The Things They Carried
After watching Hearts and Minds, I wanted to share this novel. I'm sure many of you have read it in high school, since I read it in my senior year for AP English.
The Things They Carried is a fictional account of the Vietnam war by author and narrator Tim O'Brien. The novel speaks on the horrors of the war and the guilt suffered by American youth wounded from the death and dirty nature of a war. O'Brien is one of those that considered fleeing to Canada but due to his "cowardice" decided to face the war rather than be exiled from American society. The book tell on the attidudes of American youth at the time, of the title of man forced on young boys coming right out of high school and sent off to fight a war. This novel is by no means gloried and gives a straightforward account by a war veteran, despite the title of fiction. If you haven't read it before, I definitely recommend this book; I wanted to share it on Friday but I left my copy at home.
When I was watching the movie, or at least at the beginning, I was constantly expecting it to put the blame on the soldiers, which I think a lot of anti-war movies do. What I found so interesting about this one, with people who had fleed, considered fleeing, or had actually gone to war, was that they were really shown as real people. It really hit me when that one bomber started crying, almost as if he has realized what he had done to these villages and families over and over again. I think that the documentary did a really good job of shifting the blame to an almost non-person entity, and really just showed events that had happened, and emotions that followed on both sides of the war.
ReplyDeleteI really agree with you, Molly; however, there were instances where the soldiers were not portrayed in the best light. For instance, when one military man, I think he may have been a general, starting talking about how the Vietnamese were uncivilized people, I think he may have even used the term "barbaric," and so it did not bother him to kill them. I was definitely surprised by that comment, and do not think that portrayed the soldiers in a good light.
ReplyDeleteI also thought it was interesting how the soldiers treated and talked about Vietnamese villagers. They called them "Gooks," and I think it was mentioned (like Ariel said) that some soldiers thought them less sophisticated than Westerners and uncivilized because they lived in an unmodernized world, etc, and that somehow that justified their killing them. I agree with Molly, though, that the war wasn't to blame on the soldiers or any one person. These soldiers had lives back at home, just like the Vietnamese villagers did when they were being bombed, and I don't like to believe that thousands of US soldiers were able to systematically kill people they considered actual people without feeling some sort of moral disturbance. So I guess I feel like it was kind of necessary for soldiers to think of the Vietnamese as nothing better than barbaric savages, because otherwise I don't think they could have done it without going crazy. And a lot of people did come home crazy...
ReplyDeleteGoing off of what Amber said, I personally felt the most emotionally stirring part of the film was when a general said "life doesn't matter in Vietnam as much as it does in the United States because it's more plentiful over there" and it cut directly after to the poignant image of a Vietnamese farmer devastated by the loss of his little girl. This twisted logic became a defense mechanism for American soldiers, which makes sense--one must find a way to mentally justify the mass murder of thousands of innocent souls in order to retain sanity. It just so happened that this justification had no real base in reality. Also, going back to what Maria said originally, "Sweetheart of the Song Trabong" is, in my opinion, an amazing short story by Tim O'Brien. So, if people don't have time to read all of The Things They Carried, they should definitely at least check out this story. It's an account of the war told by a Green Beret (special force unit) in a campfire-story-esque fashion with a definite mythical twist, thus highlighting the mythicism and lies of the whole Vietnam affair in an entertaining way.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I've only read several sections from the book, having read the memoir gave me more personal insights about the war while the film, referring to Molly's observation of "shifting the blame to an almost non-person entity," was a work that helped me see the concept of the war from a nationalistic perspective; and each work allowed me to get more out of the other.
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