Korean People's Army

War stories are gruesome. They capture the reality of war--death, grief, and pain. “The Sniper” and “Where Have You Gone, Charming Billy?” (by Liam O’Flaherty and Tim O’Brien respectively) are both shining examples of this; unpacking the glorification of victory to reveal how humans are dehumanized and trained to kill other people. Their differences outline a common theme: how war dehumanizes people from killing and guilt, and how that all builds into a catastrophe later on in life. “The…

Tim O’Brien is a critically acclaimed author that is known for his gut-wrenching stories of his time during the Vietnam War. In his award-winning novel The Things They Carried, he explains countless different instances of struggle and strife in the form of numerous short stories. O’Brien was born in Minnesota in 1946. He majored in political science, but was later drafted in 1968 and stayed in Vietnam about 8 months. After the war, he finished graduate school at Harvard and now, at 71, resides…

George Herring’s essay “The Legacy of Vietnam” is a fair portrait of one of the most notorious wars in the United States history – the Vietnam War. The essay starts with enormous figures of loss from both sides, and ends with the lessons we can learn from the war as well as from those losses. Herring keeps a neutral voice by providing different perspectives on the issues happened in both Vietnam and the United States. This neutral characteristic of Herring’s essay helps the author deliverers his…

Tim OBriens story, The Things They Carried, is more than just a war story. It beautifully depicts the shame and guilt that soldiers had to live for throughout the war, and unfortunately, the rest of their lives. Through the stories and experiences of soldiers in Tim OBriens vicinity, the Alpha Company, we get to know them not as mindless soldiers fighting for their country, but as people. Shame and guilt is a recurring theme in the book all soldiers in the story have experienced it one way or…

The citizens of ancient China had to provide the resources and labor to build the wall, and this caused them an immense amount of suffering. Emperor Qin Shihuangdi sent 300,000 conscript laborers and countless prisoners to build the wall (Langmead and Garnaut 2017). However, this number does not cover the full scope of the labor, as for each man working on the wall, “dozens must have been needed to build service roads and transport supplies” (Lewis 2007, 59). The leaders of the Qin and Han…

Yuval Harari’s claim that war is a specific experience only truly understood by those who have endured the experience themselves is a common conception that is frequently accepted even to this day. It is easy to understand how one would believe that war changes the people who have experienced it considering the wide range of literature that has been devoted to portraying this idea of the untouchability of war. The fact that so many artists and writers have dedicated their lives to creating…

In the short story written by Tim O'Brien, "The Things They Carried," O'Brien writes about a platoon of American soldiers fighting on the ground in the Vietnam War. He writes about the items soldiers carried on their backs and on their minds. This is similar to other wars such as the Gulf War in 1990. However, the technology, geographical features, and the politics of the two wars have several differences. There are similarities between Vietnam and Iraq: In both conflicts, there was pressure…

to fight or stolen from their families to become a soldier. In the article Child Soldiers, Prosecution, some say that “children are often forced into fighting and have little choice over whether or not the enlist.” Many towns are destroyed by an army and take the children with them for fighting. They have no say in this cause, and if they do, death is upon their short lived lives. But why would people want…

While many women are not allowed to join their male counterparts in ground combat, they are still risking their own lives to fight for our country. Women may not be allowed to enter ground combat, but this does not prevent them from piloting armed vehicles, or driving other service men into the fight. Even though they are not directly in combat with the men, they still are risking their lives. “They fly attack helicopters, command military police companies, drive infantry soldiers into combat…

when you look at how our modern society has changed over the years, you will be shocked at how often it changes and what it changes into. For example when we read Ambush by Tim O’Brien, modern society consisted mostly of just young men joining the army and fighting for our country, even if it wasn't something the young men pictured themselves doing. Their modern society included many soldiers who had to deal with the memories and moral dilemmas that haunted them even after the war was over.…