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Enemies And Friends In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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Mud, dirt, sweat, tears, disease, injury, are all normalities for a deployed military man. The Things They Carried, the men who made it home from fighting in the war came back different than they once were. Once they have seen the unspeakable and experienced what they have experienced, coming home can be a foreign feeling; home may not feel like home anymore. People are taught to forget their troubles and move forward in life, but the lasting emotional and physical burdens of war make this close to impossible. In the stories Enemies and Friends, two short but incredibly impactful stories, Lee Strunk and Dave Jenson go through immense changes together. One day these two men get into a fistfight over a “lost” jackknife. Jenson assumes Strunk took it and doesn’t let up when he asks for his possession back. Sadly Strunk didn’t feel the need to correctly reply and lied saying he hadn’t seen it before. Amidst the fighting Jenson breaks Strunks nose while repeatedly punching him in the face. “But that wasn’t the bizarre part. Because late that same night he borrowed a pistol, gripped in by the barrel, and used it as a hammer to break his own …show more content…

O’Brien seems to be in complete and utter shock, while others like Azar seem to be mocking the deceased. “Oh, man, you fuckin’ trashed the fucker,” Azar said “You scrambled his sorry self, look at what you did, you laid him out like shredded fuckin’ wheat!” (125). Others, like Kiowa, tried to make actual sense of the horrors. “Listen to me.” Kiowa said. “You feel terrible I know that.” … “Okay maybe I don’t know” (127). But when O’Brien sees the body laying lifeless and limbless he finally said “The body lay almost entirely in the shade…” Years later O’brien alludes to the remembrance of the man he killed, he never quite forgot the image of the corpse laying in front of

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