I want a Ford Raptor!

So I hope everyone had a great Valentine's Day! I sure did :) Well writing this blog means that the weekend is officially over, so that is why I'm having a hard time sitting down and actually writing it! But here I go...I guess I'll give it a try now.


The article that Jim Neilson write about The Things They Carried gave me a whole new understanding on how to look at this book. Neilson provides clear examples for why O'Brien takes his different approach to telling made up war stories is a great way to explain the conditions and trials that the soldiers go through during the war. After reading this article I now realize how effective this method is, because I now know why he is writing in such a way. Neilson says that even with O'Brien writing this way, he "has been faithful both to Vietnam and to the stories told about it".
The stories are then told to only cope with what he went through in Vietnam and "like many veterans, [O'Brien's] effort to make sense of war-time experience and memory is a continuing struggle. These are burdens O'Brien will forever carry."
O'Brien takes these burdens he has left from the war and brings it back to a "more" normal world to share his experiences with people that do not know exactly what he went through.He is then left to discover what truth really is and if the war stories are real or just something to tell people so it is out of his system, but a re-happening begins and he relives the moments and tries to piece himself back together with these stories. I believe that veterans are one big discourse in the postmodern world. It is "discourse of postmodernism [that] is replete with a radical-sounding rhetoric concerned with opposing tyranny and giving voice to the marginal and the oppressed." Their world is the psyche mind pulling itself back together, figuring out what really happened and what is the truth of the matter. They pick up the pieces. Moreover, then there was the discourse of historical texts making the war seem that "Most revised in the recent historical record has been how horribly destructive the war was for the Vietnamese," when in reality it was just as bad as the Americans that had fought in it. In conclusion, the ideas and insight that were put into the article gave me a greater understanding of the book. Goodnight!