... individual experience, and the outcome can be positive or negative. War has a powerful ability to change a person's view of life. War can also bring out qualities or underlying issues that are hidden in a person. Basically, war has the ability to allow a person to discover who they are. Self-discovery is when a person is aware of their true potential, character, or motives. This occurs in many character's lives ... throughout the book. The experience of war leads to Tim O"Brien's, Mary Anne's, and Norman Bowker's self discovery. Tim O"Brien's inner ... anymore. He goes through so much ...

• Word Count: 1446
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

... this ideal of the naveté' of the girls is comforting to these men for the reason that the innocence lost in war can be in a way eclipsed by the girls back home who are overflowing with humanity. So O'Brien feels as if it is important to tell his readers, through Rat's story of course, how the men see Mary Anne. Whether or not Mary Anne ... as even bigger than Mary Anne. She is now a being with no inhibitions under the spell of a larger entity, her true self. She represents the self that is part of Vietnam as a whole. The environment offered by the Vietnam War eventually begins to liber...

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

"A true war story is never moral. It does 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 ... , in which some ultimately were, others also flopped. But that does not mean that they were trying to tell us something about the war in Vietnam, historically accurate or not. Some were more overt in their views than others and...

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

... irony, first-hand accounts, and subjective interjections, Herr blasts through the detached, monolithic American view of the Vietnam war and brings the raw, visceral, ground-level human-interest story straight to our senses in order to dispell any myths or misconceptions about war and about the war in Vietnam. This paper will examine Herr's blasting critique of American ideology circa 1968 and will specifically focus on ... : arms control, information control,....psychopolitical control,...control of terrain through the Strategy of the Periphery. But when the talk had passed, the only thi...

• Word Count: 1801
• Approx Pages: 7

My father's name is Juan A. Saucedo Jr., and his story begins at 17 years of age in 1974 right after high school. Being too poor to afford college and too young to join the army, he got a marriage license so they would accept him. The military was perfect because it offered job training for civilian ... battle came, we were so scared the drip of sweat off your forehead hitting the ground sounded like a gunshot. All my senses were heightened, I don't know how, but you could feel it when something was out there, and we were ready for it. If we were caught by surprise everyone would be firing, ...

• Word Count: 1284
• Approx Pages: 5
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School