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Research Paper On If I Die In A Combat Zone

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Final Term Paper: If I Die in a Combat Zone…
“Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.” -Tim O’Brien
The novel/autobiography, If I Die in a Combat Zone (1973), recounts author Tim O’Brien’s experiences with life, love, and personal dissention during possibly one of the most horrific military conflicts in history: the Vietnam War. In If I Die in a Combat Zone, Tim O’Brien gives a terrifying first-person perspective of his disdain and opposition toward the Vietnam War through his recollection of his internal struggle of living life in mid war Vietnam, the violence and loss of humanity that soldiers, and the life-altering, irreversible damage that the author/narrator endured during the Vietnam War.
Throughout his involvement/participation in the Vietnam war, O’Brien was having a hard time coping with the way he felt about why the war was even happening to …show more content…

Periodically, he would speak about his nights of watch, where his mind would run away with him. But, the scariest aspect of these seemingly outrageous pictures of death and ambush by Viets in the night is that they were not far from the reaches of reality. In the dead of night, O’Brien said that he couldn’t help but think that “we were fooling ourselves to think that we remained the hunters, in control of the war and our destinies” and that “all the enemy need do was steal up on our rear” (95). More than once, he mentions that his sense of courage was a sort of lost cause, and that hope for bravery was pointless in such a place so devoid of mercy. Even now, after all that he endured, Tim seems to have learned something from war: “it may not make a man of you, but it teaches you that manhood is not something to scoff”

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