Abducted By Vietnam Essay, Research Paper

ABDUCTED BY VIETNAM

It has been estimated that over 2 million people died in the Vietnam War, and an additional 3.6 million were wounded. These staggering numbers give some example of the terrible bloodshed each individual soldier either witnessed or participated in on a daily basis. The Things They Carried, a captivating collection of Vietnam War stories written by Tim O Brien, gives readers a closer, more personalized look at what happened in Vietnam through the eyes of the participants. O Brien pays special attention to the psychological effects the war had on the men in his book, showing how the daily routine affected them with lasting imprints that often went beyond just bad memories. Through the daily physical, emotional, and psychological strain it imposed on its participants, the Vietnam War permanently altered some aspect of the character of each soldier in The Things They Carried, transforming some into a person niether they nor close ones could ever have imagined.

One of the least dramatic but most common effects the war had on the soldiers in O Brien s book was desensitization. Throughout the different stories the reader sees how all of the violence caused the soldiers in Alpha Company to become numb to the everyday occurences of death. There are examples of this phenomenon in nearly every story, like when Dave Jensen sang Lemon Tree as he removed the parts of Curt Lemon s body from a tree, making light of the death (83). Nearly everone participates in similar actions, for instance, shaking the hand of the dead old man in The Lives of the Dead. It is doubtful that any average person woluld do such a thing under normal circumstances. This numbness, adopted involuntarily as part of survival means during the war, probably had a lasting effect for many as Tim O Brien relates to the reader that these images haunt him to this day, images that could possibly cause someone to go crazy if they weren t yet desensitized.

Unfortunately, lasting psychological and emotional effects of the war go beyond simply bad memories. For some, the war noticeably altered their personalities. The fact that perhaps hundreds of thousands of veterans have attempted suicide since returning to America shows that their character had been altered enough so they found it hard to fit in with normal society once more. O Brien gives the reader a very detailed, personalized example of this in the story of Norman Bowker found in Speaking of Courage and Notes. Vietnam had become his world, and when he came home he found he just wasn t who he used to be and could no longer fit in, so he hung himself (155). In Night Life the reader sees how O Brien s friend, Rat Kiley, became so overwhelmed by the war that he finally hit a wall (222), and possibly suffered permanent mental damage. By far the strongest example of an altered personality is found in the story, Sweethart of the Song Tra Bong. When Mark Fossie brought his girlfriend, Mary Anne, over to Vietnam. She didn t handle being in the middle of a war like the rest of the soldiers at Fossie s detatchment. Rat Kiley, who is telling the story at this point, talks about how she seemed fascinated by… the adrenaline buzz (98). Mary Anne became a totally different person over the course of a few weeks, feeding off the excitement of the war; once she started tagging along with the nearby Green Berets she became a complete killing machine, not the sweet Mary Anne Bell that once planned on marrying Mark Fossie.

Throughout Tim O Brien s The Things They Carried, readers are given a close-up view of the dramatic effects the Vietnam War had on it s participants, not just physically but mainly in the emotional and psychological realms. Most of the men became desensitized to bloodshed, violence, and death due to the daily occurences of it, a slight hardening of the heart that they will have to carry throughout life on top of the agonizing memories of terrible events. In extreme cases, such as with Rat Kiley, Norman Bowker, and Mary Anne Bell, the lives of the victims of the war s brutality were flipped completely upside down, that is, changed so drastically that they were almost a different individual. It is hard to imagine such a cruel twist of fate, something perhaps comparable to being abducted by aliens who alter their victim s mind so they aren t the same person, yet not completely someone else, and who then drop the victim back into their normal life to resume living as before.