WEEK SEVEN SUMMARY

I made a lot of comments to various posts; I find this blog really interesting and much of the writing and analysis powerful and compelling. It's very sophisticated stuff, and I have to confess, I'm impressed and intrigued by the dynamic here.

I can't help but notice, though, that a number of you (like, all except Zach) fell short in terms of posting everything that was required. It might be a good idea, given the holistic structure of things, to make sure you're making up for such oversights in future weeks ;) and to go back through the posts and comments for this week, and consider engaging some of the very interesting issues that have come up...

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.”

Week 7: Open Topic

One of the recurring structures of the book is storytelling. I think this is an interesting topic to cover because O’Brien believes that stories contain immense power and allow tellers and listeners to confront the past together and share knowledge with each other. From Mitchell Sanders stories of the six men who hear sounds in the jungle to Rat Kiley shooting himself in the foot so that he can be excused from Vietnam, we see the author Tim O’Brien use storytelling as an attempt to lure us into the “Jungle” of Vietnam with him and Alpha Company. This is what this book consists of, short stories, and they are accounts from Tim O’Brien that he is manifesting through memory and filling us in on so when we discussed the criteria for a true war story the other day in class this theme of storytelling came to mind. In the book Mitchell Sanders admits to making up a few things in the story about the six men in the jungle just so he could get his point across, and we see why he did this, because true war stories aren’t believable. Nobody wants to hear about women being raped and children being murdered, villages being burnt, and POWS being tortured. Listeners want to hear crazy stories about a wall soldiers in the Jungle and this “storytelling” can be related to the “Red Convertible” or “Circus in the Attic” how the whole story practically was built around this bed of lies and heroic sounding stories.

Week 7 Open Topic

Thus far, my favorite "story" has been "How to Tell a True War Story". Focusing on the abstract definitions of truth in the story. O'Brien lists the things he thinks define truth. They differ from our textbook, straight laced teachings of truth. We were taught that truth was always honest, accurate, moral, and final. Most importantly we were taught that truth is absolute. O'Brien says, "If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for truth..." (69). Thereby saying, truth is obscene. He notes, that you cannot separate what happened from what you think happened. So truth is open to interpretation and dictated by the individual telling their truth as they think it was. Truth is a memory flaw...or strength, however you see it. Truth is also never believable because it is so unbelievable. So in a war story to tell the truth is to lie about the believable and tell the truth about the unbelievable...which of course could not be the truth to you or me or even the one telling the story. Here lies the imperfect, incomplete non-absolute. "The truths are contradictory" (80). The death of Lemon in the sun is beautiful yet gory, the story is about war but not really, it's about love. The yin and yang, opposites that contradict the absolute lines and boundaries we build around stories and our lives in general so that the abstract conscious can be silenced and our absolute sedentary minds can rest in peace at night. O'Brien also says the truth is ugly but then again it's also a contradiction, therefore making it beautiful. Finally he says, "...nothing is ever absolutely true" (82). So we are left with questions and no answers or answers we can make up based on our proposed truths and ideals. My question is though, if all these truths are truths, how do we ever know what really happened? How does that play into religion and "God's truth" (71)? -Hey, he said it, not me.

Week 7 Open Post

I think all of us born in the generation y era as they so call it have grown up with a different perspective on war than most. I know there has been wars going on all around us as we were kids, but it was nothing we really saw in real time. We learned most of our information about war through the "truth" that our history teachers taught us and movies. By truth I mean facts about the war. This brings me back to Hemmingways "A Farewell to Arms" quote when he says, "I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice. . . . We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates." When I read this I think back to History class were all those words dissapear and all we were left with were names and dates of places were battle took place, and what the outcome was in the end. The only people remembered were ones that were so called "heros" of a battle or who were high up on the peg board.

I grew up with this huge mis-understanding that wars were just a full on attack and the last man standing was the the winner. Its like a game of chicken, the first one who has any sense of compassion for others over pride is the one who looses. I know there is more to war than that, but it makes sense to me. As I get more into it you find out that war is not all it seems. It is a lot of waiting and messing around until you receive commands from your officer or the other side attacks. I think it is during these times is when most of the war stories come from. I believe that Tim O'Brien says that most war stories are not about war at all. It is during these slow times when people have time enough to think about war and it scares them. When your in war you don't really see anything, you just do as you been trained and time kind of stands still as you get lost in this brutal world of war.

Week 7 Open Topic

I was recently thinking about the discussion that we had in class on Tuesday pertaining to the rules of writing war stories. According to Tim O’Brien war stories are unique in that they are unbelievable. After we had the discussion I sat down to do some reading in The Things They Carried and realized that most of what was going on really wasn’t believable at all. I knew that what I was reading was possible but I really didn’t believe it. And I then began to deeply question the truth in every war story I had ever heard. I couldn’t help but think back to The Red Convertible and Soldier’s Home while thinking about why the veterans lie about what they have seen and done. Some do it to make sense of the war through there own interpretations and others do it simply to make there experiences sound more exciting. I simply found it very interesting that many of the stories that we have read and heard fallow O’Brien’s “formula” for telling war stories

My Schema Towards the Vietnam War

I was never really taught about the Vietnam War in the past. Most of my knowledge was gathered from watching commical movies such as "A Full Metal Jacket," or more serious movies like the "Platoon." I have also heard other things about how it was basically a slaughter, and have learned about the "Wall of Honor" that was created with each soldier's name on it that gave his or her life in the war. I am a firm believer in the past is the past. That is why I chose this picture, because all we can do now is remember those great Americans that gave their all and sometimes paid with their life to eliminate the spread of communism. When I look back I believe it is none of our business how other people want to run their country, and we should not, by force, make them conform to the way we run our country here in America. At first we were just trying to help, but everybody knows once you get in, shit gets deep, and it is hard to pull out.

I personally hate war and believe it is unecessary. I way I was brougt up was to be a lover not a fighter. In this theory it is believed that everything can be solved by coming to a solution that will bennefit all. As good as this sounds we all know that people are stubborn as hell and irrational. You can not have a constructive argument when the opposing side is not willing to except that he/she is wrong and is willing to search for a position that can be defended by both sides. You can't argue with someone who will not accept fallibility. Therefore we believe it leaves us no choice but to "lock and load" and blow there stupid idea out of their heads and replace it with 7.62 mm's of sense.

http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/vietnam/index.html This is a website that I used to get more information on the war and how it came about. I'm kind of more interested in why the war started than all the battles that took the life of millions of people.