S. Military Interventions In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

The history and self-identity of the United States Marine Corps are based on operations in foreign environments. Since 1898, the United States military has been intervening in abroad. However, some of the US military interventions in other countries have been criticized, which include the Vietnam War. The Vietnam conflict is seen absolutely to have no sense politically, militarily, or economically, because “when a nation goes to war, it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause” (page 34). Therefore, the dispatching of the underage recruits to that war was to subdue them unduly to adversary-induced psychosomatic disorders.
According to Tim O’Brien, the soldiers, who were between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five years old, “had no sense of strategy or mission” (page 19). They order their experience through superstition as opposed to rationality. Consequently, superstition becomes a sort of religious faith that has to save each of them from the twists of fate in the atmospheric strangeness of the jungle. For example, Kiowa “believes in the New Testament stories of life after death” (page 156), Jimmy Cross believes that he “received a good-luck charm from Martha” (page 14), and Henry Dobbins, who carries his

During those periods of boredom and discomfort, they “kept up a good-humored tolerance” (page120) and courage. In correlation with The Great Gatsby, apart from being war veterans, there is a similarity in terms of psychological disorder. Some of the characters suffer obsessive love disorder as great Gatsby does. Believably, no matter how courageous or brave the infantrymen might be, the absence of the women they love affects their emotion and causes them