War and The Power of Words
"My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see."
-Joseph Conrad
The Vietnam War began after Vietnam split into two parts in 1954: Communist North Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh and South Vietnam under Ngo Dinh Diem. Soviet Russia allied with North Vietnam, and the United States reacted by allying with South Vietnam. President Lyndon B. Johnson began sending troops to Vietnam in 1964 to combat the Vietcong. Dedicated soldiers trudged through the dense jungles of Vietnam, they crawled through collapsing underground tunnels and braved burning villages. These are the circumstances under which Tim O‘Brien‘s narrative, The
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Authors often use flashbacks as a means of adding background information into the current events taking place in their story. This is done by interrupting a specific activity within their story to give the reader additional information about a character's past, including his secrets, inner and external thoughts and emotions, conflicts, or significant events that have impacted their lives. In Tim O’Brien’s piece, he writes of a flashback had by Lieutenant Cross and Martha. Cross zones out of the war and thinks of when he kissed Martha after they went to the movies together. He recalls what she was wearing when he put his hand on her knee, and how he should have been braver that evening. This flashback serves as a way for the reader to connect with the character Lt. Cross. O’Brien uses the flashback to demonstrate the emotional toll war took on him. Cross focused on that evening with Martha because he did not want to focus on the war itself. Instead of focusing on the blood and gore involved with her he chooses to concentrate on Martha. The sexier image of Martha back home waiting for him was much more comforting than the reality of
The period from 1960’s to 1970’s was a hardship time for Americans because of Vietnam invasion. In an attempt to contain and defeat communism, the United States, oblivious of the enemy capability and filled with pride, invaded Vietnam at a cost of large financial expense and human lives. North Vietnamese military supported by forces of China and the Soviet Union fought the American force ferociously and was able to force America to end its invasion in 1975. As with most other third world countries, Vietnam also has a long history of colonization by European powers.
The start of the book in the late 1970 the United States had pretty much won the Vietnam War. We had defeated the Viet Cong in the field, returned most of the control to the South Vietnamese and where the South Vietnamese could continue the war on their own. This is when Army General Creighton Abrams replaced William Westmoreland in 1968, after the military defeat but public relations disaster of the Tet Offensive. Where Westmoreland had treated the War as a military exercise, Abrams understood its political side. Abrams worked on developing a new war plan at the Pentagon.
In a “Vietnam Veterans against the war”, John Kerry’s comment on President Nixon not wanting to become, “the first President to lose a war,” illustrates just how insistent Nixon was on maintaining a superior Presidential image of power. Ironically, Nixon has one of the more, if not the most, tarnished Presidential image due to the Watergate scandal. Kerry’s speech drove the idea that the Veterans fighting in Vietnam did not believe that they were there to do good and did not feel that they were the “heroes” liberalizing the Vietnamese from the dangers of communism. As he notes, most people there did not understand the difference between communism and democracy. The freedom the Vietnamese sought was liberation from the helicopters, the bombs,
In A Viet Cong Memoir, we receive excellent first hands accounts of events that unfolded in Vietnam during the Vietnam War from the author of this autobiography: Truong Nhu Tang. Truong was Vietnamese at heart, growing up in Saigon, but he studied in Paris for a time where he met and learned from the future leader Ho Chi Minh. Truong was able to learn from Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary ideas and gain a great political perspective of the conflicts arising in Vietnam during the war. His autobiography shows the readers the perspective of the average Vietnamese citizen (especially those involved with the NLF) and the attitudes towards war with the United States. In the book, Truong exclaims that although many people may say the Americans never lost on the battlefield in Vietnam — it is irrelevant.
The guilt and thought of Lavender's death were still haunting him. O’brien uses allusion in chapter “Love” (2). After O’Brien conversed about Lavender's death with the veteran Lieutenant, O’Brien decided to break the ice, change up the conversation, and ask about Martha. Cross left the scene and
Further, into the story, Cross is seen attempting to gather his senses and continue, he even tells himself “No more fantasies” (O’Brien, 13). He would continuously shut down his thoughts about Martha and refused to think about her in any way positively because he was no longer a civilian. He was the leader of the group and “This was not Mount Sebastian, it was another world…a place where men died because of carelessness and gross stupidity,” (O’Brien, 13). In some ways, this seems like O’Brien stressing about war and how change can happen within a matter of
At the beginning of the story Lieutenant Cross is constantly daydreaming and romanticizing about a girl back home named Martha which distracts him from leading his men like he is supposed to be doing. It is only after one of his men gets killed that he finally realizes that his daydreaming has likely caused the death of one of his men and he then understands that he needs to take responsibility for his men by being the leader that they need him to
One of the most controversial wars in history and a turning point in American foreign policy, the emotions and events surrounding the Vietnam War capture the essence of the era. The rise of rebellious youth culture and anti-war and anti-draft movements were key social aspects of American life leading up to and during the fighting. (Doc 2, 3) On the political side, Congress aimed to control the Chief-Executive with legislation such as the War Powers Act of 1973, requiring the president to remove all unreported troops in Vietnam and report any further sent. (Doc 7) To say the country was divided would be a massive understatement.
“American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and our National Identity” is a book that takes us through 20 years of the War in Vietnam from about 1955 to 1975. The Vietnam War is the second longest war in US history encompassing 5 presidents which include Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford. Appy’s book gives a unique American perspective on incredible, horrifying, and inspiring stories in Vietnam as well as American. Through Apps book readers learn about different communism containment methods that America used. Readers also learn about different methods of attack on Vietnam from an American standpoint and how the different failures of the US army and US politicians turned many heads into hard truths about the war.
After a long day of marching, “He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there” (1). The author uses abstract diction to emphasize the strong love Cross maintains for Martha, signifying the huge role Martha plays in Cross’s experience in war. Not long after, Cross’s dreams becomes more exotic. Hoping that Martha is still a virgin, he recalls a story of when he got rejected, It was at "a dark theater, he remembered, and the movie was Bonnie and Clyde, and Martha wore a tweed skirt, and during the final scene, when he touched her knee, she turned and looked at him in a sad, sober way that made him pull his hand back”.
It is quite difficult to compare two wars that happened 180 years apart from each other, the Vietnam war 1955 to 1975, and the American Revolutionary war 1775 to 1783. Yes, both wars are all that different from each other, in fact I would say that they were the two least similar wars in American history. These wars are very similar because they both used guerilla warfare, a form of irregular warfare that uses tactics such as ambushes, sabotage, raids, and mobility to fight a larger less mobile military force. However a major difference in the wars was that the Revolutionary war was fought to gain independence, while the Vietnam war was fought to maintain independence. Another difference is that the U.S. were ‘Victors’ in the Revolutionary war, and were not so in the Vietnam war.
I find Ho Chi Minh’s letter far more persuasive than Lyndon B. Johnson’s. Using ethos, pathos, and logos, he forms a solid argument that supports Vietnam’s stance on the war. He appeals to one’s emotions by expressing the injustices faced by his people, writing, “In South Viet-Nam a half-million American soldiers and soldiers from the satellite countries have resorted to the most barbarous methods of warfare, such as napalm, chemicals, and poison gases in order to massacre our fellow countrymen, destroy the crops, and wipe out villages.” Words such as “massacre” and “barbarous” highlight the severity of these crimes, and invoke feelings of guilt and remorse in the reader. Chi Minh uses ethos to support his logos, or logical, views on the
In Tim O’brien’s book, The Things They Carried, we see the detrimental causes and effects of the enforced stereotype of male masculinity. Tim uses many factors including the setting, characters, symbolism and other components like these to conveys his feelings and emotions. Many of those feelings and emotions derive from his personal experience in the war. The Things They Carried accurately shows what it is to struggle with the stereotypical image of a man in how it presents itself in everyday life along with its adverse and restricting effects.
Ho Chi Minh, Former Prime Minister of Vietnam, once said: “You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and I will win” (Vietnam War Quotations). Vietnam is in Southeast Asia with the population of 96 million. The country border China, Laos and Cambodia (The World Factbook: VIETNAM). Vietnam used to be ruled by France but later declared independence after World War II under Ho Chi Minh.
The surprise nature of America’s attack coupled with the warfare inexperience of many journalists present in Vietnam saw many of them change their perspectives on their countries involvement in the war. During the war, medias role in the war was changing and this then became another “check and balance” for the United States’ government. (Source B) The Vietnam war was considered as a “living room war” in the sense that the battles and casualties were being shown everyday on American television screens as daily television programs. Source B states that the fact that violence was viewed in the homes of many Americans made the anti-war protests to follow “extremely personal and surreal”.