Tim O Brien Themes

The book “The Things They carried” by Tim O’Brien was about the Vietnam war. One of the things that is in the book is that there is more than what is just on the surface of the war. It puts a personal spin on the dry material that is usually read about wars. Tim O’Brien was in the Vietnam war when he was a young man, and he uses these experiences to write both fictional stories and nonfictional stories about this war. When a person is about to start reading this book they must go into it prepared. This isn’t like other books that sugarcoat subjects that people find hard to talk about. Tim O’Brien shows the true beast of the Vietnam war. He shows the true grit, grime, and gore that was prevalent all around the people who were sent over there. It puts a personal connection to the Vietnam war that people, who were not of that time, wouldn’t understand. The men that got drafted into this war were young men with dreams, and hopes. These were people that you knew, and grew up with. What the friends and families of these people didn’t know was that as they watched those young men leave, they would not get the same boy back if they got the person back at all. In this book there is virtually no protagonist, and the main antagonist is each of the soldier 's minds. The war, and constantly having guerrilla warfare used on you took a toll on the people sent there. In the book he says how you never know who is the enemy because they all look the same. Constantly looking over your shoulder, and trying to survive made the men there have PTSD when they came home. Towards the end of the book, it talks about a man who was in the war with the Lieutenant. When he came back he didn’t know what to do with his life. He was so lost, and felt detached from everything. After a while of trying to find something to do that wasn’t drive around the lake in his hometown, he hung himself. This is just a small show of what happens to some of the people when they come home. One of the problems with this was that in this day and age there wasn’t much to be said about PTSD, so it went suppressed and silent for many years. “Vietnam veterans who experience PTSD have a feeling of helplessness, worthlessness, dejection, anger, depression, insomnia, and a tendency to react to tense situations by using survival tactics. … The frequency of PTSD was a lot higher among those with high levels of exposure to combat compared to the noncombatants. PTSD was not taken seriously until the 1980 's when many Vietnam veterans were complaining of similar symptoms. These symptoms had been noticed after previous wars but there were only a couple of cases. In some cases, veterans did not experience their symptoms …show more content…
At times it shows the tortured soul of one who had to go through all of those terrible events. One of the ending morals of the story includes how it never exactly ends.“In a war, you’re up against not just your own mortality, but you’re up against a lifetime of memory. Wars don’t end when you sign a peace treaty. They go on and on in memory.” (Hicks 38) The things that are seen, or experienced during a war like the Vietnam War are always remembered. Those gruesome memories are in parts of the mind that tend to spring out at you at unexpected moments. The memory is a living breathing animal in people’s head, when something traumatizing like war, or extreme violence, happens it turns that animal into a monster. This isn’t something that can be ran away from, even though many try. This follows after you in your everyday life, and these people had to learn how to live with it jumping out at you all the time with no help. “I don’t believe you heal from horror and evil. You deal with it, cope with it, pledge to do better. You try to learn and try to be more morally courageous. Healing is an inappropriate word. Some sores are best left open so that we don’t forget, so that we learn and remember.” (Hicks