Tim O'brien

If I Die in a Combat Zone is an autobiographical book about a foot soldier that survived the war. The chapters are depicted with great detail of the experiences of a young man who is drafted, trained, and sent to war. O’Brien is a reluctant soldier and morally opposed to the war. He makes plans to ditch the war for Scandinavia, but they fall through due to his morals and indecisive thinking, which makes his writing so believable (Waters).

“It was an intellectual and physical stand-off, and I did not have the energy to see it

In the story “Spin” you learn more about characters in the book. The story is composed of wacky and weird things that the platoon would do to help cope with the feeling of war, such as rain dances, mailing ticks to the draft board, and strapping a puppy to a land mine. Let Mr. O’Brien explain why he could not spare squeamish sensibilities: “If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty” (Harris).

The next thing he knew he was being shipped off to Vietnam where he joined the Alpha Company. The Alpha Company was stationed outside Chu Lai. The territory patrolled by Alpha Company was frightening and forbidding. The terrain was unfamiliar to the solders. The Viet Cong were hard to fight, rarely showing themselves. O’Brien brilliantly and quietly evokes the foot soldier’s daily life in the paddies and foxholes, and evokes a blind and blundering war. (Gottlieb)

“There were times of panic, when soldiers squealed or wanted to squeal but couldn’t. They would make stupid promises to God and to their mothers and fathers, hoping not to die.”(O’Brien The Things They Carried 19)

In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien used fiction to help him write the stories about Vietnam. The fiction he used was just mostly of places and situations. The feelings portrayed though, were real and felt by any foot soldier during Vietnam. The stories involve a lot of death. They also involve courage and lack of courage, and how the war could become overwhelming, which would lead to insanity. “The Ghost Soldiers” was a story of revenge by O’Brien on a young medic, Bobby Jorgenson, who almost let die, because he had become frozen with fear. O’Brien talks of rage which he had never felt before:

O’Brien recalls the wreckage that was all around. Wreckage was the rule and brutality was standard operating procedure. There were scalded children, pistol-whipped women, burning hooches, free-fire zones, body counts, and constant bombing and harassment fire (Hillstrom 125). The war had a great effect on Tim O’Brien’s life. His writing is a way for him to cope with the feelings he had after the war. O’Brien wrote If I Die in

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