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Masculinity In The Things They Carried By O Brien

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Due to unclear reasons, the government gave the American population about the war, the Vietnam War was overly-polarized, costing the soldiers their mental and physical deterioration. While the draft was forcing soldiers to fight with unclear motives, the government was hiding the true reasons for fighting. When interviewed by the Copley Press, President Dwight Eisenhower spoke about a type of government that has mostly been frowned upon in the world ever since WWII. “Then you have the possibility that many human beings pass under a dictatorship that is inimical to the free world”( President Dwight Eisenhower). President Eisenhower denounced the dictatorial government of Ho Chi Minh and how it was forming into a communist government similar …show more content…

To counteract that previous statement, O’Brien states that the true reason people go to war is because they will be seen as cowards if they do not go to war.O’Brien alludes to the killing of a Vietnamese man and by alluding to this murder he’s indicating that men in wars do unspeakable things in part due to immense amount of peer pressure from their fellow soldiers. O’Brien also alludes that a soldier's greatest fear is not death but just simple embarrassment. In the story “The Man I Killed” Tim O’Brien explains in graphic detail about a man that he killed and Alazar expresses his excitement for O’Brien.“ ‘Oh man, you fuckin’ trashed the fucker’ Azar said. ‘ You scrambled his sorry self, look at that, you did, you laid him out like Sredded fuckin’ Wheat.’ ‘Go away,’ Kiowa said. ‘I’m just saying the truth. Like oatmeal.’ ‘Go’ Kiowa said'' (O’Brien 119). Toxic masculinity, or the dominant and violent reaction of men to feel superior and powerful, has a negative impact on the soldiers and can be seen by Kiowa’s response to Azar. Azar’s use of diction and persuasive tone illustrates how excited and proud he is of O’Brien for his bloody murder. Azar uses a simile to compare the Vietnamese dead soldier to a common food. This comparison is completely atrocious because comparing a …show more content…

Ysef Komunyakaa, a former soldier turned poet, suffered many defeats in the war and spoke of the Mental Toll he faced in the war “My Black face fades, hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn’t, dammit: No tears. I’m stone. I’m flesh… I turn that way- I’m inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial… I go down the 58,022 names, half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke.” (Komunyakaa - Facing It). Yusef Komunyakaa felt as if the Vietnam War had stripped him of his humanity. Yusef Komunyakaa felt as if some part of him is trapped in a mental cage that he can not get out of due to the mental toll that the war caused on veterans of the Vietnam

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