Jim Neilson

This article gave a lot of different insight to the book "The Things They Carried". One of the quotes that Neilson brings a great since of how the men felt about the war and when they were going into battle. For instance, "That little field," he writes, had swallowed so much. My best friend. My pride. My belief in myself as a man of some small dignity and courage. Still, it was hard to find any real emotion. . . . After that long night in the rain, I'd seemed to grow cold inside, all the illusions gone, all the old ambitions and hopes for myself sucked away into the mud. (210) War is a very harsh environment. A lot of people do not realize the impact it can make on someone’s life. We see war as a little thing if someone dies. However, if that was you that died, or it was someone close to you, you realize that one death can mean a lot more than just a short article in the newspaper. A life can also be something that people take for granite. Everyone thinks that they are going to live another day and so on, but in reality someone’s life can be taken away just as quick as it was given to them. This quote also talks about how “I'd seemed to grow cold inside, all the illusions gone, all the old ambitions and hopes for myself sucked away into the mud.” When someone in the war loses someone around them, their mind becomes engulfed on what is happening around them and they forget their orders and they lose track of what is going on. Suddenly they fight for one another and bleed for one another for they never know which day will be their last.

The Things They Carried

The short stories made up to what is known as, "The Things They Carried", has captured my attention more than any of the previous novels. This one actually has some historical events and tells stories from the pas, whereas all the other books we have read have a kind of "demon like" reference from my views and i cannot relate to them at all. O'Brien begins to tell different stories he tries to portray why a soldier should be teling their stories. For instance, “And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed”. “In other cases you can’t even tell a true war story. Sometimes it’s just beyond telling”. Everybody becomes so wrapped up in the adventure and how the stories can show a very positive outlook, they often can misinterpret what the author from the short story is trying to tell to his audience. The soldiers often want to persuade their readers to be happy and tell them the victories they had or the lives they have saved, however, it may be hard for them to get into depth for to the reality of war and how you witness death everyday and how you see your fellow soldiers fighting side by side dying. "If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie." This demonstrates how everyone is deceived by the war stories which we are told rather than seeing the reality of what goes on “behind enemy lines”. The end!