Week 7 assigned topic

In the primary sources article of PBS, President Johnson addresses the nation to inform them of the North Vietnamese regimes deliberate attacks against U.S. vessels operating in international waters, and how he has sent planes to bomb these hostile attacks. We later find out that these claims were false and that he sent these planes overseas without Congressional approval and because of this, Congress enacted the War Powers Act in 1973, requiring the president to receive explicit Congressional approval before committing American forces overseas. In my open topic this week I wrote about how O’Brien uses “stories” to explain war, and in order for it to be a true war story it must seem false or unbelievable. This example of the Tonkin Gulf incident correlates because President Johnson uses a false story to dupe the US people into believing that there really is a reason to go to war. We see examples of this same dishonesty and corruption in The Things They Carried. One example is when Mitchell Sanders tells the men about the six men hearing voices in the jungle, and he admits later to making up bits and pieces of this story just so his listeners would listen to it and believe it.
http://www.war-stories.com/camouflage-whisenant-1967.htm In this article, it describes the innocence of the boys fighting over in Vietnam and how things were so boring sometimes that they had to find whatever entertainment they could in order to keep from going insane. In “The Things They Carried” O’Brien talks about this same boredom and how two boys were tossing smoke grenades around instead of a football and how Ted Lavender adopts a puppy and later Azar kills it and claims his own immaturity as excuse. (Spin, 37)
This article and the PBS primary source give more insight into what the Vietnam War truly was and the theme of innocence and deceit has given me new tools to look at while I’m reading “The Things They Carried.”