Week 10 Closed Topic

I have waited for a long time to post my closed topic because I wanted to see what most of you were going to write about, I did not want to be redundant and for ya'll to read and try and conjure a comment response to something it seems you may have just read or commented on. I would like to talk about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I thought that everyone was going to write about it because it had been discussed so much in class so I had planned to write on Agent Orange. Since it hasn't been discussed here yet I feel it is due a few words. When Sam, Emmett and Lonnie are at Cawood's pond Emmett and Lonnie go for a walk and when they come back Emmett is disoriented and shaken. "he just got spooked....It wasn't anything" (38). This is PTSD at it's best. It has been depicted in the story well. Out of nowhere Emmett is back in Vietnam hiding. I had a grandfather that in the middle of the night during storms would crawl around the house on his belly. He never talked about but my grandmother would tell us stories. When I was a child I laughed at them thinking he was just being silly, but now I feel guilty for laughing. Many men who come back from war not just Vietnam experience this mental illness. They will jump at loud noises, not recognize family members and the symptoms go on and on. I have found two websites the first here just gives a few numbers from wars http://ptsd.about.com/od/prevalence/a/MilitaryPTSD.htm. This second has all the information you could ever want on PTSD and how it effects it's victims and how people try to overcome it.http://www.ncptsd.va.gov/ncmain/index.jsp

Week 10 - Closed Topic

I have found the theme of veterans integrating back into the American society one of the broadest reaching theme in all the war literature we have read so far. This seems to be one of the biggest challenges these men face, even bigger than facing the enemy. In this novel, In Country, Bobbie Ann Mason portrays Emmett as a character who never quite made it all the way back into society. He lived with his sister, couldn’t hold a job, and now wears skirts and only hangs out with other veterans. But wait, wearing skirts is a new facet to this integration disability. Emmett walks into the room, wearing a “long, thin Indian-print skirt with elephants and peacocks on it” (26). Sam explains to everyone that he is mocking Klinger’s behavior on M*A*S*H (27). I decided to investigate this odd behavior a little more closely. Klinger is a “wounded” soldier who fakes being of unstable mind in order to be granted a Section 8 discharge by the military. He dresses in women’s clothes and does unusual behaviors in order to make everyone believe that he is crazy, just so he can go back home to America. A Section 8 discharge was considered an undesirable discharge because it translated into the fact that the army found the soldier to be mentally unfit for active duty based on evidence of mental instability. This means, when these soldiers came back to the states, everywhere they tried to get a job and begin earning a living knew they had been discharged from the army because they were “crazy,” and if you aren’t good enough for battle, you probably aren’t good enough for anything else either. It’s amazing the drastic measures these soldiers would endure just to leave the Vietnam War.

week 10 open topic

I have jumped ahead in the reading, and so I don't want to go into too much detail in the book because I don't want to be the girl who ruins the story....but I do want to talk about a part of the book that comes later. Sam "runs away" to Cawood's Pond and camps out as if she is trying to be a soldier. Emmett, being the good uncle, finds her the next morning. They are talking about why she ran she ran away, and Emmett tells her a story about when he ran away because his daddy gave him a whipping. He says, "I ran to the creek and stayed there till it got dark, and while I was there I thought I was getting revenge, for some reason. It's childish, to go run off into the wilderness to get revenge. It's the most typical thing in the world" (221). Sam replies to that by saying, "That explains it then...That's what you were doing in Vietnam. That explains what the whole country was doing over there. The least little threat and America's got to put on its cowboy boots and stomp around and show somebody a thing or two"(221). I remember a few posts back when we were reading "The Things They Carried", and I said something about how the US didn't need to get involved in the war. This just goes to show that there's another person (though fiction) who agrees with me. I don't know exactly what we were trying to get revenge for, but I can see how we were threatened. One of our ships, the US Tonkin got blown up, and that caused a threat to the US...but a small threat, and like Sam said, we have our cowboy boots on, and we are stomping around to show them who's "boss". I almost wish I could laugh...but I know it would be innapropriate.

Week 10- Closed

In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason is in many ways a continuation of the suffering on war veterans we have seen prevalent in the semesters reading so far. For the first time we have been asked to give our thoughts and curiosity into the crimes and pain delivered by the United states army onto the Vietnams country, people and US soldiers camped out in battle. The US Army in using the powerful weed killer Agent Orange, not only destroyed crops, and jungle but innocent citizens and soldier’s lives. In using a girl who has lost her father to the war, Bobbie Mason introduces the reader to a new perspective on the effects of Agent Orange. We learn of Agent Orange and its effects in chapter nine “Agent Orange could also act on the immune system, causing it to collapse over a periods of time” (68). Sam in many ways acts just like another reader, curious of the effects of Agent Orange and the lack of care taken by the US Army. Personally, In Country has made me look with even more disgust of the actions taken by the US army. I find as a reader you can often get num to the tragedies of the war and the effects it had on the soldiers by reading and talking about it so much. In Country has made me stop and look again at the horrific occurrences of death and Agent Orange. In wanting to gain a stronger understanding of Agent Orange and its effects, I researched Agent Orange at where it gave me a stronger insight into the “weed killer”. “Agent Orange in particular was laced with dioxins - extremely toxic to humans. Dioxins accumulate in the body to cause cancers. Anyone eating or drinking in contaminated areas then receives an even higher dose”. However I feel that you are only able to gain a stronger understanding of the effects of Agent Orange by the images that have been released. I found this BBC post useful as it gave an honest look into the harm that Agent Orange caused and the effects that are still being found due to the horrid toxins sprayed by the US army in Vietnam. In researching Agent Orange, it became a huge worry to me about how a war in today’s society would be fought. Many countries that have no mercy for innocent civilians would without hesitation use toxins to have a society suffer.

Week 10 - Open Topic

Since M*A*S*H plays such a prominent role in the novel, In Country, I decided to do a little bit of research on it. I have never been interested enough to actually watch an episode because I always thought it was just an old comedy; however, I learned that its producers were very innovative for their time. They created a show that not only criticized the war in Vietnam, but also mimicked the chaotic lifestyle of the war and evolved as the war finally came to a close. The show is set in South Korea, on a military hospital base. The injured soldiers arrive by helicopter, are bandaged up or operated on, and then sent home or back to the front lines. One technical note that was highlighted was the manner in which the directors filmed the show as if the camera was a higher being looking down on the lives of the characters and their place in the war. They used long film shots and followed action shots with camera instead of breaking it up into smaller segments. “In this way, M*A*S*H seemed to be asserting the central fact of war, that individual human being are caught in the tangled mesh of other lives and their struggle must be to retain some sense of humanity and compassion. This approach was grounded in Altman’s film style and enabled M*A*S*H to manipulate its multiple story lines and its mixture of comedy and drama with techniques that matched the complex, absurd tragedy of war itself,” Jeff Shire. The characters were also very well developed. Interestingly, there is a contrast between two different types of medical workers: the skirt-chasing, gin-guzzling Dr. McIntyre and Dr. Peirce, and the straight-laced, uptight Dr. Burns and Nurse Houlihon. I imagine this is representative of real life in the war, where there are those who are serious about being there and others who cope with the horrific situation by not taking life too seriously. These characters did evolve over time, and as the war ended, many of the skirt-chasers became a little more respectful of women and the militants toned down their abrasiveness. The show began to focus more on the characterization of the soldiers these veterans of Vietnam were relating to instead of situations the characters were experiencing. The show was sensitive to the fact that the veterans were all coming home and attempting to integrate back into society. They were most likely focusing on themselves and trying to redefine their place in society, so to see the characters on M*A*S*H redefining themselves was probably very therapeutic.

Week 10 - Open Topic

Over the last nine weeks I have been raving about how much I hate war. Today I am asking you all for your forgiveness, for I have found a few things that are positive from war. Aside from the stories of torture, financial burdens, blood, sufferings, and lives full of misery, there really are a few great things that war has given us. First and foremost, camouflage or camo as the fashion world describes it. Camo has become the new black for teenage boys, only the other day did I see a high school student proudly wearing his camo shorts and matching camo backpack, how cool. Shops such as Abercrombie and Fitch and American Eagle have picked up on the camo trend and turned there entire summer short collection into a combat zone. I once tried a pair of camo shorts on due to my girlfriends recommendation but looked in the mirror and thought I looked like a giant leaf. Maybe camo just is not my color, or maybe I tried on the wrong shade of tree, I will try the camo trend again as deep down I do like the look. Next on my list of war goodies is dog tags. While waiting for my girlfriend the other day in the mall, I strolled around the men's jewelry section and came across a pair of dog tags for a enormous 300 dollars. Are dog tags cool and if so why did I not receive the memo? Designer dog tags are the new cool thing and I just can not see myself asking for a pair of Gucci dog tags. Aside from my confusion over this trend they seem to be doing well and popping up in every designer showcase. Last but not least is video games. The other day I was around my friends house and within 45 minuets I had bombed five countries and been labeled "Jack the communist". The trend of imagining your are leading your army into battle and fighting 5,000 troops single handily is the new cool thing and yet again I did not know it was "sweet" to do so. So its fair to say War is great, it has given me a sense of fashion, a way to look more manly and what I should be doing in my free time. Oh War how I love you.

Jack- Open to come

Hi Everyone. I am having a nightmare of a day and am currently stuck in a studio recording a tv show. I ran away to the bathroom and jumped on the computer. My post will be a little late, hope thats ok. Thanks. Jack
No later than 9, I promise