6.Journal Entry "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong"

This chapter is my favourite, I love that Tim O'Brien brought a girl into the war, even if the story is not true I feel that he has touched on something that the world still has not gotten over. Should women be in war? Still today men think that they can do everything better then woman can, and maybe its true but each gender excels in different ways.
Mary Anne came into the war as a preppy little girl "barely out of high school" she was polished and perfect. However she began to go through stages that corrupter her, it started by visiting the village and not being afraid of anything around her, she stopped wearing all the jewelery and stopped pampering herself. She helped the men clean their guns, she learned how to dissemble a gun and put it back together again. She was out late, and one night she didn't even come home, turns out she was out on an ambush with the Greenies. She was fearless, they said she would prance along the trails without any weapons no sense of worry across her face. Once again she disappeared for three weeks, and when Mark Fossie found out she was back he was worried about her she was changing she wasn't the girl he wanted to marry and grow old with anymore. Fossie told her she was in a place where she didn't belong, and with that he told her how she wanted to eat Vietnam how she felt closer to herself here then anywhere else. She was gone, lost in the war literally. A few days after she had took off into the mountains, never to be found again.

5.Journal Entry "How to Tell a True War Story"

Rat Kiley lost one of his best friends during the war, they both were only 19 and having a good time play a game they made up to waste time. They were just throwing back and forth a smoke grenade to see who could hold onto it longer, there was absolutely no harm in this because it simply would just blow up and a you would be covered in smoke. However Curt Lemon stepped on a trap and it killed him. When Tim O'Brien tells us how he dies, he explains it to be almost beautiful, as if his brown skin was shinning in the sun lite. I think that it is very odd to be describing a death as "beautiful" because no death in war should be especially when you are blown to pieces and your remains are scattered amongst a tree. The fact that the death is talked about in such a pretty way makes me wounder how much of it is true, it makes me think that maybe its more of a memory that they wanted to believe and not actually what they saw. The mind plays tricks on us in order to protect us from the evil in the world, we choose to see what we can handle and what we think is right. In this case I feel that O'Brien wants to see a young kids death to be beautiful and not ugly and disgusting the way it might of been. "If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude as been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie." This is true, even though Lemon had died, the way the story was told, made it seem like it was okay because of how beautiful it was.

4. Journal Entry "Rainy River"

The soldiers feel cowardly when they go to war, because to them running away is much more heroic. For Tim O’ Brien going to war would be giving into the government and the pressure from the town’s people. O’Brien wants to run, flee to Canada, but he feels he would be disgracing his family and his community. When O’Brien stays with an old man near the border of Canada they go out fishing on the river. Elroy Berdahl, the old man, was creating an opportunity for Tim to flee, but he “couldn’t make [him] self be brave.” He was embarrassed, and that was it. Tim O’Brien couldn’t run away, he couldn’t shame his family and so O’Brien “would go to the war- [he] would kill and maybe die because [he] was embarrassed not to.”

3.Journal Entry "Spin"

In the last paragraph in the chapter Spin Tim O’Brien discuss’ what a story is, and why we write them. You see we need to remember and feel in order to get over it and making it forever. “Stories are for joining the past to the future” to hopefully never forget the lessons and values that we have learned throughout or life. He tells us that “stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember” how exactly you got there, and why you got there. They are for “eternity, when memory is erased” and to be used as a memory when all you can remember is nothing. Stories are for your memory box in your mind, to never forget what happened in your life.

2.Journal Entry "Love"

You writer types," he said, "you've got long memories." Should we trust Tim O' Brien, the protaganist, to tell the stories truthfully? Why?

Tim O’ Brien who is the protagonist in the story is also the author, throughout the story he discusses personal experiences about his time in the Vietnam War but what can we believe? As humans we can’t always listen to everything we hear, and so when we read fictional novels we have to think what he is basing the facts on. In this instance Tim O’Brien bases the story on experiences; however he does tell us not to believe some war stories because to tell a good one you must change some factors in it. I feel like we should only trust what we want to believe, if we want to believe all the deaths that occurred during the war, then we can choose to trust his stories about death. Nevertheless we may choose not to believe the stories O’Brien tells us of since everyone has a right to their own belief.

1. Journal Entry "The Things They Carried

The items that Tim O' Brien’s characters carry are both symbolic and literal. They carry personal items with them on their journey through Vietnam as well as heavy machinery and ammunition. The things they carry bring a sense of who they were at home, and who they are at war. Both Jimmy Cross and Henry Dobbins carried with them their lovers from home, Dobbins with his girlfriend’s pantyhose that he “wrapped around his neck as a comforter.” While Cross “humped” around letters and pictures from a girl named Martha from New Jersey, a girl he would always love. These items that these two men carry reveal a feeling of love and longing comfort that they search for during the war. With love comes fear and Ted Lavender carries tranquilizers which resembled his terror for the war. However some men in my mind, carried random things that of coarse didn’t make much sense to me, but to them they meant the world, such as dental floss, soap, and toothbrush’s that Dave Jensen carried along with him. He also took with him “three pairs of socks and a can of Dr. Scholl’s foot powder” to prevent trench foot. These items I think signify a sense of home and cleanliness which of course is unavoidable at war. Other things the men carried where condoms, a diary, and comic books all of which at first seem to have no meaning but truly do have a deep meaning only the soldiers know. With the weight of fear on their shoulders they also carry the load of their reputations, each and every one of them need to hide their vulnerability and distress from the enemies and fellow soldiers. Their security has been diminished and the only things they have are the few items they tag alongside them.