I find Ho Chi Minh’s letter far more persuasive than Lyndon B. Johnson’s. Using ethos, pathos, and logos, he forms a solid argument that supports Vietnam’s stance on the war. He appeals to one’s emotions by expressing the injustices faced by his people, writing, “In South Viet-Nam a half-million American soldiers and soldiers from the satellite countries have resorted to the most barbarous methods of warfare, such as napalm, chemicals, and poison gases in order to massacre our fellow countrymen, destroy the crops, and wipe out villages.” Words such as “massacre” and “barbarous” highlight the severity of these crimes, and invoke feelings of guilt and remorse in the reader. Chi Minh uses ethos to support his logos, or logical, views on the
President Lyndon B. Johnson began sending troops to Vietnam in 1964 to combat the Vietcong. Dedicated soldiers trudged through the dense jungles of Vietnam, they crawled through collapsing underground tunnels and braved burning villages. These are the circumstances under which Tim O‘Brien‘s narrative, The
O’Brien captures real-life events that he experiences first-hand in Vietnam. Including the incomprehensive presence of brutality, a disturbing lack of value for the lives of innocent Vietnamese civilians, and the soldier’s experiences with guerrilla warfare. These factors together encompass the main points in Tim O’Brien’s argument and give valid evidence that helps the reader grasp that America had little to no morally justifiable reason to become involved in the Vietnam
Among the large group of American men to be drafted one of them was Tim O’Brien the author of the short story “The Things They Carried” 3. Aside from the exponential amount of men sent off to war, the Vietnam war already had a bad stigma. There was little public support due to the feeling of fighting and unwinnable war and the amount of men who were dying. In his story, O’Brien portrays this sense
Fallen Angels Have you a reader ever wondered about the realistic depiction of war: how the war is romanticized and how it can be an awful place to be? The author Walter Dean Myers shows us the depiction of the war in Vietnam the main character in the book Richard Perry a young boy from Harlem being thrown into the war because of his life at home and doesn't want to really deal with people. The book Fallen Angels is a realistic depiction of war. The book shows us some untimely deaths, graphic violence and the main protagonist inner thoughts and doubts. Through the novel Fallen Angels the depiction of war is shoved into the main characters face with graphic violence untimely deaths that occur and the
Bruce Dawe's 1968 dramatic anti-war poem 'Homecoming' exposes the dehumanising perspective of conflict, by revealing the devastating amount of insignificant slaughter of soldiers and the lack of identity and humanity during the Vietnam War. ' All day, day after day, they're bringing them home,' Utilising repetition, Dawe establishes to the audience that war is futile and effectively a waste of human life in an unending conflict. The constant use of the pronoun 'them' implies the worthlessness of the soldiers' identities and illustrates that war has stripped them of their humanity. The word 'day' is repeated to depict how days after days it is all the same monotonous routine of packing up unknown dead bodies. ' They're bringing them home, now,
If I Die in a Combat Zone: Final Term Paper For the United States, the Vietnam War was an unwelcome incident that President Johnson agreed to assist South Korea with. The American people suffered great losses and are still to this day recovering from the terror of the War. From the inside thoughts in If I Die in a Combat Zone, author Tim O'Brien shows how the Vietnam War was detrimental and unhealthy through his depictions of horrid treatment of the innocent Vietnamese people, how fear and murder was now absent from the minds of the servicemen, and the soldier's experiences with different leaders in their lives as foot soldiers. Reading the autobiography/personal memoir of a foot soldier in the jungles of Vietnam, the idea that everyday
As David Farber illustrates in The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s, “Between the summer of 1964, when the Johnson administration achieved passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and the April 1965 antiwar rally, the American combat role in Vietnam had escalated greatly” (141). In the mid 1960s, a bloody and violent war was in full swing overseas between Vietnamese and American soldiers. On the American home front though, citizens of the US began to question whether it was wise to remain in the war or pull American troops back home. Two major groups began to spring up: advocates for the war and those against it.
“There is at the outset a very obvious... connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America,”(Document E: Martin Luther King, Jr.). During the period of the Vietnam War, division struck the United States due to people’s vast opinions, this caused a rift in the country and began protests. Citizens of the USA did have legitimate reasons to protest the Vietnam War, but not all agreed with that. American citizens had many different reasons to protest the Vietnam War, but the biggest reason was that people were realizing how horrific wars truly were.
On November 1, 1955, the Vietnam war began. The war was between North Vietnam and South Vietnam along with the United States to stop the spread of communism. Tim O’Brien walked alongside the South China Sea during his time in Vietnam. He and his soldiers called it Pinkville because of the color it was on the map which represented a misleading area. O’Brien published his novel The Things They Carried on war stories to show how storytelling can be believable although his novel is fiction.
To them, Vietnam was just a small country in the middle of nowhere that posed no threat to the United States or world peace; because of this they moved from “village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost” (O’Brien 1306). However, when the soldiers in this story lost a comrade with nothing to show for it, everything became pointless. A study showed that there are “strong associations between combat loss and psychological maladjustment in analysis of NVVRS ” (Currier). This is seen in “The Things They Carried”
Readers, especially those reading historical fiction, always crave to find believable stories and realistic characters. Tim O’Brien gives them this in “The Things They Carried.” Like war, people and their stories are often complex. This novel is a collection stories that include these complex characters and their in depth stories, both of which are essential when telling stories of the Vietnam War. Using techniques common to postmodern writers, literary techniques, and a collection of emotional truths, O’Brien helps readers understand a wide perspective from the war, which ultimately makes the fictional stories he tells more believable.
The Vietnam War was very different from the past wars. There were a lot more cases of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) among soldiers than any other wars http://historyofptsd.umwblogs.org/vietnam/ . In ‘The Things They Carried’, a book about the Vietnam War written by Tim O’Brien, using the psychological lense can help us understand how wars can change a person’s mental state dramatically. It can show us what soldiers had to carry during the war, including intangibles, like fear and guilt. These men had to fight a war that the U.S. did not have to be involved in and it changed their whole life.
In the autobiography, a Rumor of War, Philip Caputo, talks about his experience in the Vietnam War. He tells us why he joins the Marines until the day he was released from active duty. A rumor for the story about war and how it changed men like Phillip Caputo, John Kerry Silvio Burgio and Tim Carey. This paper is based on Philip Caputo and how the Vietnam War changed him through his time before the war, during the war and after the war.
In a time of strong American Values corresponding with the beginning of extensive government doubt, President Lyndon B. Johnson was faced with challenge many had encountered before him. Convincing the American people to hold up weapons is no easy task in itself, and Johnson additionally wished to convince his people to clasp weapons for a war that a multitude believed was not an American fight. In 1965 Johnson spoke at Johns Hopkins University with a speech he called “Peace Without Conquest” to sway the views of his fellow citizens. Throughout the course of his presentation, Johnson appeals to his audience through tapping into the subconscious thoughts of his people, which will likely make him effective in swaying the audience to believe in
John Kerry utilizes powerful language to combat the depersonalization of the Vietnam War and effectively condemn the actions of the American government. He retains his credibility throughout his speech because he himself is a Vietnam War veteran, and no one knows better than them what really happened. Kerry carefully chooses his words to demonstrate his personal connection to the subject of his speech. He does not shy away from the use of communal language such as the word “we.”