Exploration 4 - Dylan Brown

Soldiers are constantly kept busy in times of war, even if it meant small jobs like in this picture here. Many of them felt like they had a place where they belonged in the war and with it ending many felt like they had no purpose in life.

One theme I noticed in the last five chapters of The Things They Carried was that of loss and enduring afterwards. In the final chapter of The Things They Carried, O’Brien is recounting how he dated a nine year old girl named Linda who had a terminal brain tumor, one day in September Nick Veenhof came up to him and said, “Your girlfriend, she kicked the bucket”(O’Brien 2). This story shows how even as a child he had to endure hardship. This theme is important because this story is about American soldiers enduring through the war and dealing with just that, loss, but these problems don’t just happen in a soldier’s life, they happen in an everyday person’s life as well. From my own life I have had to deal with hardships like family members dying or losing other things I valued and “enduring” life afterwards.  

One research question I have been thinking about is how did the conditions in Vietnam effect the soldiers stationed there? In class we spoke about how for many people who used to be in the war they felt like they had no purpose in life after it ended, drifting from job to job or similar. This made me wonder about the conditions in those active war zones and led me to this question. Searching through Quora.com, I came upon a great example of this where someone is recounting their friend and their issues after the war, stating that he was a ‘nervous wreck’ among other things when he would hang out with him. The link is: https://www.quora.com/What-were-the-effects-of-the-Vietnam-War-on-soldiers