Week 7 Assigned Topic

O'Brien, Tim. Things They Carried. New York: Broadway Books, 1990.

Tim O'Brien is against the Vietnam War, and he shows this in his story called "On the Rainy River". This story talks about how he left home to go to the border to get away from the war after he got his draft letter. He meets a man where he decides that he needs to go to war; he cannot be a coward. The man and Tim are sitting in a fishing boat by the Canadian border and Tim is thinking about jumping and swimming to the border. "I tried to will myself overboard. I gripped the edge of the boat and leaned forward and though, Now. I did try. It just wasn't possible. All those eyes on me--the town, the whole universe--and I couldn't risk the embarassment. It was as if there were an audience to my life...and in my head I could hear people screaming at me. Traitor! they yelled. Turncoat! Pussy!" (59). In this quote, Tim sees that he doesn't care about being brave, he cannot embarrass himself by not going to war. He then gives in and goes to war. He worries that he might have to kill, or he might be killed, but he would have to go to save himself from embarassment. In the end, he ends up being a coward, because he goes to the war. He gives into his embarassment, and puts aside his true feelings of distaste for the war.

After reading John Kerry's testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, I could see why Tim would want to go to Canada to miss the war. The United States entered the war in order to help out the South Vietnamese because North Vietnam was trying to take over. North Vietnam was a communist country, and the United States were against communism, so we entered in order help overcome communism in Vietman. Regardless of the reason why we entered, we entered the war and had many negative consequenses because of it. The United States not only lost lives, but they turned into homicidal maniacs, to put it nicely. John Kerry said, "They [the veterans] 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, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country" (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/vietnam/psources/ps_against.html). John Kerry siad that the United States made these veterans do this. They were put into this war and had to do anything in their power to survive, even if it meant doing things that were uncalled for.

The history of the Vietnam War can best be explained with pictures to tell the stories so that it gives faces to the unknown names from stories we hear about the war. It is a very powerful website that makes the reader seem as if they are living the war (at least it did for me). There are pictures that break my heart, and some that I could not even look at long because of the greusomness of it. This website made me more aware of the danger of the war.