Exploration 4: Jordon Frye

     A theme that has stuck out to me throughout the ending of the book is the theme of guilt. In The Things They Carried, guilt has affected nearly every soldier at one point. To give a few examples, after Kiowa died in the muck, Azar felt guilty for making jokes about Kiowa’s death. Another fine example, and quite possibly the best, is Tim O’Brien’s guilt from ‘killing’ the man in the chapter Good Form. O’Brien is explaining the difference between happening-truth and story-truth when he says “[...] I want to tell you this: twenty years ago I watched a man die on a trail near the village of My Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt enough” (O’Brien 171). O’Brien says he did not kill the man, but simply by being there, he was just as guilty as the man that did. And that guilt would live with him forever.
     I had a few research questions that I could have chosen from, but the one that really interested me was: how did the view of the Vietnam War impact the troops in Vietnam? The reason I found this question interesting was because the peer pressure of friends, family, and fellow Americans concerning the war could not have been easy to deal with. What I found was unfortunately not exactly what I was looking for, but I did find some of the ways the war changed the minds of many Americans about many things. From New York Times, A writer by the name of Karl Marlantes served as a Marine Lieutenant. Marlantes wrote about some of the positives of the war, as well as some of the negatives. One positive aspect of the war, he says, was how it pitted many racially and culturally different Americans together and taught them to trust one another. One of the negatives, Marlantes says, is it made many Americans very cynical and made them lose hope for the government. From Quora, I found a few comments that dissected the troops by the ways they entered the war. Most draftees, they said, wanted nothing to do with the war. One even said that his grandfather believed America was on the wrong side of the war. Those that enlisted were more approving of the war, but were as lost as the draftees.

This picture shows people refusing to be drafted into the war.