![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sub_dividedCommencement is in four days. I'll smile and accept my diploma and pretend to be a role model for my four adorable cousins who will no doubt be wearing matching dresses and then I will leave this state and settle down to a nice low-key job answering telephones where I will NEVER HAVE TO WRITE ANOTHER PAPER AS LONG AS I LIVE.
In the meantime, here's another book review.
The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brian
Read this for History 467 (US Since 1945). According to the syllabus,
In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien grapples with the myths and the memories of Vietnam, with themes of love and masculinity, courage and cowardice, internal and external enemies, responsibility at the levels of the individual and the nation collectively. Write a short response, about one single-spaced page, that evaluates O'Brien's themes of courage and responsibility with the additional perspective offered by the following three statements by young American men about their service in Vietnam:
Winter Soldier Investigation Introduction by Walter Cradell
Winter Soldier Investigation Conclusion by John Kerry
John O'Neil vs John Kerry on The Dick Cravitt show (this is the same O'Neil, by the way, who would later found Swift Boat Veterans for Truth)
You can guess what's coming, right? That's right, the response!
(Plz ignore bad phrasing, this was written in like two hours.)
During the Winter Soldier investigation, William Crandell and John Kerry needed to defend their actions against a deeply embedded tradition that equated military service with heroism and civilian dissent with disloyalty. Rather than attack the tradition, they attempted to expand it by casting themselves as “winter soldiers” – soldiers who were continuing to serve in difficult circumstances even after their time had ended. In other words, they explicitly took up the mantle of patriotic military service and applied it outside of the battlefield. Kerry described the investigation as “one last mission to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war,” with the implication that dissent could be just as warlike as service, and could require just as much courage.
Tim O’Brian shares Kerry and Crandell’s desire to escape traditional notions of bravery and patriotism, but takes this desire one step further when he claims that serving in the military can actually be proof of cowardice rather than of bravery: “I was a coward. I went to war” (61). O’Brien does not confine his criticism to politicians (“We are here to bear witness not against America, but against those policy makers who are perverting America” – Crandell) but extends it to every person whose blind acceptance of government policy has allowed bad policies to continue. His goal is not to work within traditional notions of bravery and responsibility, but to invert them.
In The Things They Carried, O’Brian calls the desire to avoid embarrassment the single greatest factor driving men to war. He describes his own motivation for accepting the draft as growing out of fear rather than bravery -- “I feared losing the respect of my parents. I feared the law. I feared ridicule” (45). By revealing this, O’Brian is speaking directly against centuries of accepted wisdom in which it was the men who went to war who were brave, and those who did not who were cowards (“damned sissies” - 45).
Even more shocking, O’Brian claims that were he truly brave, he would have skipped out on his draft and gone to Canada. He describes the moment of truth: “Right then, with the shore so close, I understood that I would not do what I should do. I would not swim away from my country and my hometown and my life. I would not be brave” (57). In a total reversal of tradition, draft-dodging becomes an act of conscience; upholding the draft becomes an act of cowardice. “I wouldn’t tolerate it. I couldn’t endure the mockery, disgrace, or patriotic ridicule…I couldn’t make myself be brave. It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that’s all it was” (59).
O’Brian argues against a military/civilian duality in which blind adherence to military duty is automatically good and conscientious civilian dissent is automatically bad. He rages against the “blind patriotism” of his hometown, and furthermore holds the people who practice it – presumably the bulk of the American people, a charge neither Kerry nor Crandell was willing to make – directly responsible for the mess in Vietnam. “How much I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simpleminded patriotism…sending me off to fight a war they didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand...I held them personally and individually responsible” (45).
/end response.
I pulled most of that from the fourth chapter; there are other themes as well. Basically, The Things They Carried stands out from tens of thousands of other partially fictional, partially factual accounts of the Vietnam War because the author is a liberal. He doesn't want to romanticize this war or vilify all wars -- he doesn't want to give War any kind of larger meaning at all. According to O'Brian, war is in the details. (In The Things They Carried, haha.) At the same time, he struggles not to let those details overwhelm the Big Picture. In fact, as much as this book is about the details, it is about this struggle, which is also O'Brian's struggle to write a true story without resorting to pat "truths".
The way he goes about this is to continually remind the reader that he or she is reading a work of fiction based on real experience. So a chapter describing a striking, poignant, beautiful, funny scene will be followed by a chapter explaining that all of it is made up. Or maybe the core is right but the details are wrong, or the truth is far more horrible, or far less horrible, or (the author's favorite line) maybe it doesn't matter whether the story is 100% true or not, because it expresses a more fundamental truth -- it's a "true story that never happened" (page 84).
I liked the book. It's written in an easy conversational style, and it analyzes itself so that you (the reader) don't have to. There's no single storyline to connect all the chapters, instead the book is like a series of short stories with author commentary inserted between them. Some chapters were originally written as stand-alone articles...of varying quality. ^^;
Recommended if you like war stories, absurdity, or reading about writing. Disrecommended if you are allergic to liberals.
In the meantime, here's another book review.
The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brian
Read this for History 467 (US Since 1945). According to the syllabus,
In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien grapples with the myths and the memories of Vietnam, with themes of love and masculinity, courage and cowardice, internal and external enemies, responsibility at the levels of the individual and the nation collectively. Write a short response, about one single-spaced page, that evaluates O'Brien's themes of courage and responsibility with the additional perspective offered by the following three statements by young American men about their service in Vietnam:
Winter Soldier Investigation Introduction by Walter Cradell
Winter Soldier Investigation Conclusion by John Kerry
John O'Neil vs John Kerry on The Dick Cravitt show (this is the same O'Neil, by the way, who would later found Swift Boat Veterans for Truth)
You can guess what's coming, right? That's right, the response!
(Plz ignore bad phrasing, this was written in like two hours.)
During the Winter Soldier investigation, William Crandell and John Kerry needed to defend their actions against a deeply embedded tradition that equated military service with heroism and civilian dissent with disloyalty. Rather than attack the tradition, they attempted to expand it by casting themselves as “winter soldiers” – soldiers who were continuing to serve in difficult circumstances even after their time had ended. In other words, they explicitly took up the mantle of patriotic military service and applied it outside of the battlefield. Kerry described the investigation as “one last mission to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war,” with the implication that dissent could be just as warlike as service, and could require just as much courage.
Tim O’Brian shares Kerry and Crandell’s desire to escape traditional notions of bravery and patriotism, but takes this desire one step further when he claims that serving in the military can actually be proof of cowardice rather than of bravery: “I was a coward. I went to war” (61). O’Brien does not confine his criticism to politicians (“We are here to bear witness not against America, but against those policy makers who are perverting America” – Crandell) but extends it to every person whose blind acceptance of government policy has allowed bad policies to continue. His goal is not to work within traditional notions of bravery and responsibility, but to invert them.
In The Things They Carried, O’Brian calls the desire to avoid embarrassment the single greatest factor driving men to war. He describes his own motivation for accepting the draft as growing out of fear rather than bravery -- “I feared losing the respect of my parents. I feared the law. I feared ridicule” (45). By revealing this, O’Brian is speaking directly against centuries of accepted wisdom in which it was the men who went to war who were brave, and those who did not who were cowards (“damned sissies” - 45).
Even more shocking, O’Brian claims that were he truly brave, he would have skipped out on his draft and gone to Canada. He describes the moment of truth: “Right then, with the shore so close, I understood that I would not do what I should do. I would not swim away from my country and my hometown and my life. I would not be brave” (57). In a total reversal of tradition, draft-dodging becomes an act of conscience; upholding the draft becomes an act of cowardice. “I wouldn’t tolerate it. I couldn’t endure the mockery, disgrace, or patriotic ridicule…I couldn’t make myself be brave. It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that’s all it was” (59).
O’Brian argues against a military/civilian duality in which blind adherence to military duty is automatically good and conscientious civilian dissent is automatically bad. He rages against the “blind patriotism” of his hometown, and furthermore holds the people who practice it – presumably the bulk of the American people, a charge neither Kerry nor Crandell was willing to make – directly responsible for the mess in Vietnam. “How much I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simpleminded patriotism…sending me off to fight a war they didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand...I held them personally and individually responsible” (45).
/end response.
I pulled most of that from the fourth chapter; there are other themes as well. Basically, The Things They Carried stands out from tens of thousands of other partially fictional, partially factual accounts of the Vietnam War because the author is a liberal. He doesn't want to romanticize this war or vilify all wars -- he doesn't want to give War any kind of larger meaning at all. According to O'Brian, war is in the details. (In The Things They Carried, haha.) At the same time, he struggles not to let those details overwhelm the Big Picture. In fact, as much as this book is about the details, it is about this struggle, which is also O'Brian's struggle to write a true story without resorting to pat "truths".
The way he goes about this is to continually remind the reader that he or she is reading a work of fiction based on real experience. So a chapter describing a striking, poignant, beautiful, funny scene will be followed by a chapter explaining that all of it is made up. Or maybe the core is right but the details are wrong, or the truth is far more horrible, or far less horrible, or (the author's favorite line) maybe it doesn't matter whether the story is 100% true or not, because it expresses a more fundamental truth -- it's a "true story that never happened" (page 84).
I liked the book. It's written in an easy conversational style, and it analyzes itself so that you (the reader) don't have to. There's no single storyline to connect all the chapters, instead the book is like a series of short stories with author commentary inserted between them. Some chapters were originally written as stand-alone articles...of varying quality. ^^;
Recommended if you like war stories, absurdity, or reading about writing. Disrecommended if you are allergic to liberals.