In response to In response to The Things They Carried, Chapter 20: The Ghost Soldiers and Chapter 22: The Lives of the Dead

How did O’Brien’s injury impact his relationships with his platoon?

Tim O’Brien’s injury impacted how he was around his platoon members greatly. He states that he starts to become cold inside himself and he realized that he, “didn’t have that patriotic zeal anymore” since he was moved to a different company. He grew extremely envious of his platoon members because they were still experiencing the danger and adventure of combat. He started to become a different person altogether because he was so angry at Jorgenson, the medic that replaced Rat Kiley, for almost letting him die, and this drove much of his change in persona.

What is the significance of Linda and her story?

Linda is a significant character because she represents the war that everyone has inside themselves. She was a fighter; fighting for her life, but she was alone. She represents how the men felt in Vietnam because yes, they were all together fighting the same thing or they all agreed that they didn’t know what they were fighting, but each of them had their own different experiences and ways they were battling in Vietnam. There wasn’t a single person who would have the same exact experience that others could relate to, each situation was different.

In response to The Things They Carried, Chapter 18: Good Form

According to Tim O’Brien, what is the difference between “happening-truth” and “story-truth” in the chapter, Good Form?

According to Tim O’Brien, “happening-truth” is like the skeleton of a story, the structure. It doesn’t have a lot of detail, it’s mainly facts. “Story-truth” is the flesh and skin of the story, each individual little hair is accounted for. It includes the small and big details and the moral of the story. “Story-truth isn’t always real, but it’s what makes a story relatable and able to connect to specific events and characters. O’Brien states, “What stories can do, I guess, is to make things present.”, whether it’s a story with “happening-truth”, or “story-truth”, both serve the purpose of letting listeners or readers know about the story.

In response to Tim O’Brien’s chapter, Sweetheart of the Song tra Bong, from The Things They Carried:

During her time in Vietnam, Mary Anne changed dramatically. When she arrived, she was a typical American girl who was innocent and curious. During her time she spent in Vietnam, she slowly gained an interest in the guns and combat after she began helping the men in the medical unit. She stopped wearing makeup and jewelry and cut her hair showing that she no longer cared about her appearance. She eventually “ended” her relationship with Fossie and actually started going on ambushes and the men even said that her eyes weren’t bright blue anymore, they changed to the green of the jungles.

She changed because she had a different perspective than all of the men which made her more compelled to engage herself in the war. This transformation was very symbolic of the war itself because when she arrived, she immediately began helping with the medical medical unit and only weeks after that she began going on ambushes. Many men went into the war not knowing anything, just like Mary Anne, but they were quickly thrown into the war and had to fight. Not only does she symbolize the innocence of the men in the war, but also the loss of innocence because she wasn’t the ideal American teenage girl anymore. After being in Vietnam, she became a woman, not just a girl because she had been exposed to the horror of war, which consumed her entirely.

It does matter that she was a woman because she changed the perspective of these men on women, and Rat Kiley even tells the men that he’s telling the story to, not be sexist and just listen to the story because the message is what’s more important, the moral. Vietnam’s nature was inevitable and always changing just as the nature of Mary Anne. Things happened that weren’t expected and so many people lost their innocence on both sides.

In response to poetry from multiple beat poets

Trees

The pale rose

Crumbled in the sand

Feverish fairies

Exposed to the elements

Wrinkled books

Lived forever

All floating in an

Ocean of soul

Pety errors

Tears of rage

Brush fires and

Stone fields

Lived forever

Eons after tragedy

All floating in an

Ocean of soul

New continents

Mysterious tombs

Smelling the wind

through the

dead tree

And

Living tree

And

Deathsome tree

And

Lonesome tree

All floating in an

Ocean of soul

Even the better path had

Erosion

But there’s no misery

Only

Beautiful arms

Creating crisp shapes

Towards the

         Light

Their voices are cold

But

They paint their faces

Against the unspoken grief

And the wall of hands

Shining in the sky

All floating in an

Ocean of soul

.

One perspective of light and darkness

In response to James Baldwin's, Sonny's Blues, James Baldwin - "Sonny's Blues":

Jazz was a rigid, bubbly, exciting and mostly improvised art form when it was first created in the 1900s. The Jazz Age allowed African Americans to express their feeling through music, art and dance and was acceptable for them to do so. Jazz music/songs came out of slave work songs, that consisted of call-and-response songs and gospel/spiritual songs. The Jazz Age consisted of large and impactful shifts in literature, dance, art and music. As the Great Depression grew in America, the Jazz Age died, but the jazz foundation remained throughout.

James Baldwin is an African American writer and civil rights activist born on August 2, 1924. As a child, he went to church where his father preached and when he was old enough he started to preach as well. As he became older, he left his position at the church and started working many odd jobs as he began to invest part of his time in writing. Although he was a vital figure of the Civil Rights Movement, Baldwin was discriminated not only because he was an African American, but also because he was homosexual. Because of the discrimination he faced he decided to move to Paris so he could focus on his writing and to get away from American Society entirely and write about it. Much of his writing focused on racial issues, interracial relationships, homosexuality and other themes which society frowned upon. A large amount of his writing was influenced by his experiences he had in Harlem.

In his short story, Sonny’s Blues, he presents many powerful images of light and dark which creates a sorrowful atmosphere to engage and tell a meaningful and interpretive story. He doesn’t use the normal connotation good and bad for light and dark, instead he tells us in the story that light exposes the dark, which is not always a good thing, especially for young children.

At the very beginning of the story, the narrator is quick to state that young people, “were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which is now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone”. At this time, only white people played the important roles in movies and blacks were made fun of or were seen as dumb in the films if they were in any films. The narrator is hinting that darkness is lack of opportunity because white people have perfect lives that black people will never be able to obtain or that discrimination or segregation will always be in their lives and even though they have each other, no one has the same experience which makes them “alone” in a sense.

Later in the story, the narrator is having a “flashback” and is talking about when he was younger and his parents would have people from church come to their home on Sunday evening for dinner. The children would all play inside while the adults were outside in the darkness, “and the darkness in the faces frighten the child obscurely… In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light. Then the old folks will remember the children and they won’t talk any more that day. And when the light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness. He knows that every time this happens he’s moved just a little closer to that darkness outside. The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It’s what they’ve come from. It’s what they endure”. In this passage of the short story, the author is stating that the light exposes the darkness in the world. When the light reaches the younger generations, they are exposed to all the unfairness and injustice in the world around them and the older generations try to protect them from being exposed too soon because they do not want them to loose their innocence at a young age.

We can connect this example of light and dark to the Vietnam war in multiple ways. When American soldiers resting during the night, they were a little restless, but for the most part, they stayed where they were and relaxed. During the day when it was light out, the darkness of whatever they were fighting  became very evident and exposed to the American soldiers. The daytime made them realize why they were restless in the night.

Flood

My wild youth is being caged.

No one wants the rebels to come free

dreams to fly.

They want this jungle to be restricted

The mad fools don’t listen to our pleas

they fear that variety will come between us, but that is what makes us come together.

It feeds us.

The fury will build inside myself if we were all the same faceless person.

Let the gates open and the flood begin.

Let the waters consume you and boil inside your veins.

The wonders of heaven await us all

but for now we are on this earth

we must learn to dance in the whirling winds of morning

hum the melodies of the birds.

Sing to the bright sun  

pray to the cool moon.

The light connects all of us together on different paths.

The waters weave our long limbs together.

The molten fire inside us will soon

break the chains.

Let what you feel be heard