Guerrilla warfare

The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien, tells the story of a platoon in the Vietnam War. O’Brien uses many literary devices to help him portray the overall theme including repetition, details, and through emphasizing the reasons the soldiers are a part of the war. All of these combined portray the anti-war argument and illustrate the idea that when young men go into war, they carry many burdens, but the emotional burdens are the heaviest ones that they are never able to put this down.…

As Wayne E. Lee points out in his book Waging War, modern warfare revolves around insurgencies. Due to the asymmetry of weaponry in these conflicts, insurgencies aim to make warfare as protracted as possible. As seen in the 1966 movie The Battle of Algiers, the insurgencies in Algeria use their limited capacity for conflict to their advantage, and fight the French descriptive instead of head on. The French army failed to deal with the insurgency effectively and thus public opinion in France…

Even more so than the other American soldiers in Vietnam, Mary Ann is the embodiment of an outsider. She is also the representation of American arrogance in the Vietnam War. She does not belong there, and her story accentuates what happens when someone’s surroundings affect him or her. She arrives to Vietnam as Mark Fossie’s girlfriend, and she is the only tangible example of love in the novel. Mary Ann gets there dressed in her pink sweater and her white culottes, with a fresh face and a very…

War and religion. While in many cases, churches and other holy sites are often used as a way for people to avoid the violence of warfare, in cases such as the Crusades, religion can be the cause of warfare. The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien, does not explicitly focus on themes relating to the nature of the relationship between religion and war, rather it focuses mainly on other large ideas such as burdens and subjective truths. However, several symbols presented in some of the many…

Carried Through the War An estimated one million American soldiers died in the Vietnam War. The war was brutal, and even though I have not experienced war directly, I can imagine a persistent death awaiting each and every individual on the battlefield. It is his short story “The Things They Carried”, by author and writer Tim O’ Brien, that I believe truly illustrates the hardships and death of the Vietnam War and how they affected soldiers physically, spiritually, and mentally. To begin with,…

We see the first chapter of The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien to be the foundation for the rest of the novel, with exquisite descriptions of everyone and everything, to the foreshadowing and symbolism that embodies each character and “what they carry”. O’Brien offers us basic descriptions of what each member of Alpha Company carries that is described as “largely determined by necessity” (2). Some would carry knives, extra rations and what seemed like an overkill of supplies, while others…

“William Timothy O’Brien is a renowned American writer, famous for writing novels on the Vietnam War.” (FamousAuthors). One of his most famous novels is called “The Things They Carried.” O’Brien was born on October 1, 1946 in Austin, Minnesota. He grew up in Worthington, where that city played an important role in shaping his imagination and developing his artistic sensibility. Although O’Brien was against the war, he was conscripted into the United States Army and sent to Vietnam where he…

Everyone deals with certain types of situations in his or her own way. A person’s emotions and actions could also affect how he or she deals with their problems. In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien explains how the soldier’s emotions get the best of a person. Someone could also deal with their problems in a negative way. They could deal with their issues without help, which might make the situation even worse and may cause bigger problems. Someone might not know how to deal with a situation…

In the year of 1965 The United states of America had began to deploy troops to fight communism in the country of Vietnam. The U.S. would find themselves with new problems both overseas and at home. During the war there was a great amount of conflict that grew on American soil. Many people in the U.S. did not believe in the U.S. involvement in the war and made that clear through a series of violent and non-violent protests and demonstrations. Along with the problems in the U.S., there were many…

War lasted for an astonishing 19 years. Don’t you think if things aren’t going in our favor, we should remove ourselves from the situation? I would. And finally, both the Iraqis and the Vietnamese used guerilla warfare to fight the U.S. The United States were not used to guerilla warfare, and the fact that the Vietnamese had heavy forest vegetation to hide in was an added obstacle. But don’t be fooled, the wars differed from each other considerably, too. We went into both of the wars for…