Where The Wind Leads: An Analysis

“The Sacred Willow” portrays four generations of a Vietnamese family that stretches from the traditional mandarin culture of northern Vietnam, the French occupation, the Vietnamese war, to life in the US. A main portion of this book is centered around the narrator Mai’s father Duong Thieu Chi and his struggle of working in the government while raising a family during the time of French Occupation. Throughout Mai’s accounts, her father’s internal conflict between good and bad as well as modern and traditional are highlighted to symbolize the 20th century Vietnamese sentiments towards their country and their call for independence.

In chapter three of “No Promises in the Wind” the train stopped in a town late in the afternoon. The bulls (as called in the book) are the men who are sent to get the free riders off of the train, but after the accident the bulls were nowhere to be seen. Everyone on the trains were able to get off on their own accord, because there were no bulls around. In the town’s depot no one paid any attention to them. Joey’s face was red and swollen because of all the crying he had done.

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. In order to understand this mindset, we have to understand how the NLF

Cant we all just get along? These two stories “The Sniper” and “Cranes” show the really bad aspects of war and how they can really effect humans. In the story “The Sniper” the theme for the sniper is “War knows no boundaries, age, sex, location, time of day, or family ties. In cranes it talks about how the two friends in the story, one becomes a rebel the other a government worker. “Cranes” was written by Hwang Sunwon and translated by Peter H. Lee. And “The Sniper” was written by Liam O Flaherty. Although the setting of both stories was during the civil war the themes are the same and different.

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. Men went through so many tasks during the Vietnam War physically and mentally.

Prompt Question: Discuss the ideas developed by the text creator about the role adversity plays in shaping an individual’s identity.

Nam Le’s “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” is categorized in “ethnic story” narrated his Vietnamese life in order to meet an upcoming deadline even though finally he can’t submit his story because his father burns his work. Throughout the story, Nam the narrator talks about “the past” which he experiences when he was young including the recent experience that he has got from his father reunion. Not only does the story tell us about the past which, but it also shows a connection of time between past, present, and future. Likewise, the story shows the relationship between son and father which is the main theme of this story; and shows how the past is important and affect to them differently. Also, the story of the past could lead to the end of the story that can be interpreted like a prediction of the direction of their relationship in the future. Do you see the connection of time in the story?

In the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, the soldiers have to carry a lot of things physically and mentally. One of the biggest things the soldiers have to carry is conflict, but not just between other people, inside of themselves as well. In the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien the author has an internal conflict of whether to go fight in the war in Vietnam or to run away to Canada which he tells through the story “On the Rainy River.”

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.

Regret is a powerful emotion that has the ability to scar someone for the rest of their life. Moments of regret can come from relationships, self-made decisions and life changing events. The idea of regret also applies to “A Marker on the Side of the Boat” by Bao Ninh and “On the Rainy River” by Tim O’Brien. Although these two literary pieces are very different in many ways, both authors describe the experience of the Vietnam War as a time of regretful decisions that negatively impacted people of both the American side and the Vietnamese side. Both authors tell a story about a character that recalls of flashbacks of the war, where they grieve over the past decisions that have affected them for the rest of their life.

On the Rainy River is a story about a man, Tim O’Brien, who struggles with a life altering decision. He evaluated his own personal convictions regarding the Vietnam War at an isolated fishing lodge by the Canadian border. Three different forms of isolation are present in this story. These include physical, emotional, and societal isolation – all of which had an effect on how Tim dealt his conflicting emotions.

During the turbulent times of the Vietnam War, thousands of young men entered the warzone and came face-to-face with unimaginable scenes of death, destruction, and turmoil. While some perished in the dense Asian jungles, others returned to American soil and were forced to confront their lingering combat trauma. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried provides distinct instances of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and reveals the psychological trauma felt by soldiers in the Vietnam War.

Readers, especially those reading historical fiction, always crave to find believable stories and realistic characters. Tim O’Brien gives them this in “The Things They Carried.” Like war, people and their stories are often complex. This novel is a collection stories that include these complex characters and their in depth stories, both of which are essential when telling stories of the Vietnam War. Using techniques common to postmodern writers, literary techniques, and a collection of emotional truths, O’Brien helps readers understand a wide perspective from the war, which ultimately makes the fictional stories he tells more believable.

America’s war heroes all have the same stories to tell but different tales. Prescribed with the same coloring page to fill in, and use their methods and colors to bring the image to life. This is the writing style and tactic used by Tim O’Brien in his novel, “The Things They Carried”. Steven Kaplan’s short story criticism, The Undying Certainty of the Narrator in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, provides the audience with an understanding of O’Brien’s techniques used to share “true war” stories of the Vietnam War. Kaplan explains the multitude of stories shared in each of the individual characters, narration and concepts derived from their personal experiences while serving active combat duty during the Vietnam War,

Much like the Narrator, his parents were born in North Vietnam and immigrated to the south in 1958. This was because catholic priests convinced them that the Viet Cong would commit atrocities when they took over. When the communist reach spread to the south, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s mother fled alongside him and his brother, leaving his father and sister behind in Saigon. This was unintentional, as the author describes; “My mother can’t communicate with my father, so she takes our lives into her hands and decides to flee the town on foot”. Luckily, his father had the same idea and through happenstance, they ended up leaving on the same barge. Though he didn 't suffer the same trauma as the Narrator on pages 48-50, when an errant gunman kills his godson and best friends wife, Viet experienced much misery during his journey. In an interview with Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air, he remembers guards aboard his ship shooting smaller rafts for fear of them being Viet Cong. Upon further research into this event, Viet found that most of these boats were homemade rafts which housed the poor of