A Man's Courage In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

A Man’s Courage

The dictionary defines courage as having strength in the face of pain or grief. Although that does not mean it is everyone’s definition. Courage is something that will always be there, it is up to someone who is motivated enough to dig down and find it in themselves to help them face the situation that they are in. It can be more difficult to find it for some and easier for others, but it will always be available when it is needed. In Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried he brings you into his life leading up to and through fighting in the Vietnam War. In the book he walks you through his journey of physical and personal struggles along with his fellow soldiers’. Throughout the book O’Brien gives you a sense of his own courage and how it evolves over time. Starting out when O’Brien is back in high school and the draft is rapidly approaching, he seems to be feeling very anxious and somewhat scared to be forced to fight. After his senior year in high school, getting ready to go off to Harvard to continue

It affects how someone feels about things, how their mind works and how they operate in their lives. O’Brien gives a personal example of this change taking place after he becomes a soldier living and fighting in Vietnam. He still does not quite understand why the US became involved with the war in the first place, but he develops a new outlook of it. He is not fighting for whatever reason that the country was giving to civilians, he was fighting for his brothers (fellow soldiers). All of the soldiers want to be there, not for the purpose of fighting people he had never seen in his life before, but to fight with the men that he bonded with and grown to know and love. This is when he starts experiencing a new type of courage, the type that goes unknown to a person because he is not worrying about having courage and facing his own fears, the only thing he is worried about is being there and fighting for his