War In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

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Wars are unpredictable and can change people’s lives: One way is by fusing with the daily lives of the people who fought in the war. Not only that, but soldiers never seem to forget those special moments when they felt as if they were part of something great and the times where they feared for their lives. Memories of the people they care about are what kept soldiers alive at war, but once they come back it seems as if those memories aren’t as special as they were during the war, making them feel dissatisfied. In general, wars are not fair to those you were in them because it changes how soldiers perceived things, and their personalities, drastically. The people who fought in the war start lacking empathy for others, other than those who fought …show more content…
In The Things They Carried Mary Ann who arrived at a camp to stay with her boyfriend becomes an unrecognizable person. She learns quickly how to use guns and would never back out when she had to help operate someone. Mary Ann stopped caring about hygiene and wearing makeup by one point. Usually, girls would love to look pretty for their boyfriends or just look pretty. She goes from being a normal girl to someone who shows no emotions towards anyone and becomes someone that is part of the forest “At least for a moment she seemed to be the same pretty young girl who had arrived a few weeks earlier….For a long while the girl gazed down at Fossie, almost blankly, and in the candlelight her face had the composure of someone perfectly at peace with herself. ...In part it was her eyes: utterly flat and indifferent. There was no emotion in her stare, no sense of the person behind it.” (Tim O’Brien, 67) Another story in The Things they Carried talks about how after the war, Norman Baker, a veteran from the Vietnam war, drove aimlessly around a lake thinking about the war and how he almost won a Silver Star. “On his eleventh revolution he switched off the air-conditioning, opened up his window, and rested his elbow comfortably on the sill, driving with one hand. There was nothing to say. He could not talk about it and never would.” (O’Brien, 139). To him nothing mattered everything that was important to him was gone. He did not care about anyone or anything in particular because no matter how hard he tried to fit into society again it just was not working at
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