Week 8 Free Topic

For the assignement of the free topic this week, I wanted to explore the topic of post tramatic stress disorder for a soldier and the fact that life moves on without them while they are stuck in war. PTS is a horrible reality of war that many soldiers face.
"The diagnosis is a legacy of the American war in Vietnam and is a product of the post.war fortunes of the conscripted men who served there. They came home to find that they were being blamed for the war. Epithets like "babykiller" and "psychopath" were thrown at them by some who had watched on television the US military's atrocities against defenceless peasants."(Derek Summerfield)
I felt the urge to explore this topic after watching the movie Jarhead the other night. In it, the soldiers keep a board of photos of the soldiers girfriends who have broken up with them and moved on. One of the soldiers attempts to explain the tradgedy by telling the others that " Just because we are stuck in a hellhole over here where time stops, doesnt mean that time stops for those not in war. They move on with their life and forget those who are stuck in the timewarps of wartime." (Jarhead) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9K1diEGHDY
Its intersting what happens to these soldiers when they return home from war, life has moved on, and people have changed. The soldiers are lost in a strange world and find it very difficult that life has changed so dramatically while leaving them behind. This is apparent in the story “speaking of courage” when Norman Bowker returns from the war to a world that he feels does not understand him and could never understand him because they werent there to experience the things that he had back in Vietnam. He says, “The town didnt know shit about shit and did not care to know” (143) He wrote in his notes “I got killed over in Nam” (156) Obrian explains that the reason for his writing his novels was, “ to grab people by the shirt and explain exactly what had happend to me, and all the mistakes I made, and all the terrible things I had seen and done.” (158)

Week 8 assigned topic

I think the very first sentnce of the article," The Literature of vietnam war" can sum up the essence of Vietnam literature.
“War stories aren't always about war, per se. They aren't about bombs and bullets and military maneuvers. They aren't about tactics, they aren't about foxholes and canteens. A war story, like any good story, is finally about the human heart. (Tim O’Brian)

As we’ve seen from the novel, “The things they carried,” war literature cannot be summed up in a single type of style or theme. Instead its a collage of stories from peoples hearts and memories of the horrific things they witnessed and did. Obrian defines war as being immoral, obscene, evil, untellable, having no meaning, and even being beautiful. (How to tell a true war story.) I dont think we will ever know what a true war story is, or a single defining style of war literature unless we have been through a war and experienced the things soldiers have. The men that have faught the war are the only people who have the answer to the question of coming up with a working definition of war literature. Until we are ever faced with the actualities of war and actually being there, all we are able to know is the stories we hear from these brave men. Whether true or not, or in pure form or embelished to make them seem more heroic, these stories are more than just stories to the people who lived them and we must respect that.

WEEK EIGHT ASSIGNED TOPIC

This was a tough one, there are so many ways to go about writing a good war story. In her article The Literatrue of the Vietnam War Susan Farrell discusses how war writers approuch the task of informing the reader about the war by focusing "on the surface details of daily existence--the everyday routines of war"(3). I believe that is is a something necessary for the reader to understand the reality of war.
She also shares with us the chaotic and ambiguous writing style of most war writers that seem so hard to handle by readers. I also feel that this is an important part of writing a good war story. When a man went to war he began to think differently. Tim O'Brien writes " What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragment that have n obeginning and no end"(36). For a story to be informative and realistic the reader should be given the opportunity to step into to writers mind. Without this sort of free flowing thought this isn't possible.
The story spin holds true to both of these aspects of writing. O'Brien speaks of the routine Bowker and Dobbins have of playing checkers every night before bed. How just watching them play quietly was restfull. He speaks of the poppa-san that the all grew close to. This story jumps around quiet often, but O'Brien draws attention to it by telling us most memories have no beginning or end. I found comfort in the choppy pattern moving from memory to memory. When a person thinks to themselves it is difficult to focus on one particular topic and I think that after getting used to the style it actually flows quite naturally. By focusing on the habits and daily routines of the men a writer reminds the reader that they are all human. Just like at home they have thier routines far away. This allows us to connect with the characters and soak up everything that happens to them. The bond the reader and the character have make the fragmented writing style realistic and easy to swallow.

Assigned Topic Week Eight

This is a very interesting topic. I really do not know what to write about.  In analyzing "How to Tell a True War Story" there are a couple of definition that I have found.  One of the definitions I have found is that the definition of a true war story does not mean that the facts are correct, but the definition comes from the partial memory of a battle that has happened many years ago; back when men were running on adrenaline and their perception is skewed.  O'Brien reinforces these thoughts when he writes, "Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn't, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness" (71). I take this quote as meaning that the men living the story can't even process the true realization of what is happening, but in order to relive the situation they must add in things that did not happen in order to get the full effect. 

 There are a couple of other definitions that I have found in the chapter, the first one states; "You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end. Not then, not ever" (O'Brien 76). O'Brien   is not actually speaking of  telling the story, but he is referring to the story that keeps on playing in his mind, day after day, night after night. The final definition of a story is what O'Brien explains as, "You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh"(77).  What I get from this is that there is no other way to take a war story besides for what it is. He is saying that war is not a cartoon, its not make believe, its a war, there is no moral, there is no meaning, there is no end. 

Susan Farrell, the author of "The Literature of the Vietnam War" article gives several perspectives on how war stories are told. One of her perspectives speaks of "atrocity" she writes "How does one write about atrocity?" (5). This leads into the conclusion of the modern vietnam writer by saying they write in a disorderly, ambiguous, or chaotic manner. When she speaks of how Vietnam writers do not really have a structured way of writing, I interrupt this in a couple of different ways; the first is that Vietnam writers can not put together the meaning of battles or the actual meaning of the war, the second is that Vietnam writers do not want their stories to have structure because Vietnam was not structured, it was ambiguous, they just wanted to survive. 

 I put all of these definition into one chapter, "The Man I Killed", O'Brien keeps lamenting on features of the man he killed in this story, O'Brien states, " His jaw was in his throat... his fingernails were clean, the skin at his left cheek was smooth and hairless... his neck was open to the spinal cord" (124). O'Brien is detailed in explaining all of the features of this dead man. There is no point for him to us all of this detail, there is no meaning all of this detail is ambiguous in explaining the battles or the war. Kiowa tries to help Tim by rationalizing and giving a purpose to this man's death, but the further Tim thinks about it the more he laments on the features of the dead man.  As O'Brien is moving on, Kiowa is explaining that all he needed was "some metal R&R". But was there really mental R&R when O'Brien is staring at a man he killed or was that just him losing his since of feeling. 

How can you find meaning

I read the Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement, this took place during the testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations during April 23, 1971.  This was quite tough to read. We are always brought up as America is the defender of the brave, and always fights for what is right, but what was right in the Vietnam War? For Americans, we have always have had a sense of pride in our country, but when men come back and tell their dastardly stories about what they did in-country, for example they spoke of "They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians... shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks" (2).  When a loyal American reads this they lose their belief system of what they hold is right, they start to question the government as a whole. If the government is allowing me to do this diabolical things across the world, what else are they allowing other Americans do?  The culture and the value system's are greatly shaken when Americans here these stories of TERROR and evil. 

 During the same time I picked a the My Lai 4 Story for CNN's Vietnam echos of war, this tells us that a: "Free-lance journalist Seymour Hersh won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for helping to break the story of the My Lai massacre, in which Calley led a division of U.S. troops in the murder of an estimated 500 Vietnamese civilians at the villiage of Son My"(1). This text was chosen to reiterate how unethical and unmoral American's troops actions are over-sees. 

  I particularly wrote about how American civilians were affected by hearing about this cruelty that has taken place millions of miles away from American soil, because if Americans were this bad about what happen from hearing second hand accounts of the war, can you imagine how terrified and tormented the Vietnamese  people, who witnessed it on a first hand account. The American troops and planes completely destroyed everything in Vietnam, we destroyed people, animals, and even most of their culture. I can only guess how many stories that have been passed down and passed down to be whipped out by a white man with an m-16. 

These stories completely reminds me of Rat Kiley when he, " He stepped back and shot it through the right front knee. The animal did not make a sound. It went down hard, then got up again, and Rat took careful aim and shot off an ear. He shot it in the hindquarters and in the little hump at its back... The whole platoon stood there watching, feeling all kinds of things, but there wasn't a great deal of pity for the baby water buffalo" (O'Brien 78). This just shows how immoral and evil these troops are. They do not feel anymore they are lethargic when it comes to feeling the difference between what is right and what wrong. I can't imagine how the Vietnamese society was tortured, maybe not on the physical scenes but more on the tool that witnessing all of these evil events has on the mind.     

"1970 My Lai 4: Vietnam Echos of War" CNN. com 28 Feb 2008

    <CNN Specials - Vietnam at 25: Cultural Timeline>

Free Write Week 7

For this assignment, I read  "Aggression from the North" on the PBS website, this account was know as the "White Paper". This came about by President Kennedy putting together a group of Vietnamese to travel to South Vietnam in order to get a first hand account of what was truly happening in Vietnam. I chose the same topic for my alternate primary source from Vassar College,  The PBS article starts out the article by saying "South Vietnam is fighting for its life against a brutal campaign of terror and armed attack inspired, directed, supplied, and controlled by the Communist regime in Hanoi" (par.1). The account from Vassar said the  report recommended, "The introduction of large-scale American advisers to help stabilize Diem's government to defeat the CV and crush the NLF[National Liberation Front]" (White Paper). The NLF was created by both Communists and non-Communist forces in an umbrella that only had a few important goals that they were fighting for. Their many idea was to stand in the way of Ngo Dinh Diem. They considered themselves as a third party in the matter, they were independent of the communist party and it was main made up of non-Communist members. The NLF was even praised by main anti-war activists. 

The reason that I give a synopsis of the research I have done is due to the point that I wanted to bring across... CLARITY. That looking back at the relationship of Vietnam and the United States have had is really unclear and doesn't really make sense. The "White Paper" recommends of an all out attack of United States forces in Vietnam, but White house advisers say that the United States  should just pull all forces out of Vietnam completely. President Kennedy did not listen to any of those he decided that the United States will partially send troops into Vietnam. This does not really make any sense once again clarity has come into question. What is the point of only sending in a few troops? Why not send in everything that the United States had so it would have been a quick and decisive victory instead of dragging out a war for eleven years. With the lack of Clarity from the United States and the three different sides on the Vietnamese end, the communist, the non-communist, and the NLF that is not communist but against the non-communist president, brings the situation into a stalemate were everyone just ends up killing everyone else.  I wanted to point this out because an accumulation of battles makes up a war and in "The Things They Carried" several memories of battles and the reason why U.S. troops were over in Vietnam were not clear. 

   In How to Tell a True War Story, Tim O'Brien reiterates over and over how the war looses its  clarity and how everything blends together. One of the best quotes in this chapter is when O'Brien generalizes about what war true is, he says: "War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead" (80). This shows the reader the clarity of war. How can war be all of these things? There is no deeper meaning in war than dumb people that are tired of each other that want to just kill each other instead of talking things out or just leaving things alone.  Later in the chapter, O'Brien later writes about the clarity of war one more time, he says,  "Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy civility into savagery" (82). This shows that if there was clarity, a purpose, a meaning, that it was lost in the bloodshed of young men. 

In conclusion, there is not clarity in war.

"The Vietnam War: An Overview:The Wars for Vietnam 1945 to 1975" Vassar College. 28 Feb 2008

 

Week 7 assigned topic

For this assignment I chose to read the "Vietnam Veterans against the War" article. I found this article to be very interesting and more of an indicator to the truth of what happend in Vietnam than most of the information we are given. Who better to learn about the war from than the people that were actually there and actually lived the experiences. I feel that these are the only people that have the authority and credibility to share with us how the war really went.I found it very intersting that they were willing to admit that maybe what they were doing there was wrong.
"We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or American."
I found this video that documented real war veterans and their opinions of the way things really were. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLxQ7oX98iM

War changes people. This fact is realized throughout the book, "The things they carried" but specifically in the story, "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong." When Mark Fossies girlfriend, MaryAnn came into the camp she was sweet, innocent, and in love. But after spending time in the intense settings of the war, her entire persona changed. She seemed to enjoy the urgency of military life and she joined the "Greenies," ambush warriors who were filled with animal instincts. Rat explains that what happened to Mary Anne isn't really that strange: being a woman doesn't make her immune to the way war and the jungle can affect people."The girl joined the zoo . One more animal- end of story" (pg. 107) I found it fascinating jsut how much war can change a person. When MaryAnn first arrived she had a suitcase, cosmetic bag, a pink sweater, and culottes. And after being in the war for only a month or so, she was found wearing a necklace made of human tongues and living like an animal in a zoo among the greenies. If war can do that to a little girly girl, it can change anybody.