Moral Confusion In The Things They Carried

Then later he said, ‘Tim, it's a war. The guy wasn't Heidi—he had a weapon, right? It's a tough thing, for sure, but you got to cut out that staring”(O’Brien 120). Just though the imagery that we receive from O’Brien we can see that Tim was very ashamed of his actions and the silence that overtook him. Tim feels really guilty and ashamed for killing that man and we see that through O’Brien’s

The Civil War was a brutal time in American history, pinning neighbor against neighbor. Many families were broken up and soldiers often the went wandering into battle aimlessly. Frustrated by this war, an American author, Stephen Crane shows his distaste for this war by his ironic works: the poem “War is kind” and the short story “The Mystery of Heroism” by bringing the loss of family and pointless deaths to advocate against the war. Throughout “War is Kind” a mockery of how the barbarity of war affect spouses, children and parents of the soldiers lost. It specifically focuses on the families orientated around the soldiers in battle and how their deaths have came to be.

In the novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien expresses to the reader why the men went to the war and continued to fight it. In the first chapter, “The Things They Carried,” O’Brien states “It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather they were too frightened to be cowards.” The soldiers went to war not because they were courageous and ready to fight, but because they felt the need to go. They were afraid and coped with their lack of courage by telling stories (to themselves or aloud) and applied humor to the situations they encountered. The men who served in the Vietnam War were just barely men, some of them were just hitting the age twenty.

A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo shows the hard work and difficult tasks the men had to go through to prove themselves and protect their country. The war will change the men’s attitudes and the way they do everything. Men made sacrifices in the Vietnam War most people would never make in a lifetime, they will not just sacrifice but push themselves physically harder than most any other men. The men will also emotionally change from constantly watching other men die, or killing other men. The mens first kill was always the hardest for them, mentally they had so many thoughts of the other mans close ones back home and what they would go through and how it would be all their fault.

. .” (15) As soon as Lavender falls, they all seem to go berserk. It almost seems that, due to his death, Lavender’s comrades are moved with intense sadness and rage, causing them to wreck havoc across Vietnam. This would be a completely response for any soldier—but it’s not the text’s deepest meaning. If readers take one step further, they might discover that the driving cause of these postmortem actions was not Lavender’s death.

Having questions about his love, Martha, in his mind instead of being careful about his men is the reason of him feeling guilty that “the lieutenant’s in some deep hurt” (17). On the other hand, by describing the goods that soldiers carry comprehensively, Tim O’Brien indicates that it was very tough for Jimmy Cross to predict that Ted Lavender would get shot in a break after hours of walking through Vietnam with pounds of stuff on his back. This means while Jimmy Cross is trying to

It could also be argued that the killing of soldiers in World War One was unavoidable because they’re enlisted to fight and die if need be. Soldiers die in war because that’s their job, they volunteer or are drafted to protect their land and its people with their lives when necessary. It is unfortunate that human life must be lost at all, but in war, it cannot be avoided. Trench warfare is a particularly harsh style of fighting, is extremely dangerous for the attacker, and men in those days had weaponry similar to today, but did not have comparable body armor. Technology advanced so fast that, initially, the men simply didn’t know what they were facing.

Once at the military barracks he is still determined to not lose himself and his morals and therefore is often getting himself and the other young soldiers into trouble, “Kammel wants you to run round the shithouse” (40). Kotze slowly but surely breaks Campbell down until his only instinct is to survive and get out of this war alive, “within myself I’ve got principles… but like here we’ve just got to survive” (61). Campbell by the end of the play is so psychologically damaged by the war and the military training that eventually he betrays himself and shoots the already injured Black

He showed that he did not put much thought into what could have happened. In his statement with Koenig, he stated that he wanted to prove to himself and the public that he could be an ideal war hero. In the end his attempt of being a hero killed five American soldiers. That same need to be a hero is parallel to his craving of attention and affection from when he was a child (Koenig, 2016). Making a statement of wanting attention does not describe a soldier that has the interest of everyone, instead it shows how selfish he could be.

It was a tragic loss for the village. While at the funeral of Ogbeuefi Ezeudu, Okonkwo’s gun went off and killed Ogbeuefi son. His son was a British messenger and killing someone with his occupation was a crime. Consequently, him and his family had to be exiled. He wanted to defeat the British in every way but he had lost the support and respect of his clansman because of his actions.