Before Christmas Vacation, I read a book called The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. He had a very interesting pattern of switching between different main characters. At times, it made the story very hard to understand, but other times, it gave everything said a higher meaning.
When Tim O'Brien found out that he was being drafted to fight in Vietnam, he didn't know what to think about it. He decided to run away to Canada, and stopped for a rest at a small lodge right on the United States/ Canada border. An old man lived and worked there, and Mr. O'Brien stayed at his lodge for about a week , and helped him out with various tasks. Even though the border was less than 15 minutes away, Mr. O'Brien still decided that he didn't want to disgrace his family and decided to return home.
The way that Mr. O'Brien turned around instead of going across the border really surprised me. It made me think about the whole idea of the draft. The draft has its pros and its cons. One thing thats good about the draft is that it makes the army larger, and allows for everyone in the army to have a little less work to do. It makes things less busy for everyone when there are more people to bear the load. But on the other hand, the idea of "quality over quantity" comes up a lot. Wouldn't you rather have 5 very committed soldiers over 10 not so committed soldiers?
It also surprised me that Mr. O'Brien made the decision to come home. In other books that I have read about Vietnam, the person being drafted seems to stay stuck in the middle. It normally takes someone to push him to make a decision. Go to Canada, or go to Vietnam.
A trend that I have seen with non fiction books about people that went to Vietnam is that when the soldier comes home, he is normally crazy, or kills himself. One of those things happened in this book, but not to Mr. O'Brien. One of the men in his platoon went home and eventually hanged himself. I want to know why this seems to be very common amongst Vietnam Veterans, but is very seldom heard about with other wars, such as World War II and Korea.
Mr. O'Brien did mention that at night "ghosts" could be heard that could drive a man crazy, but wouldn't similar things happen in other theaters of war? I do know that Vietnam Veterans did not receive a warm welcome when they came home like veterans of World War II did. Perhaps this added to the trauma, and is why suicides are not as commonly heard about amongst World War II veterans. As for veterans of later wars, I'm sure new programs have been established to help veterans deal with grief. There seems to be a program, study, or commission on almost everything nowadays.
No comments:
Post a Comment