The Things They Carried- conflict resolution

His inner conflicting feelings are mainly that O’Brien has killed a man and has witnessed unheard of things. He is feels guilty for his life and does not know how to handle this, seeming like a trainwreck waiting to happen. O’Brien holds a pair of Kiowa’s sandals and he decides to bring them back to Vietnam, so he travels to there with his nine year old daughter. He then takes his nine year old daughter to the ‘Shit fields’ in Vietnam where Kiowa died. O’Brien finds comfort in dropping Kiowa’s sandals back in the ‘shit fields’ and he gets an overwhelming sensation to go in the shit fields himself. He was possibly reminiscing and he goes in as a baptizing ritual, cleansing himself of is sorrows and grief he’s held the past years. He understands moments later that he should stop thinking of the man he would have been, had it not been for the war, but decides to deal with it. He understands that he uses his story telling as relief and his stories unload his inner burdens, even if he does have to tell his nine year old daughter he killed a man. He gets a sense of relief from this.

The Things They Carried conflicts

In O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”, O’Brien faces multiple types of conflicts. The short story that comes to mind the quickest is “On the Rainy River”. O’Brien faces Man versus Society in this short story. He does not believe that the war is right in any way. He calls himself a twenty-one year old college student that is a ‘Liberal’, justifying that him being drafted into the war is unbelievable. He runs away from his home town in hopes of ditching the war. This is two conflicts now. Man versus Self and Man versus Society.  O’Brien runs and lives with Elroy Berdahl for almost a week. I believe O’Brien is conflicted with himself. He cannot find it in himself to go to the war, because he does not want to be a pawn of the government fighting a useless war. He is conflicted with himself and since he is running from the draft he is conflicted with society. Society needs him to fight in the war and to bring back justice. “Destroy those Commies!” and all of that propaganda. In the end O’Brien gets paddled down the Rainy River, a river in Minnesota that goes to Canada, and Berdahl makes it apparent that O’Brien can get off and run to be in Canada. O’Brien now has the choice of being a draft runner or going to war. O’Brien chooses the latter, only because of persuading himself. Berdahl does not say a word, besides smiling and nodding. O’Brien could have ditched the draft, but he was conflicted with himself so he goes to war.
My favorite scene has been when Mitchell Sanders  tells the trillion dollar artillery drop story. Mitchell Sanders tells the story of the six men hiking in the Vietnam mountains. As the men trek through the mountains they hear something. Something like an orchestra or as they say chamber music. They hear chatting and instruments playing. They hear martini glasses and other civilized sounding things. They say they hear a cocktail party and radio a massive army to blow up whatever it was. They call in air strikes and napalm trees. They blow down the mountain ridge and they still hear them. They head down the mountain and say absolutely nothing. When the colonel asks for all the explosives and incendiaries the men look at him and say nothing, like they’re blind and dumb. The colonel says it was six trillion dollars and they continue to say nothing. It’s my favorite because the colonel is amazed of their silence. I love how eerie it is, that they hear noise before and after the artillery drop, and it is in the middle of absolutely no where.

It isn’t connected to the main characters conflict. It’s an eerie and funny story.

Tree walk

I set my head on the desk, shut my eyes, and drifted off to ‘la-la land’- the place where dreams come true. I was walking down one of my old neighborhood streets, which in the dream is now abandoned, and continued walking until I got to a cul de sac. There’s a sidewalk that leads from this neighborhood to the public school nearby, which has a soccer field. I walked down this side walk until I got to the soccer fields and past the fields until *WHAM* I hit an old oak tree. City ordinance will not let trees over two hundred years old to be cut down. This tree looks like the tree from Avatar, but is much smaller. Imagine a very large oak tree awkwardly sitting in the middle of a meadow. Multiple soccer goals are about half a mile away, so all there is on this meadow is this oak tree awkwardly sitting in the middle of the meadow. It has no tree friends, just that one tree. Its roots span out for a few feet and it is a very large tree. It rises about two story levels. When you look at the tree it doesn’t look like your generic tree, but an ancient oak tree. It’s massive with large bumps on it, like warts. Scanning the tree you would think it is a hundred or so years old… The tree did not have anything, besides comfort. It was a warm and sunny day in this dream, so I was without sunglasses. The tree did provide shade.

When I went for this walk and meditation, I did not find a doorway. I sat on one of the tree roots and fell asleep.

Meditation is…

When I think of meditation, I think of someone relaxed in ‘criss-cross apple sauce’ pose or ‘butterfly position’. ‘Butterfly position’ is sitting on the ground, legs flat, knees touching the ground, and feet touching each other. An actual figure that comes right to my mind is Buddha. Buddha sat in a meditation pose, with his Buddha belly and bald head. As he meditated under a tree, he came up with his very own religion. One of the major thoughts when I think about meditating is Yoga. I think of the incense the yoga teacher is burning, usually that cheesy yoga class incense that smells like sage, but it’s artificial. My parents both go to Yoga class tri-weekly. And when they aren’t at that Yoga studio; they’re cycling, running, or doing Yoga at home. I myself meditate. I find that if I’m stressed out and I need something, other than a cigarette, to calm my nerves, I go outside and sit in ‘butterfly position’. It is meditating. I don’t go off on a cosmic journey or anything of the sort, but I feel relaxed and calmed. Meditation means to think or contemplate. When I meditate I sit outside an try to relax and think of absolutely nothing. It sounds like a paradox, but thinking of nothing helps you relax.

I felt fully satisfied after meditating. I felt like I got a rush of sleep, like I got the needed sleep that I missed because of working on school work. Power nap is the term that I hear thrown around. I have never ‘meditated’ in a class, so it felt relaxing to have the lights off and to think of NOTHING. I am a disoriented person. I’m clumsy. I’m forgetful. I’m constantly thinking, almost too much. However, when I did the meditation exercise I felt fully energized after. I feel satisfied, feeling amazing after I meditate.

The Things They Carried

So far, Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” is a well written book. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but it reads fairly well. O’Brien and his platoon mates trek through Vietnam with random supplies, which they ‘hump’. They ‘hump’ or carry personal belongings. I thought it was cool to hear all of the different supplies, like one man had woman’s hosiery, another had a Bible, and O’Brien carried a picture of a college girl. Hell, I thought it was hilarious to hear that a man had six or seven ounces of ‘dope’ on him. Not only does he have a little bit, he has SIX flippin’ ounces! That’s alotta drugs. I guess that man will be sleeping well.

After reading the review for the book I was expecting O’Brien to be one of those ‘seasoned war veterans’. I imagined a man from Pixar’s ‘Up’. I imagined a bitter old man that yells at the top of his lungs “YOU HOOLAGANS GET OFF MY LAWN!” or something like that. Instead, he’s a 24 year old man. That surprised me that he’s that young and a romantic. Not only is he not a surly middle aged man, he’s a romantic young man. He talks about his college girl that he wishes to have sex with and it seems all he can think about is if she’s a virgin or not. That seems to be the biggest reoccurring theme in this book, whether O’Brien’s protagonist’s girlfriend is a virgin or not. She’s in college, a Junior in college, so I doubt she is…

O’Brien’s comrades are something. They’re all pretty much bat-shit crazy. I say that only because all of them are rolling on some sort of drug or doing a shenanigan that sounds unmoral. The men shot dogs, killed innocent people, and at one point one of his comrades killed a sixteen year old boy, kicked his body to death, and chopped off his thumb. They kept the thumb as a good luck charm. That’s a tad messed up in my opinion, but then again the Vietnamese were pretty messed up too. Ted Lavender was pissing and he got sniped. He got ‘zapped while zipping’. Once his comrades found him they hardly said any condolences. They joked. They made jokes, like “mind blowing”. It’s punny! The rest after Lavender’s death was saddening.

Anyways, this book is fairly good so for. It’s a roller coaster of saddening thoughts and hilarity. This is one of the better books I’ve had to read for a English class.

Today’s date

Today’s date is September the 13th