... the Vietnam War face, but not only does it exhaust ones physical state, but also it mentally affects these men. In Tim O'Brien's short story entitled "The Things They Carried", the setting and characters are used to acknowledge the theme that the Vietnam War takes a toll on ones ... carry mosquito netting, machetes, canvas tarps, and extra bug juice, to keep them from being bitten and catching diseases (O' Brien 641). According to the story, these men are marching up mountains and walking through swamps to keep themselves alive. Often times, the land was mined and booby-trapped, and it ...

• Word Count: 1337
• Approx Pages: 5
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... Cross, carried letters from a girl back home, Martha, who visited the same college as him. She wrote to him and told him of a story where she was on the New Jersey shoreline with a friend, she monitored the waves and how they were "separate but together" meaning that ... in the power of his stories of her (Tran). The power of salvation from stories is derived from forgiveness, and to tell a story of someone that is to employ good feelings and thoughts of them. One of the objects carried by the soldiers that is infinite in ... right beside him and experience what he went through. The fe...

• Word Count: 1571
• Approx Pages: 6
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... teaching a rain dance to Rat Kiley and Dave Jensen, the three of them leaping around barefoot while a bunch of villagers looked on with a mixture of fascination and giggly horror- (O'Brien, 39). These men looked to each other for emotional support and reassurance since none was coming from the homefront. The men of Alpha Company trusted each other with their lives. Dave ... about the war and is even trying to forget it happened. Norman Bowker turns to the Narrator to help him express his feelings. What you should do, Tim, is write a story about a guy who feels like he got zapped over in...

• Word Count: 1324
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: High School

... teaching a rain dance to Rat Kiley and Dave Jensen, the three of them leaping around barefoot while a bunch of villagers looked on with a mixture of fascination and giggly horror- (O'Brien, 39). These men looked to each other for emotional support and reassurance since none was coming from the homefront. The men of Alpha Company trusted each other with their lives. Dave ... about the war and is even trying to forget it happened. Norman Bowker turns to the Narrator to help him express his feelings. What you should do, Tim, is write a story about a guy who feels like he got zapped over in...

• Word Count: 1324
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: High School

... many millions of others ("War in Vietnam-). There were 587 U.S. prisoners of war and a current unofficial estimate puts the number of personnel still unaccounted for in the neighborhood of 2500 (Scott). The Vietnam War was one of the best wars lost. Maybe the war will teach the U.S. to never rely on their moral rectitude and look to see who they have ... ...

• Word Count: 1339
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: High School

... failed to inform the public of this dramatic decision(Halstead, 522). His effort failed when poorly trained National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State University on May 4 (Halstead, 538- 39). This made the expected protests much worse than anyone in Washington could have imagined. The Kent State tragedy brought upon a nationwide campus disaster. Between May 4 and May 8, campuses experienced an ... ...

• Word Count: 1263
• Approx Pages: 5
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... failed to inform the public of this dramatic decision(Halstead, 522). His effort failed when poorly trained National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State University on May 4 (Halstead, 538- 39). This made the expected protests much worse than anyone in Washington could have imagined. The Kent State tragedy brought upon a nationwide campus disaster. Between May 4 and May 8, campuses experienced an ... ...

• Word Count: 1263
• Approx Pages: 5
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... failed to inform the public of this dramatic decision(Halstead, 522). His effort failed when poorly trained National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State University on May 4 (Halstead, 538- 39). This made the expected protests much worse than anyone in Washington could have imagined. The Kent State tragedy brought upon a nationwide campus disaster. Between May 4 and May 8, campuses experienced an ... ...

• Word Count: 1263
• Approx Pages: 5
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... at Andrews Air Force Base. There were 8 jurors, each were internationally recognized artists and designers. They narrowed the original 1,421 designs down to 232 and then narrowed down again to 39. The jury finally selected Entry Number 1,026 because it clearly met the spirit and requirements of the design. The designer of Entry Number 1,026 was Maya Ying Lin (The Vietnam ... ...

• Word Count: 1466
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

... 400,000 by the end of 1966, nearly 2 million during the following year. When the end of 1967 approached the American public support for the war had dropped to only 39%. The president's performance was not being approved by the American public. Johnson made it clear of his decision to de-escalate the war and withdraw from the presidential race in ... ...

• Word Count: 1517
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

... certain similarities are distinguished. O"Brien's piece follows the dragon's back format, that Bell described in "Linear Design". Instead of staying along one story line, O"Brien's guiding concept is therefore seen through numerous peaks and valleys. The two stories also have their own significant differences. O"Brien ... a pattern of many smaller peaks and valleys. These represent smaller sub-climaxes and resolutions to subplots and subordinate conflicts over the course of a story" (Bell 28). Bell discusses suspense as a key factor in the plot which keeps the reader wanting more. She po...

• Word Count: 1340
• Approx Pages: 5
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... car to me for good now, it was no use" (Erdrich p.270). When Henry gives the red convertible to Lyman, it symbolizes Henry's death. This story shows a unique perspective on rites of passage (fanshawec p.1). Lyman is undergoing the process of maturation and realizing that he lives in a discriminative world. Lyman ... of Henry dying because the author states that he is on the ground with his arms open wide like a person unconscious. The willow tree in the story also has symbolic meaning. The author writes, "The branches bent down all around me (Lyman) like a tent or a stable. Lyman descri...

• Word Count: 1471
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

... Salman Rushdie) He tells his audience, in The Things They Carried, a compilation of stories in order to help others understand his whole story about Vietnam. All that O'Brien believes and feels about what happened while he was in Vietnam is what he is attempting to illustrate. ... importance. However, the characteristics and the descriptions given to Mary Anne's character should be of high priority to the reader. O'Brien's story shaped world is created through the details that evoke emotions rather than the details that evoke reliability. Rat's storytelling technique is a perfect example...

• Word Count: 1540
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

... it, so for those of us that have never faced that adversity can really grasp the mental conflict these men were forced to handle. In the story it talks about things that they no longer needed, they just dropped on the trail and walked away. And all the characters struggled with the ... since they cannot drop what burdens them in their minds, they mask is and put on a face that revels nothing of their personal internal struggle. This story hits home a bit for me. My dad was drafted in the Army to serve in Vietnam. He tells us very few stories of his time there ... that after a while devo...

• Word Count: 1296
• Approx Pages: 5
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War film, "Apocalypse Now," tells a vivid, gruesome, realistic, and terrifying story of one of America's worst battles just after it ended in 1975. The film uses beautiful cinematography along with superb ... all while paying cheap Philippine labor cost. Coppola created this film with "ambitious effort to show Vietnam as America's Heart of Darkness, with Joseph Conrad's story providing the narrative skeleton" "(Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 1-1) and many themes, meanings, and entire scenes from the movie do in fact come directly from Conrad's ... book...

• Word Count: 1876
• Approx Pages: 8
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... the very thing that finished this life. "The Things They Carried," by Tim O'Brien, is about struggles, pain and sadness of war. Throughout the story O'Brien creates within the reader an understanding of the special effects of war on the soldiers who fight in Vietnam .The narrator moves further than the ... not only the exact meaning of what they carried but also symbolically the burdens that they had emotionally. This technique doubles the meaning in this story, the author shows how significant can be small details and how it becomes possible to make a judgment about the individual exam...

• Word Count: 1752
• Approx Pages: 7
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... of My Khe. He repeats this phrase over and over again and seeps in more information each time. Finally, more towards the end of the novel we hear the whole story of how it happened. This would be considered a repetition compulsion. According to Sigmund Freud, the repetition compulsion is to keep repeating an event over and over again hoping that eventually ... , which is usually fiction, does accurately show what went on. It does this by making the reader feel emotions about what happened. By writing in story truth, and then telling the readers what story truth is, they are more easily a...

• Word Count: 1289
• Approx Pages: 5

... not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been ... us something about the war in Vietnam, historically accurate or not. Some were more overt in their views than others and some were more focused on the literary aspect of story telling which then again ultimately means bending the truth. A political...

• Word Count: 2039
• Approx Pages: 8
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... not experience. While concentrating on one target, opposing forces can sneak up behind them without them even noticing until it's too late. In the story, the sniper does a good job of staying calm, which helps him finally take out the enemy on the opposite rooftop. After the sniper had ... kill my own brother? Why did this war ever start? This horrifying event is a great example of the futility and tragedy of war. In the story, the sniper and his brother were separated when the civil war started. It turned whole families against each other. An example of this is the ... ascetic, which m...

• Word Count: 1534
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

... about the Holocaust, directors are burdened with the task of finding an appropriate language to convey the depths of emotion inextricably linked to the subject matter, as well conveying the story in a way which is both sympathetic and historically accurate. There are literally hundreds of fictional or documentary-drama pieces about the Holocaust with a number of themes in use. ... by 25 million Americans. It's non-commercial length, black and white cinematography provided a documentary style were uncharacteristic of Spielberg's previous efforts and indeed varied from typical blockbuste...

• Word Count: 1992
• Approx Pages: 8
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... all is internal: one's own personal opinion. Research demonstrates that for a gauge of the opinions of others people commonly rely on their own opinions, projecting them onto the public mind. Story slant does have a significant influence on estimations of public opinion and perceived opinion is indirectly affected by slant via personal opinion. Thus people infer public opinion from their own reading ... an average of 656,000 viewers watching at any time throughout the day in January. CNN averaged 596,000, according to Nielsen Media Research data provided by the networks. The story was l...

• Word Count: 2080
• Approx Pages: 8
• Grade Level: High School

... the war in Vietnam. Bringing this to the surface in the strategic organization of Coppola's story, he draws parallels most particularly between key characters in Heart of Darkness and his own story, who guide both protagonists" mental pilgrimage into themselves. By equating these major elements in his story, Coppola provides striking commentary upon the most controversial issue of his time. The first distinguishable ... Conrad's Chief Accountant, an oddly out-of-place Englishman dressed all in white amidst the dirty grunt-workers of the English ivory trade. The man plays a cold role in ...

• Word Count: 1504
• Approx Pages: 6
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... 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) The story "On the Rainy River" is about being drafted. O"Brien writes about going to Canada. Like, In If I die in a Combat Zone O"Brien talks about dodging the war. He shacked up ... on me, I couldn't risk the embarrassment, and I couldn't endure the mockery, or the disgrace, or patriotic ridicule. I was a coward. I went to war."(Harris) In the story "Spin" you learn more about characters in the book. The story is composed of ...

• Word Count: 1543
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

... words My Lai to me, I probably would have looked at them unresponsively and thought nothing else about it. At the time, I didn't know what those words were, or the amazing story behind them. I first heard about the massacre at My Lai in my sociology class at the beginning of this semester. As she was telling us this ... story, I could feel all of these emotions begin to rise up in me. Feelings of compassion, anger, sadness, and confusion were all present at the same time. I did all I could to ... tears. Sadly, whether it is due to my apathetic ways or my previous educational experienc...

• Word Count: 1330
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: High School

... Maine mysteriously sank off the coast of Cuba, and a painting of this was sent to Hearst. Even though it was never discovered what made the USS Maine sink, Hearst printed a story that said Spain was directly responsible. The American people were so outraged that they called for immediate action against Spain. Congress had no choice but to declare war on Spain ... web. At first, the burglary seemed minor and un-newsworthy and no one was really interested. Two reporters assigned to the story by The Washington Post, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, found some unusual anomalies during their...

• Word Count: 1457
• Approx Pages: 6
• Has Bibliography