The first thing anybody ever told me about the Vietnam War was that it was bad. The second thing anybody every told me was that it was a tie. My grandmother told me the first thing I ever heard about Vietnam, and Red Forman from "That 70's Show" told me the second.
It took me a few years to really question my own perception of Vietnam. Who did we fight in Vietnam? Why did we fight? And if so many people were against the war, why did it take us so long to get out? Although I'm sure that everything my parents ever told me about Vietnam was deeply skewed by their far left politics, I'd like to believe that by age 17 I have come to my own understanding of Vietnam. Of course Vietnam began and ended long before I was ever thought of, which left me with a sense of disconnect to what really happened.
As sure as I am that my parents couldn't give me a completely unbias account of the Vietnam War, I was sure that the media couldn't either. They say that the winners write history, and there was no clear "winner" in Vietnam. Which of course meant that anyone could interpret the war how they pleased. Some truly beautiful works about such a horrific thing emmerged, and some truly bias things about the war have come out too. Some made the "bad guys" look worse, some were just a attempt to justify what those "bad guys" were doing, and some just told what they remembered.
Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried only reaffirmed what I knew about Vietnam. The things that happened, the way people felt about the draft, the tactics that were used, and the long-lasting trauma the soldiers live with. Any other book I've read that touched on Vietnam had one common theme: horror. The horror of what these soldiers saw, or what they were doing. Other texts focused on the soldier. Obviously having served in Vietnam, Tim O'Brien's main focuses were the same. However, O'Brien's take on the war pushed his book beyond the stereotypical war story. He made it connect for me.
I realized that Vietnam wasn't just history, but the things, and some of the problems, that occurred in Vietnam are still relevant in the wars we are fighting today. O'Brien might have been bias, but he was honest about it. He might have fabricated the stories in The Things They Carried, but he was upfront with why. This book was different for me. It was more than a war story. It made me think beyond why war was bad, or even why that war was bad. It made me realize just how many people were hurt in so many ways by such a horrific mistake.
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