Exploration Four: Hannah Belden

Within the last five chapters of The Things They Carried, I think one of the major themes that weaved in and out of stories was the psychological impacts of the war on the soldiers.  This theme is important to the book because in some stories the soldiers' mental health greatly impacts what happens to individual soldiers as well as the series of events that the different soldiers go through, during and after the war.  You can see this in chapters such as Ghost Stories, where Tim describes Vietnam turning him into "the beast on their lips- I was Nam- the horror, the war" (O'Brien 199) when he was taking revenge on Bobby Jorgenson, a medic in his platoon who was slow to treat his gunshot wound.  The psychological impacts of war can also be seen on Rat Kiley in the chapter Night Life, as we literally see his own self demise, resulting in him shooting himself in the foot.  I don't have any personal experience with the mental health of soldiers, but being a psychology major, it is something that I am constantly aware of, whether it be in my personal life, in the world around us today, or even in the literature that I read.
Something that I was really interested in researching when reading the last few chapters of The Things They Carried was how the battlefield medics were trained.  It seemed like soldiers such as Rat Kiley had basic knowledge of medicine, and could help soldiers that had minor injuries stay alive until the helicopter came.  But when Tim O'Brien introduced Bobby Jorgenson and his clumsy treatment of Tim's injury, I wondered what kind of training, if any, medics in platoons and as foot soldiers had.  I found a really great response to almost my same exact question on quora.com, and it goes through how the qualifications for an army medic have changed over time.  Specifically during the Vietnam War, however, medics received around 15 weeks of medical training that was done separately from their required boot camp training.  During this medical training, soldiers learned things like first aid, nursing care, dietetics, and even minor surgeries.  They are also taught certain battlefield trauma procedures that are not legal for any other doctor to do besides an army medic on the ground.
The link to this site is: https://www.quora.com/How-were-battlefield-medics-educated-during-WW2-and-Vietnam-War-How-do-their-skills-relate-to-nurses-and-doctors

Medic James E Callahan performing CPR on a wounded soldier in his platoon just North of Saigon in 1967
http://www.historybyzim.com/2012/09/medic-james-e-callahan-saigon-june-17-1967/