traumatic experience in war. We find out about this traumatic experience when Ferdinand Bruckner comes into the film. Bruckner, Hans’ former captain, was responsible for killing hundreds
O’Brien’s unique verisimilitude writing style fills the novel with deep meaning and emotion. Analyzing the novel through a psychological lens only adds to its allure. Understanding why characters act the way they do helps bring this novel to life. The reader begins to empathize with the characters. Every day, the soldiers’ lives hang in the balance. How these soldiers react to life-threatening situations will inspire the reader. Life has an expiration date. Reading about people who are held captive by their minds and who die in the name of war, will inspire the reader to live everyday as if they are currently in the
...ust deal with similar pains. Through the authors of these stories, we gain a better sense of what soldiers go through and the connection war has on the psyche of these men. While it is true, and known, that the Vietnam War was bloody and many soldiers died in vain, it is often forgotten what occurred to those who returned home. We overlook what became of those men and of the pain they, and their families, were left coping with. Some were left with physical scars, a constant reminder of a horrible time in their lives, while some were left with emotional, and mental, scarring. The universal fact found in all soldiers is the dramatic transformation they all undergo. No longer do any of these men have a chance to create their own identity, or continue with the aspirations they once held as young men. They become, and will forever be, soldiers of the Vietnam War.
Usually when someone is murdered, people expect the murderer to feel culpable. This though, is not the case in war. When in war, a soldier is taught that the enemy deserves to die, for no other reason than that they are the nation’s enemy. When Tim O’Brien kills a man during the Vietnam War, he is shocked that the man is not the buff, wicked, and terrifying enemy he was expecting. This realization overwhelms him in guilt. O’Brien’s guilt has him so fixated on the life of his victim that his own presence in the story—as protagonist and narrator—fades to the black. Since he doesn’t use the first person to explain his guilt and confusion, he negotiates his feelings by operating in fantasy—by imagining an entire life for his victim, from his boyhood and his family to his feeling about the war and about the Americans. In The Man I Killed, Tim O’Brien explores the truth of The Vietnam War by vividly describing the dead body and the imagined life of the man he has killed to question the morality of killing in a war that seems to have no point to him.
In the novel, The Things They Carried, the chapter The Man I Killed tells the story of a main character Tim who killed a Viet Cong solider during the Vietnam War. The author Tim O’Brien, describes himself as feeling instantaneously remorseful and dealing with a sense of guilt. O’Brien continues to use various techniques, such as point of view, repetition, and setting, to delineate the abundant amount of guilt and remorse Tim is feeling.
The Man I Killed, a short story about the traumatic experience of the Vietnam War was written by Tim O’Brien and published in 1990. As a scholar who graduated from Macalester College, O’Brien was drafted into the army to fight in Vietnam, which shattered his plan of continuing his studies. He felt obligated to fight in a war he did not want to participate in. After returning from Vietnam, he began writing to cope with his suffering. In the story, O’Brien depicts how the murder he committed had a profound impact on his life physically and psychologically. He emphasizes his torment by the use of imagery and imagination. His fellow soldiers, Azar and Kiowa, try to ease O’Brien’s misery in order to continue the battle. The story explores the theme
"We have to start treating Vietnam as a country and not a war. It'll take the old age and death of all veterans before it stops being our 51st state (Alvarez, 2013)." In the story "The Man I Killed", Tim O'Brien, who served in the U.S military in Vietnam, describes the guilt many American soldiers felt about the atrocities they committed in Vietnam. "Vietnam is not an appendage of America. That sort of thinking got us into the mess in the first place. Were bound together by some painful history, but it’s not our liver or our appendix- it's a country (Alvarez, 2013)."
Finally, Tim O’Brien conveys how society’s view on courage plays an important part in the creation of guilt for soldiers in the Vietnam War. At the start of “On the Rainy River”, Tim O’Brien is drafted to be in the Vietnam War against his will. O’Brien says, “I was drafted to fight a war I hated...the American War in Vietnam seemed to me wrong.,” (40). However, regardless if one was against the war, they were forced to anyway. In adhesion, society developed one stance on the war pertaining to courage, which is that the man needs to do the bravest thing, which was to go to war and fight. Although this also ties with the theme of masculinity with men being tough, it more importantly exemplifies courage in going to risk your life for the good of the country.