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Important Quotes From The Things They Carried

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Soldiers receiving a draft letter for war is typically a very hard and stressful time in their lives, especially the draft for Vietnam, the only draft America has had so far. Most of the men being drafted were young and unexperienced in war, making them hate it even more. They were taken and dropped into some of the worst circumstances the U.S. military has ever seen and expected to fight alongside people they had never even met before. As the war went on, the platoon members would bond, and have to watch their new friends get injured or die right in front of them, and wonder why they didn’t die as well. The harshness of the war made the soldiers look for any kind of escape from reality or way to make war easier, and they found drugs to be …show more content…

After getting hooked on the stress-relieving effects of the drugs administered to them, then looked to marijuana to help even more. Once the marijuana period wore off, soldiers began taking heroin which really caused issues after coming back home. Statistics show that at one point or another around the time of the war, at least 20% of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam were on one or both of these drugs. Even in the book, The Things
They Carried, one man always carried “a hefty amount of marijuana with him” (O’Brien).
However, once he died, his fellow platoon members that had never previously been mentioned of doing drugs smoked all of his weed while waiting on the helicopter to arrive just because of the sheer harshness of watching their buddy get shot and drop dead.
Upon returning home from war, most soldiers that had been on drugs ended up addicted to them and suffered from PTSD, and once again looked to drugs as an escape, only to find out that PTSD is enhanced by the use of drugs. Most of the soldiers that had started these drugs during the war had trouble getting off of them at the end or after returning home. And it was

Carpenter 3 because of the heavy drug use that returning soldiers experienced more PTSD than did any

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